Because it’s used to influence elections worldwide. Most recently the first round of the Romanian elections were won by an unheard of pro-Russian candidate who ran a disinformation campaign on TikTok, allegedly organised by the Kreml.
Do you have any proof that the Chinese government played a role in his campaign? Because the 2016 United States election was possibly influenced by disinformation campaigns on Facebook, yet there is no ban and Zuck is taking an even more lax approach to moderation than Tiktok.
For context, there are around 40 million people living in some form of slavery today, around four times the number of people who were sold in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, so it is by no means a solved problem.
Most people in slavery today live in Asia and the Middle East, but there are pockets in Africa where it is common too.
Modern slaves are sold for as little as $10-$100 and are therefore often considered disposable by their perpetrators. Approx 70% are women and 25% children.
Slavery is illegal everywhere in the world but enforcement is lax or non-existent in some countries, notably Libya and Yemen.
Relative to population, that’s probably the lowest it’s ever been. Obviously the correct number is zero, but it’s an unfortunate fact of life that bad stuff tends to scale with population just like good stuff.
Yes, but unlike other bad stuff, like homicides, this issue isn’t homogeneously distributed over the world. It’s disproportionately concentrated to a small number of countries and regions, that for various reasons and to various degrees tacitly condone it.
Homicide is pretty concentrated too. The rate varies 100x or more between the best and the worst countries, and there’s enormous variation within countries too.
I’m not sure it’s as extreme as you suggest. Looking up stats on slavery in different countries, there are definitely some extreme outliers, but they don’t account for that much of the global total. And by far the worst offender is North Korea, which is never mentioned in these discussion. I also have no idea how accurate these figures are, but the focus on places like Libya doesn’t seem like an honest assessment of the situation.
In any case, I’m not sure how this matters. I guess it would influence how you fight it. If it’s concentrated in a few countries then you’d want pressure on those governments specifically. But in terms of how bad the problem is, I don’t see that it really matters how geographically spread out it is.
Anecdatally, by default, we now block all Chinese and Russian IPs across our servers.
After doing so, all of our logs, like ssh auth etc, are almost completely free and empty of malicious traffic. It’s actually shocking how well a blanket ban worked for us.
Being slightly annoyed by noise in SSH logs I’ve blocked APNIC IPs and now see a comparable number of brute force attempts from ARIN IPs (mostly US ones). Geo blocks are totally ineffective against TAs which use a global network of proxies.
~20 years ago I worked for a small IT/hosting firm, and the vast majority of our hostile traffic came from APNIC addresses. I seriously considered blocking all of it, but I don’t think I ever pulled the trigger.
> Anecdatally, by default, we now block all Chinese and Russian IPs across our servers.
This. Just get several countries' entire IP address space and block these. I've posted I was doing just that only to be told that this wasn't in the "spirit" of the Internet or whatever similar nonsense.
In addition to that only allow SSH in from the few countries / ISPs legit trafic shall legitimately be coming from. This quiets the logs, saves bandwidth, saves resources, saves the planet.
I agree with your approach. It’s easy to empathize with innocent people in say, Russia, blocked from a site which has useful information to them. However the thing these “spirit/openness” people miss is that many sites have a narrow purpose which makes no sense to open it up to people across the world. For instance, local government. Nobody in India or Russia needs to see the minutes from some US city council meeting, or get building permit information. Likewise with e-commerce. If I sell chocolate bars and ship to US and Canada, why wouldn’t I turn off all access from overseas? You might say “oh, but what if some friend in $COUNTRY wants to order a treat for someone here?” And the response to that is always “the hypothetical loss from that is minuscule compared to the cost of serving tons of bot traffic as well as possible exploits those bots might do.
(Yes, yes, VPNs and proxies exist and can be used by both good and bad actors to evade this strategy, and those are another set of IPs widely banned for the same reason. It’s a cat and mouse game but you can’t argue with the results)
There’s another fun thing we can call the Britain test.
The short form for September is Sept in en-GB, the only month abbreviated with four letters. It’s Sep in en-US and other en- locales. All other parsing is identical.
For example, if you’re parsing abbreviated date formats on AWS, this parsing fails only on eu-west-1 and -2 servers, and only in September.
Swedish legislation has it right here. You can unsubscribe by any means you prefer. Mail, email, phone call, a notice in your local newspaper, carrier pigeon. The choice is completely with the party who wishes to terminate the agreement.
It incentivises companies to make it as simple as possible, because if they don’t the cost of manually handling requests coming in through all kinds of different channels quickly becomes excessive.
> Mail, email, phone call, a notice in your local newspaper, carrier pigeon.
How would that even... work? Doesn't this obligate every company to read every local newspaper in every customer's area? And a customer who feels like a company a hard time could just put a notice in the paper and then collect money because the company obviously won't read every newspaper? Also, what about companies wanting to give customers a hard time by canceling their subscriptions - now customers have to read every newspaper too? I must be missing something...
