I’m familiar with the specific attacks you mentioned

(I made “false landings” up.)

No, it’s not unique to the US. But we’re by far the most dependent on technology out of any country and knowing this we talk a big game and do nothing to back said game up. The frequency with which [any agency you care to name] fails information security audits is pretty much just one long interrupted string of failures, and having worked with many western non-US governmental groups, the difference in security culture is pretty shameful.

Yeah… this is an example of what I’m talking about. It’s the romanticized version of the wild west online right now, and whenever you talk about the need for increased security, you’re subjected to a propaganda lecture (edit for clarity:) lecture about propaganda and the political implications of fucking twitter or something. Everyone is so primed to respond along the party line to the idea of troll farms that the conversation about how they’re used outside of influencing our elections never even occurs to people. Most don’t even realize it’s an issue that could be discussed.

So lets be clear here, while you’re absolutely correct about what you’re saying, that’s not related to what I was saying.

The near constant spear phishing, network intrusion, ransomware, impersonation, false landings, etc. attacks that every government, medical, social and technical system in the country is being constantly subjected to is the issue I am qualified to speak about. It’s an area where the US isn’t even attempting to fight back, and as beautiful as headline-darling things like stuxnet were, the developers that worked on it haven’t figured out how to mitigate ex: the rampant identity theft throttling the country. My favorite new one has been the theft of identity and thence blackmail of recently paroled prisoners, since a bad actor can easily get them returned to prison by just, say, using their credit card at a walmart out-of-state, or applying for public benefits in a different city. This happens all the time and nobody, at all, is talking about it. It’s so common I was brought in to write a set of tools that auto-generate the letter informing out-of-state LEO agencies that the person was the victim of identity theft and should not be found in violation of their parole terms, since that was so common it was all their entire staff were spending their time doing.

That’s just the one example that has occured to me, if you want more I can go on for very literal hours (just ask my students (who are no doubt quite stick of the topic…)). There’s no systems, or even the political or social will to investigate developing systems, that could even begin to address the most basic issues in this realm. That is the problem I was screaming helplessly into the void about.

We are pathetically behind in the cyber warfare sphere, though. Like at this point it’s embarrassing, we don’t even have the semblance of security education or standards for digital hardening. it’s just fucking awful, and we are being obliterated by chinese/russian/anyone else troll farms and hackers because of it. massive data breaches are a weekly occurrence.

Its just… we’ve got the NSA, sure, and they are good at what they do. But what they do is not what we need. Right now, you can scatter some USB drives outside any gvmt office here and some poor dumb HR rep or whatever will invariably plug it in to their work desktop, and they’ll totally fail to understand why it was bad for them to do that.

Why not just block me, then? You’re the one telling other people to “Don’t bother. Trust me.” when I comment on totally unrelated to you posts, and then threatening me when I call you out for your behavior.
That’s not just not okay, dude.

That’s literal harassment.

From the lemmy.world TOS:

Before using the website, remember you will be interacting with actual, real people and communities. Lemmy.World is not a place for you to attack other people or groups of people. Just because you disagree with someone doesn’t give you the right to harass them. Discuss ideas and be critical of principles. Show the respect you desire to receive.

For my part in this, I’m sorry? I don’t entirely know what for, but evidently you’re hurting, and that really was never my intent.

See, this is what I’m talking about. You’re not an authority on the topic at hand, you’re an authority figure within this community. Why are you pivoting to passive-aggressively talking past the actual person? That’s just mean, and petty, and you’re better than this, man. You clearly understand what I was saying, so how does doing this further the conversation? Why are you intentionally misrepresenting what I was saying to you?

Is it really that hard to acknowledge even polite criticism?

No, them posturing surely isn’t. I’m just at the point where it’s just a little bit much to add “nuclear power throwing a tantrum in the grocery store aisle of geopolitics” on top of everything else

(Deflecting uncomfortable truths with a .gif is both disappointingly insulting and pretty transparent. I haven’t done anything that warrants that kind of rudeness, you know that.)

You can’t invalidate what I’m saying with that, and you probably shouldn’t ignore the many threads dedicated to just how poorly you treat the users in the communities you moderate. Some of them are legit assholes who I will happily watch get beaten with your Metaphorical Steel Chair, but so many of them aren’t, and I think it’s too easy for you to dismiss the commenters who have been hurt by a misunderstanding or rose to defend themselves when a topic was unreasonably escalated as all being those legit assholes, when most of them aren’t. I’m not (I like to think, at least), but I just didn’t want the kind of help you were offering.

I moderate several things that are orders of magnitude larger and some of them so much shittier tbh, fuck I hate linux devs sometimes than lemmy.world, so believe me I understand exactly how awful this job can be. Being subjected to only vitriol from nazis objecting to your “totally unreasonable” ban while any positive actions you take are entirely constrained to invisible behind the scenes actions is awful. But when every meta thread about the site is has people saying “hey, can the admins please talk to this moderator?” it’s a sign that you should ask someone you trust to give you a real answer and see if those people are just assholes, or if maybe you need to reflect on how your behavior is being interpreted by an outside observer.

