The business/answers page with the number is about calls from Google Assistant and (now?) explicitly says it's not about calls from the support. That would be this page
Disappointingly, it only says how to identify automated calls from Google, it doesn't offer a protocol for verifying actual humans from Google calling you. Perhaps it happens so rarely you can just assume it's not Google.
I don't get why is there so much energy wasted on these non issues:
> a. Very young kids being treated in invasive or hard-to-revert ways on flimsy evidence.
Leave it to the doctors/counsellors/psychologists and parents. They know best. If my kids wanted to change their gender I would sure appreciate if the state wasn't making it any more difficult.
> b. People with male musculature competing in women's sports leagues.
So a man won a boxing match with women. Who cares? Sports are entertainment. They have never been fair. Women boxers have a federation they can decide themselves who gets to play with who. No need for state to get involved.
Has happened multiple times. Lastly in the Olympics. The evidence strongly suggests Imane Khelif is of male sex.
Maybe most notable (though not boxing), 800m finals for women in 2016, gold, silver and bronze went to athletes of male sex.
Sports are more than just entertainment. There is no way for the state to avoid getting involved when the sports are run through publicly funded schools. And this impacts more than just boxing. At some point the state has to decide whether inclusion or fair play is more important. At least for sports that involve strength and speed we can't have it both ways. There are no easy answers here, and we can't just pretend the issue doesn't matter.
Just anecdata but my sister was encouraged to change her gender by multiple different therapists. She later “outgrew” that for lack of a better term and has emphatically told me that listening to them was a mistake. Sometimes parents know best idk.
There are clearly broken experts addicted to the fact that SRS sterilize recipients. As much as I would support people with GID, there's something very broken about the field.
But if someone acts inhuman then it’s justified. Russia’s war crimes are well documented and they started the war. When you are the baddies then expect to be called so.
You're still in the goodies-vs-baddies mindset. Western media pushes people into that way of thinking but it's the Marvel level view and is wrong. Also, look at all the people who think Russia is the baddies for starting that war, but Israel is the baddies despite not starting its war. That's an arbitrary standard people invented to justify their simply goodie-baddie view. If you apply a different standard to every war, then it's not really a standard, is it?
It’s mostly about willful acts of violence against innocents. This might be a nuance that is too subtle though. Bad acts and bad actors should be called out. Russia is the bad actor in the Ukrainian invasion. Hamas and IDF are bad actors in their conflict.
But then everyone is a bad actor. All the countries supplying arms to Ukraine are perpetuating the war and causing more deaths, so they're bad actors. As is Ukraine itself of course. You can't actually define that in way that has any use. It's ultimately just whatever your cultural influences led you to believe.
People should just be honest and admit they're nationalists, other kinds of ideologists, or just trying to fit in when it comes to opinions about war, because that's really all it is. If it was really unambiguous who was a bad actor, it wouldn't be a war in the first place because everyone would agree.
I think it makes much more sense, and is more productive, to reason about good and bad acts, than people.
Especially with regard to conglomerates of people, like whole nations, or whole governments. Having said that, some people and some groups do fall heavily on one side or the other. But most groups are a dynamic mix of players and situations, not good or bad in any rational or stable way.
Ukraine has also bombed civilians and engages in random/statistical attacks against Russian cities - technically a war crime. We can even stretch out the definition of innocents to include Russians or North Koreans that are forced to fight and have no options. Should Ukraine surrender and let the Russians take over? Clearly the path of least violence against innocents on both sides? All I'm saying is things aren't as clear/simple as you try to present them.
Sometimes violence is unavoidable and often it will impact innocents as well.
I agree bad acts need to be called out but you're casting too wide of a net and that just leads to a loss of clarity/nuance. Is there any war action that doesn't fall under "willful acts of violence against innocents"? Are we talking about "collateral" damage? Are we talking about the Geneva Convention?
Why is Russia a bad actor? Because they invaded? They claim to have legitimate reasons, security concerns, treatment of ethnic Russians or separatists in Ukraine? What if we side with them on the legitimacy of starting the war, does that change anything?
