Reminds me of the push of U2's 'Songs Of Innocence" into everyone's iPhones maybe 10 years ago.

I still have my copy of Lego Universe, hope this new initiative will fare better.

Sometime in the late 80's I was working in MSDOS and needed more working RAM for an app, so we bought the Phar Lap DOS extender.

Got the box and started reading the manual when someone stopped and asked "Why are you reading about horses?" What horse? "The mighty Phar Lap of course."

I had no idea it was the name of a horse, but I guess since their logo had a black horse I should have known :-)

In one of the stories of Sherlock Holmes he asks Dr. Watson how many steps there are in the stairs leading up to their door. Watson replies he doesn't know and Sherlock gives the exact number and says "You see but you do not observe".

Sherlock Holmes seems to have read this article as well :-)

I think PowerShell is a bit scary, for example I could never get curl to work in it, say a simple POST command: curl -X "POST" google.com should return Error 411 (Length required) from google (as it does in CMD.EXE)

When I try it in PowerShell I get: Invoke-WebRequest : A parameter cannot be found that matches parameter name 'X'. and some more error messages

even curl -X "GET" doesn't work :-(

That is because `curl` is an alias for the builtin Invoke-WebRequest and not the actual curl program.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsof...

It was at one point, but they took it out because it was stupid.

Well that's just plain stupid

Since they would have "their pick of the litter" why did they then include kill switches? A scary scenario is a rerun of the Viasat hack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viasat_hack I.e. wipe all servers worldwide at the morning of an attack, but before that you install the kill switches on your servers and those of your allies.

To make it harder to detect and reverse engineer. There's a plethora of disabling functionality in the exploit. This is bad, but the original post is being hyperbolic.

If the RCE is Russian, it could be used a communication kill-switch on the morning of an attack outside Ukraine, similar to the Viasat hack https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viasat_hack

Why does it have to be russian? Could be any country, even USA, China. I don't see why this sort of attack is limited to Russia.

> Why does it have to be russian? Could be any country, even USA, China.

Are you sure you are replying to right comment? Because they did not implied it was not other country or actor. It even directly starts with 'IF'.

doesnt track

if russian -> could be ...

why would being russian make it this? it could be if it was made in any country. they did this attack once, okay? but its not like other countries dont pay attention.

Exactly I don't understand the obsession with Russia

Literally just a country with people like you and me.

"Jia Tan" does not sound Russian

https://boehs.org/node/everything-i-know-about-the-xz-backdo...

> "Jia Tan" does not sound Russian

It's not a real name.

What about X Æ A-12?

Also read that book when it came out, among other things it taught me about "mushroom management" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mushroom_management

The sidesweep you do on your iPhone to change the page of app icons or when you switch fullscreens on your Mac I am sure is inspired by the Switcher.

I remember as a kid reading Foundation by Asimov, when you arrived in Trantor, you had a boarding pass with a glowing arrow pointing which way to go. Almost there now.