"legal notice in a newspaper" is still very much a thing in common law jurisdictions, with a long history, see banns going way back https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/banns
There are many different types of legal ads, with different costs to advertise. The most common type of legal notice in New York is an LLC formation notice. The State of New York requires limited liability corporations to run an ad informing the public on the formation of the new corporation. There are also FCC, SLA liquor licenses, sidewalk cafe notices, name change notices, divorce notices (also known as dissolution of marriage notices), and probate notices.
I am well aware of that, but there is a very huge and crucial difference between putting something in the newspaper for the sake of public dissemination vs. for the sake of making sure one specific known private entity gets the information. The only case I can recall off the top of my head for the latter is for things like service of judicial papers, and even then as a last resort, only when direct attempts to reach the party have failed. I am not aware of a single case where a party that is already reasonably reachable has to monitor public media for private communication.
>there is a very huge and crucial difference between putting something in the newspaper for the sake of public dissemination vs. for the sake of making sure one specific known private entity gets the information
yes, and that huge and crucial difference in this case is that the entities in question have attorneys on staff, and those attorneys understand their responsibilities on behalf of the corporation
And yet, in the US, you can have process servers publish a notice in a very specific law newspaper that only lawyers ever read, then claim that you couldn't reach someone who would never in their life read such a newspaper for decades simply to see if they've been served.
If this sounds ridiculous, it's because it is, and yet somehow, we still do it. What Sweden does sounds no different, except it's companies with millions of dollars who could actually afford to check these things.
As I mentioned, AFAIK that's only as a last resort once you've been unreachable via other means, which doesn't sound ridiculous at all. Is that not the case?
> Doesn't this obligate every company to read every local newspaper in every customer's area?
In my US state, a lot of important legal notices get published in the newspaper, so companies should already be effectively doing this.
What most do (and what I've always done) is to subscribe to a clipping service that will scan the classifieds, nationwide if you want, for you and forward to you the types of items you want to be made aware of.
I prefer to unsubscribe by writing it on a post-it note and sticking it in a public bathroom under the sink. That way I can always sue for them not doing it!
Yes, that's true and it's good for those who know about it. It's not enough though, companies still have super easy sign ups and then refer to call customer service to unsubscribe (usually the case with cell phone plans for example). And many companies have no email or contact form, only a phone number available on their site.
So there's still lots of room for improvement.
Yes that’s right. You can unsubscribe by any which way you want. Mail, phone call, pigeon. Any message sent to any employee or office in anyway is deemed acceptable for giving notice for any service or contract.
Maybe I’m an outlier but I have another 3-4 of these bags of bags at home with reusable bags. Most people I talk to have the same.
I do refill my car with them occasionally, but I either forget to bring them or do grocery shopping at unanticipated times and don’t have a bag with me.
Hi. I wrote part of this flow for SAS on the original mobile app years ago. I am so sorry.
We had to do it because the underlying backend is Spanish and the APIs are insane. Behind our JSON-wrapper is an adapter to translates it into teletype friendly format … spaces, new lines and tabs makes it look like a ticket you’d get from a travel agency in the 1970s.
This format is also the reason why your name is truncated on your ticket (or so I was told). IT in the airline industry is insane and many systems are many decades old at this point.
A bit surprised you have trouble with APIS though.
Of course context matters but _generally_, end to end tests should be mostly avoided:
- the execution time of end to end tests are orders of magnitude larger than unit tests. In a medium ish application your end to end tests will take several seconds to spin up, for example by spinning up fresh databases (even with rollback in gets slow) and other detachable services. A unit test is usually a malloc away and thousands can be run in parallel on your local box in a second. End to end tests easily take hours of compute time time to run in the real world. Good luck running the suite on your laptop. Nothing kills productivity quicker than a test suite that runs slowly
- unit tests are also independent of other code so it’s easy to get some confidence that your code does the right thing by only testing the touched files in your diff before running the entire suite on CI.
- unit tests encourage good code quality since it’s easier to test injectable code. E2E instead incentivises copy pasted test suites that are thousands of lines of code long.
- in the general case end to end tests are asynchronous and require orders of magnitude more effort to run. Asynchronous tests are flaky. Flaky builds slow down your velocity.
- E2E tests rot really fast. One change leads to thousands of broken E2E tests.
- E2E is not a replacement for monitoring your application. The class of bugs you will catch in your E2E suite is a strict subset of the class of bugs you will catch with monitoring and metrics. Build the latter instead and roll out your code incrementally to your users.
- E2E tests are complicated to set up and maintain in ops. Unit tests not so much. Somewhat unexpectedly your development velocity scales pretty much linearly with stack complexity.
In summary (and again context matters and there aren’t any absolutes, but …):
- Don’t do automated E2E tests.
- Do unit tests
- Do metrics and monitoring
You have a limited budget, spend it where you get a good bang for your buck.
https://www.politico.eu/article/investigation-ties-romanian-...
https://www.politico.eu/article/calin-georgescu-romania-elec...
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