Can you provide specific evidence that Ukraine is intentionally targeting civilians, and not (for instance) flying a drone that gets affected by GPS jamming and hits a building unintentionally?
Just to be clear I'm not claiming the Russians are the good guys and the Ukranians are the bad guys. I'm just pointing out it's not as simple as someone did something bad in a war. You need to look at the totality of evidence and circumstances, challenge your own viewpoints and listen to people arguing the opposite of what you think, reach some conclusions and always be open to adjust to new evidence. Be aware of who is trying to manipulate you and why, what are the biases of the various sources of information etc. Again not that I think Russia are the good guys but things are never black and white. The west did meddle in Ukraine which in my world view is a good thing but unsurprisingly Putin perceived as aggression/attack on Russia's sphere of influence. To me it boils down to Putin being a force against western values that I'm aligned with.
>If you know the Russians are jamming GPS then what's the difference at this point?
"Why even bother if the chance of success is less than 100%"
Ukrainian attacks are very frequently successful despite GPS jamming and air defense. And vice versa.
>Just to be clear I'm not claiming the Russians are the good guys and the Ukranians are the bad guys. I'm just pointing out it's not as simple as someone did something bad in a war.
I have yet to see any videos of Ukrainian soldiers filming themselves laughing while using a knife to slowly decapitate a live prisoner. Or cut their balls off. Or put their decapitated heads on spikes. Or execute a dozen Russian POWs at a time
Ukrainian TV channels don't expound on the need to kill "as many as 2 million civilians" to denazify their opponent the way that Russian TV does fairly regularly. I've not seen any Ukrainians wave around the skull of a Russian killed in Russia live on stage at a metal concert.
I haven't seen those videos which is probably a good thing. Russians are known for their brutality. Doubtless there is brutality on the Ukrainian side as well. Both side have exchanged many prisoners so clearly it's not a matter of policy to execute them. Many Russians have family in Ukraine and vice versa.
It's pretty much a bloody mess. It's also complicated. For me it boils down to the fight between freedom and democracy and oppression and totalitarianism. Putin wants the world to be a worse place for all of us and is willing to have hundreds of thousands of people die for that.
But that's still too simplistic. It's certainly not fair to say that every single Russian (or non-Russian!) soldier who is or has been in Ukraine is a "baddie". Some are trapped by their circumstances to fight in a war they don't believe in and don't agree with.
It's easy to say, "well then they should refuse to fight", but you are not that person, and you don't know their struggles or what they feel they are capable of doing.
I think it's reasonable to say that Putin and his war-mongering crones are baddies, but you just said "Russia" and "they started the war". Lumping all people together like that is how we dehumanize people and fail to find common ground that can improve everyone's situation.
OK, but in practice what sort of common ground do you think we can find here? Because it sure seems like the only possible solution is to give Ukraine enough advanced weapons to exterminate all the orcs. If you have a feasible alternative then I'm sure we'd all love to hear it. The real world is an ugly place and sometimes there is no win-win solution.
Are we solving the Russian-Ukraine war in this thread? ;)
- Realistically no amount of weapons the west supplies Ukraine is going to enable them to push the Russians out of Ukraine.
- Putin doesn't seem to care about the number of Russians lost in this war.
- Direct involvement by western armies could lead to a nuclear escalation. NATO could easily push Russia out of Ukraine in a conventional war. Too big of a gamble.
- This is just part of a larger geopolitical struggle between the different powers. Russia. China. India.
We don't really know what Putin wants here but if some sort of end to the war can be negotiated that includes territorial adjustments in Ukraine I think that's the best win the west can hope for right now. The cold war wasn't won on the battlefield, it was won mostly economically. Doubling down right now on a military solution in Ukraine doesn't feel like the right path forward. Stopping the hot war and switching to a colder war is probably the path of least pain for everyone. Even if it seems like a temporary win for Putin. If the west helped Ukraine more in the early days maybe we'd have a different outcome but the west made some bad choices and here we are.
That said if Putin wants to keep fighting then the war will continue. I don't think he does but who knows.