Edit: (Yo guys don’t downvote them, they were just trying to help. Being kind of a jerk about it, but it doesn’t help anything to downvote people for sincere if misguided attempts at kindness)

Assuming they go through with it, it’s is a pretty clear message that diplomatic attempts are at an end. These roads haven’t been used in years because of how insane the north koreans are, but removing them only impacts civilian transit - militaries, even hilariously inept ones like the DPRK, have the ability to lay transit paths in minutes (or may not even need them, military vehicles being known for their offroad capability). And that’s not even including the famed ‘invasion tunnels’, or that a ground assault isn’t needed when 20% of your population is within the effective range of thousands (yes, thousands) of already emplaced artillery pieces.

But that literally does make you an authority within this forum. Cops are not regarded as intelligent in pretty much any discipline (for good reason), but they still are a figure of authority whenever they are in uniform. Many of them, too, do not realize this, because it’s not something that’s particularly obvious when you’re the person wielding that authority. (You’re not a cop, for starters you’re clearly too genuinely caring and intelligent to qualify to be a cop, that was just a convenient metaphor)

You have the authority to moderate so many communities, but if you don’t understand that that is in itself authority it explains the reputation you’re getting for how you approach conversations. No matter what you do, if you have the ability to casually end the conversation by banning a participant (something you have demonstrated many times before) that conversation is not between equals, it is between an authority figure and a modern plebeian.

Seriously, I still don’t dislike you (despite you having accused me of that many times before), this is just something incredibly fundamental to any discourse that I think you may not have understood. I understand you were trying to help, but unless you can bring peace to the Korean Peninsula it’s sadly not going to salve the stress of an unhinged lunatic with nuclear weapons goading people into paying, or just paying attention, to him. It sucks, but sometimes you can’t help, you can only offer sympathy and community.

The authority to exercise that discretion is perhaps the most important thing you are responsible for. (Especially in an international forum, where people (cough me) might have family in Seoul.)

You see that green ‘M’ next to your name?

Going to point something out to you btw: Whenever you receive criticism, you only ever address the aspect of that criticism you can argue against. Please, can you respond to the parts about you being extremely rude to people that have done nothing to deserve it? Or anything else I said, besides one minor point that was poorly clarified on my part?

If indeed your job is to just enforce the rules in the sidebar (and assuming we somehow ignore that authority in a subject comes with responsibility over said subject), why are you commenting on the topic from a position of authority at all? Clearly that’s an overstep of the premise you have put forward. But while I understand you think you were trying to be helpful, what you’re actually saying is that I should just “not think about it”. That doesn’t, you know, actually help. If your advice is going to be “don’t read the news” why do you moderate this group at all? That’s literally a textbook example of acting in bad faith. Despite the fact you don’t read the sources you throw out to support your point, you claim to be somehow knowledgeable enough in this topic to advise others on if they should/should not consume said media based of a single comment you repeatedly misrepresent.

And that’s not kindness or understanding, squid. That’s being a jerk.

From your article:

Under the new deal, the US will make its defense commitments more visible by sending a nuclear-armed submarine to South Korea for the first time in 40 years, along with other strategic assets, including nuclear-capable bombers.

Dude, squiddy, even a single Ohio class submarine could wipe out half the life on this planet. I get you think I haven’t understood your message, and maybe you think this is somehow helpful instead of incredibly patronizing, but it’s concerning that the moderator of a news community doesn’t understand that news can be both important to read and at the same time deeply stressful.

Ah, perhaps my stress is due to the lack of a geopolitical dowsing-scrotum. Modern medical science, please get on this! /s ( <3 )

Did I say somewhere I thought this was going to turn into WWIII, or that this would be the end of it all? No, I said it was yet another extremely stressful thing to heap onto the pile. You’re inventing what I said and arguing against that.
(The united states was the 2nd nuclear power to which I was referring. There are ample US nuclear assets stationed in KR.)

You’re not wrong - Ignorance is, rather famously, bliss.

Thank you Nutsack, that’s very reassuring

Seems like being stressed out over two nuclear powers (even if one of them has the tinkertoy equivalent of an arsenal…) playing geopolitical chicken isn’t the most unreasonable reaction I could have.

Oh for fucks sake, now this?? Can we all just take a step back and calm down, between ‘US/Taiwan/China’, ‘Ukraine/Russia’ and ‘Israel/Every Decent Person’ my ability to worry about new things is at it’s limit, kindly give it a month then try this again okay Kim?

The worst dressed nerd in a meeting is the most important one.

Yo, feminists have been leading the charge on shit like paternity leave (FMLA was feminists), battered men’s shelters (now there’s four! In the country!) and getting equality of rulings on spousal abuse or visitation rights. Don’t buy into the alt-right BS about how the movement used to be good but now it’s just full of all those self-centered women, and I only hate the current version. It’s a really common line, and it’s bullshit.