Ondřej Surý deserves a fucking medal and a title of nobility and a castle or something on that level. There are a lot of people just like that who would like to be able to keep a roof over their head, food on their table and have enough help that they don't have to worry about the thankless and unglamorous work they've taken on being in vain if they get hit by a bus one day.
I don't know what sort of funding model would be best for ensuring that the things most critical to the security and uninterrupted functioning of globally important digital infrastructure don't just get abandoned and fall over one day, but its not what we've got at present. If the global digital economy is worth 16.5 trillion bucks, then we're currently spending less than one part in sixteen thousand in maintaining it.
Amazingly, on the internet, there are a whole host of equivalents where it is literally just one guy volunteering his time for the last several decades to fill in potholes whenever someone calls him up. Only it's more than just a bump in the road if this guy stops doing what he's doing. It's more like a major bridge falling down.
Imagine your economy was dependent on network of roads, bridges, etc. to function. If you had any sense, you'd probably ensure those roads had people dedicated to filling the potholes, inspecting the bridges, plowing the roads, etc. and that there was some redundancy in the system so that if say a mountain pass was closed due to an avalanche, traffic could be rerouted.
I just checked and the Top 10 open source foundations globally have a combined annual revenue of under a billion dollars. The US alone spends $900 billion a year on its military. You'd think that software projects which underpin much of the global digital economy could get some meaningful support given that an estimated 16.5 TRILLION dollars of the overall global economy is considered to be digitally dependent.
I don't know what the answer is for resourcing globally critical projects, but its clear that a lot of key infrastructure for the entire global economy is running on the backs and continued goodwill and willingness of unpaid volunteers who can literally quit anytime.
I do know you don't want the world to hinge on whether some guy is currently in the hospital or going through a messy divorce or trying to plan a funeral or just on a ferry for the next 8 hours.
This guy should probably be doing this full time and have a globally distributed team of paid helpers working under him. Instead, he's got a Patreon.
This ONE GUY basically saved the internet this week through his VOLUNTEER WORK in creating easily installable PHP packages. We're talking tens if not hundreds of millions of computers getting his patches. If he hadn't already been in place doing this work, the internet and those who maintain it (because the internet is actually a thing that a whole lot of people need to work at to keep it from falling over) would be having a MUCH worse week than it is already experiencing.
For any people that thought that China has been staying uninvolved in WW3, it turns out that a bunch of critical components of the Geran-4 and Geran-5 jet drones which Russia has been using on Ukraine with great success are being exclusively sourced from China, including the actual jet engine FOR WHICH RUSSIA HAS NO OTHER SOURCE. Russia is building and launching thousands of drones a week and China has a veto. They could restrict sales and they're not.
The contrast between how Ukraine conducts itself in this war and how Russia does is particularly stark today, with Ukraine successfully striking a major pumping oil station in Samara to disrupt the Russian economy and war machine, while Russia continues to strike at non-military targets, conducting terror attacks on the Ukrainian people, firing ballistic missiles into apartment buildings.
This is a picture of one of the two vessels that Russia hit today. I'm guessing this is the one that sank, as you can see that the stern is down low in the water. You can see that the coast is quite near and I doubt that this vessel was able to maneuver for long with what was probably a hit that flooded its engine room.
We need to stop talking about hybrid war. This is just war and Russia is committing it. Russia is conducting life-ending attacks on civilians inside the sovereign borders of NATO members. It's time to declare article 5. Russia is at war with NATO and it's time we acted like it and stopped repeating the endless lie that this is just "hybrid war." NATO's actions so far have not established deterrence against Russian action on a large number of its members. That needs to change. People have died.
Looks like Russia attacked two ships off the coast of Bulgaria, sinking one with all crew missing. Pictures of the other show it to be quite near the coast and I think reports of this being in Bulgaria's EEZ are incorrect and the attack or at least rescue efforts took place within Bulgaria's territorial limits, which is very different. Essentially, Russia was attacking civilian shipping in Bulgarian waters.
The FBI has on numerous occasions in the past done things like infiltrate groups and then basically egg someone on into committing to some sort of fake smuggling/attack operation usually involving explosives, missiles, etc. which the FBI supplies, except the explosives are made of silly putty or some such.
We all know Trump is a confabulatory liar who will make shit up on the spur of the moment, but him saying that the US knew about Fairford in advance does pose some questions. What if Fairford were some sort of operation to try to egg some people on into conducting what they thought was an attack, but one which wasn't actually capable of succeeding.
-I backed up the system repeatedly before major operations including the OS upgrades using the last free version of Macrium Reflect, which I also had to copy over from my personal archives. There is no official support for the E545 by Lenovo or from Microsoft for Windowws 10 or later, so it is a good idea to do snapshot images of the drive frequently before testing/updating some aspect of the system. This allows for easy reversion in the event things go awry.
-Installed Windows 10 using the setup program on the mounted .iso. Install was successful and I proceeded to do a lot of cleanup or unused or dated software at this point as well as more driver updating and ran Windows update until it ran dry. Installed my usual set of useful utilities and apps including a lot of things which would not run on Windows 7 or would only run in old versions.
-Once the ISO was successfully transferred to her computer, I mounted the ISO on her computer using WinCDEmu, a free utility. Unlike on Windows 10 and 11, there isn't native support for mounting ISOs in Windows 7. WinCDEmu installs its own driver.
-Upgraded to Windows 10. This required me to transfer an .iso file over from my personal store of archived stuff which I keep around neatly organized because I am a total packrat. ISO files aren't available for download and the official Media Creation Tool from MS puked on this computer for unknown reasons. Transferring the file was surprisingly difficult due to poor link stabililty and slowness on her end. I ended up using Resilio Sync as Synctrayzor, my usual utililty crashed on her Win 7.
-Upgraded bios and all drivers to the latest available versions from Lenovo and then installed AMD's own driver for the A8 mobile line. The bios upgrade, to version 1.18 released in 2018 (this computer is easily a dozen years old), required me to replace the battery, which was dead. A replacement cost $28.