> Realistically no amount of weapons the west supplies Ukraine is going to enable them to push the Russians out of Ukraine.
OK, general. I wasn’t aware of your military credentials. Russia is about 12 months away from completely exhausting all of its Soviet stockpiles of (tens of thousands of) vehicles and artillery, and their war economy is already unable to sustain production at replacement rates.
Source? I thought it was the west that couldn't ramp up and is running out of stockpiles. I'll admit I'm an armchair general but I did serve so I have at least some minimal idea of what war looks like.
EDIT: Also not clear how long the US is going to keep supporting Ukraine now that Trump is in power so that's another factor.
>I thought it was the west that couldn't ramp up and is running out of stockpiles.
It's worth pointing out that Russia's "production" claims generally include refurbishment. When they say they produced 4 million artillery shells, that sometimes means they produced 400,000 artillery shells and refurbished 3.6 million artillery shells from deep storage.
I hope that the Trump administration will continue supporting Ukraine and not try to force them into an unfavorable temporary peace settlement, but the US isn't essential. Other NATO and EU countries are fully capable of keeping Ukraine in the fight, if they want to make it a priority. They might have to cut back some of their social spending and agricultural subsidies to afford it.
Russia will never completely run out of materiel, but they have already exhausted most of their stockpiles of good stuff. At this point they've been reduced to using refurbished armored vehicles built in the 1950s and modified civilian cars along parts of the front.
You can track Russia’s stockpiles through open source satellite imagery, here’s a recent video overview: https://youtu.be/TzR8BacYS6U
Ukraine benefits from being on defense, as the attrition rates are significantly in their favor. I’m not sure what will happen after Trump does whatever it is he’s going to do, but it is clear that Russia’s current trajectory is not sustainable beyond a year or so
I agree Ukraine benefits from being on the defense. The question is what are their chances of retaking their lost territory where they need to be on the offense? Russia has higher attrition rates but also has a larger population to recruit from.
I'm not seeing Russia just crumble away under Ukrainian assault. If that's the case how does Ukraine benefit from the continuation of the war?
I would love to see Ukraine kicking Russia out as an outcome but it seems incredibly unrealistic.
Ukraine can't achieve a battlefield victory but with foreign military aid they might be able to slow down the Russian advance long enough for the Russian economy to collapse. Russia is only able to keep their economy somewhat functional through fossil fuel exports. We can give Ukraine long-range missiles/drones and targeting assistance to wreck Russia's key export infrastructure (ports, pipelines, refineries, storage depots). And we can choke off much of Russia's shipping through sanctions and interference with their tanker "shadow fleet". There are also still billions in assets owned by Russian government entities, corporations, and citizens but held in Western countries so we can just straight up steal it all and hand everything over to Ukraine. There are no guarantees but as long as Ukraine is willing to keep fighting it's worth a try.
Ukraine doesn’t necessarily need to retake its lost territories by force. They only need to keep bleeding Russia out until the war becomes untenable for them. Russia loses like 1500+ soldiers and 100+ vehicles per day, just to move a line on a map a few meters. Their economy is hitting double digit inflation despite a 21% interest rate. Their recruitment efforts are running dry and they may have to resort to mobilization soon to continue to fill their ranks with more cannon fodder.
At a certain point they may have to come to the negotiating table, and the longer this drags out the less favorable their position will be.
> it is clear that Russia’s current trajectory is not sustainable beyond a year or so
Those cheering for Ukraine have been saying this from the start. They have been lying again, and again, about everything... The Russian MoD has been on point, again and again. Why should I trust anything camp NATO/Ukraine says?
The reality on the battlefield is that NATO/Ukraine loses badly, while spending much/much/much more money. Donated money.
Sorry bro: it's a lost cause. The russians will be victorious again, fixing Europe's nazi problem again.
Everyone who teaches their kid "Bandera is my papa, Ukraine is my momma" is a nazi to me. And according to my research, that's a lot of the Ukrainian speaking Ukrainians.
> The reality on the battlefield is that NATO/Ukraine loses badly,
NATO isn't even on the battlefield.
> while spending much/much/much more money.
Yes, western labor has more value per hour, so the $ value of the smaller share of western effort devoted to the support of Ukraine is much higher than the $ value of the much larger share of Russian effort.
> Donated money.
See, you have to decide on your narrative. If your narrative is that NATO is who your Russian buddies are fighting on the battlefield, then it isn't donated money. If your narrative is "donated money", then you have to drop the "NATO/Ukraine" description of the belligerent opposing Russia.
There is no evidence to suggest that NATO could push Russia out of Ukraine in conventional warfare. The Russians and their allies are WAY better prepared for that war, and it would immediately turn into the third world war, not remain “NATO vs Russia”.
Takes like yours are equally dangerous as the brainless “Ukraine is actually winning the war” ones, even though you appear slightly more neutral and informed.
The actual situation is way more complex still than you claim. You take this weird stance where the Russian heads of state are evil, Ukrainian/US/NATO heads of state are not, Russian soldiers might or might not be, and Ukrainian soldiers are not.
In reality, the invasion phase of the war is justified from the Russian point of view, so their heads of state and soldiers are in the right. Same goes for western heads of state and soldiers. Me and you both live in the west and therefore have our own perspective on the war. People in BRICS states have their own perspective (that I’m quite familiar with due to having actually spent the effort on reading, unlike 99% of western commentators on this war).
Besides, don’t feel bad for Russian soldiers for being victims of the circumstances. Ukraine has been snatching people off the streets against their will for the past months and dropping them on the frontlines. This is happening in the majority Russian speaking cities and towns, not majority Ukrainian ones.
Seems relative .. I literally grew up on Aboriginal land in the Kimberley and attended school with multi lingual kids that had non English speaking parents.
Most are still not writing in their own language.
What is "Far" for you is neighbours from school and locals of the town I now live in.
Certainly these are closer in space and time than Slavs from a few hundred years past.
Perthite Brit here. I’m hugely curious about the situation before the Europeans came. Was there really no writing? Were there really no boats? It’s all so murky because the history was literally not written by the aboriginal communities. But has a story been passed down?
No writing but a lot of drawing and oral transmission .. spending a few hours on a sand drawing while reciting a story that changes little across generations is another kind of map (and features in a massive tome on historic maps).
Thank you for this. I’m lucky to live near Galup (Lake Monger). It’s wonderful but I’m always reminded how much has been lost of the original wetlands.
I grew up speaking a dialect that people normally didn't regularly put into writing (and there still is no standard spelling) before the advent of text messaging.
I didn't mean far in time or space, I meant culturally. These people knew writing (in Latin) just not for their language. They had agriculture, domesticated animals, feudal society, some of them were already Christian, their language was very similar to English conceptually so their concepts would be similar to ours (well at least mine)
Interesting that a Romainian sounding username wouldn't mention the mess with Romanian presidential election where tiktok played a major role. The threat seems very real
The Romanian elections were a debacle in many other ways. So far at least, our authorities have done nothing to actually arrest the fascist lunatic that almost won, nor to bring any concrete evidence that he did anything other than breaking campaign finance laws by paying for TikTok like any other influencer might while not declaring this money in his campaign fund disclosures.
Actually, they didn't even bring any evidence of that, except for the fact that he claims in official documents and public appearances that his campaign cost 0, which is such a bold faced lie that it barely needs dismissing.
But no, I don't share the court's apparent opinion that, but for TikTok, this lunatic wouldn't have won. All suggestions are that, will he be allowed to run again (which is theoretically the current status quo, him not having been put under any sort of judicial control!), he will win again, despite his vastly diminished TikTok presence. Turns out, to my great personal sadness, that many of my countrymen, idioticaly, actually liked the fascist and weren't (just) manipulated by TikTok.
In the context of the EU it is in no way surprising that a "far-right" candidate gets 30% of the votes. Austria, France and the Netherlands were pioneers in 2000 already.
Germany's AfD had 12% after Merkel's immigration disaster and now was 21% (in polls) after the US has repeatedly used and insulted the EU in the past 4 years. In 2019 pro-US sentiment was deservedly at an all-time high in Germany, that is no longer the case.
> Okay, so now we know how to edit a BCD file. But what do we put in there? This was the trickiest part of this exploit chain, as you get very little feedback when things go wrong. Recall the bug we are trying to reproduce: We want the bootloader to attempt to boot from our BitLocker partition, fail, and then trigger a PXE soft reboot into our controlled OS.
> The easiest way to get this working has three parts:
> Get the original BCD from the victim’s device. This ensures the configuration matches the specific partition GUIDs. You can do that by shift-rebooting Windows, going “Troubleshoot > Advanced options > Command Prompt”, mounting the boot partition, and copying its contents to a USB drive. Or, be more advanced and use an SMB mount, if you don’t have USB access.
Do I understand it correctly that to bypass the encryption you need access to the decrypted contents of the encrypted disk? Did the original exploit guess the layout of the partitions instead?
This was ultimately what I needed to do when I wrote a systemd service that managed some firewall rules. It really was a footgun though, what with having essentially different meanings/purposes for ExecStop whether you’re doing a Type=forking, a Type=oneshot, or a Type=oneshot with RemainAfterExit=yes.
And relatedly, I honestly have no idea when I’d want to use ExecStartPre, or multiple ExecStarts, or ExecStartPost, and so on.
I would argue the semantics of ExecStop are always the same. It's the command that's executed to stop the service. On the other hand, what it means for a service to be "running" or "stopping" naturally depends on what type of service it is (i.e., is it a daemon or not?)
Yes, so whether the service is stopping as a result of the process exiting, or whether you requested the service to stop manually, it will run the ExecStop in either case.
That makes sense to me personally. What would be the more intuitive design in your mind?
Stopping as a result of the process exiting or requested the service to stop are two very different things. Systemd overloads the term ExecStop for different semantics, relying on different property settings. That's where the confusion comes from.
The name sounds like it means "this is how I want you to cause the service to stop" to me (and clearly to others as well). That would be symmetrical with ExecStart meaning "this is how I want you to cause the service to start". If it runs after the service stopped it should be called "ExecAfterStop" or something like that.
That is what ExecStop means. It specifies how you want to cause the service to stop. But the lifetime of the service isn't exactly the same thing as the lifetime of the process that got started in ExecStart.
Maybe think about it this way: ExecStart is what the system will run to transition the service from the "starting" state to the "started" state. ExecStop is what the system will run to transition the service from the "stopping" state to the "stopped" state.
For a service with RemainAfterExit=no (the default), you enter the stopping state right away once the processes that got started in ExecStart exit. That's useful when you are starting some long lived process as a service, and in that case there is usually no need for an ExecStop. But semantically, ExecStop has the same meaning either way -- it's what needs to be run, if anything, to transition the service from the stopping state to the stopped state.
I have now found the documentation for ExecStop (in systemd.service(5)), which hopefully improves my understanding.
It definitely seems to be both "cause to stop" and "after (unexpected) stop" in one. You can look at $MAINPID to see which case you have. This design apparently makes sense to you, but to me and several others in this thread a service that has already stopped isn't in need of being stopped and shouldn't execute commands intended for that. (There is a separate ExecStopPost for "after stopping, for any reason".)
Yes. ExecStart works the same for all the cases. ExecStop works differently though. While ExecStart is the event to kick off the command for the service, ExecStop is not. The asymmetric semantics are where the confusion comes from.
It's been enlightening to me to read through some of the distro-provided .service files to see what can be done, with services I'm more of less familiar with.
Useful article. I was almost planning to rent a rack somewhere but it seems there's just too much work and too many things to go wrong and it's better to rent cheap dedicated servers and make it somebody elses problem
https://support.google.com/business/answer/6212928?hl=en
Disappointingly, it only says how to identify automated calls from Google, it doesn't offer a protocol for verifying actual humans from Google calling you. Perhaps it happens so rarely you can just assume it's not Google.
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