So while Utah punches above its weight in tech, St. Paul area absolutely dwarfs it in population. Surely they have a robust cybersecurity industry there... https://lecbyo.files.cmp.optimizely.com/download/fa9be256b74111efa0ca8e42e80f1a8f?sfvrsn=a8aa5246_2 Utah, #1 projected tech sector growth in the next decade, of all 50 states. Utah, #8 for tech sector % of entire state economy, of all 50 states. Minnesota? Doesn't crack top 10 for any metrics. Utah may not be the biggest or techiest state, but it is way more so than Minnesota. The National Guard just seems like a desperate move. Again, this is my argument, but you are only seeing desperation as due to incompetence, not due to... actual severity. When they're deployed, they take orders from the the federal military, Not actually true unless the Nat Guard has been given a direct command by the Pentagon. and at peace, monitoring foreign threats seems like a federal thing. ... which is why the FBI were called in, in addition to the Nat Guard being able to report up the military CoC. You call in the National Guard to put down a riot or something where you just need bodies, not for anything niche. I mean, you yourself have explained that the Nat Guard does have a CyberSec ability, and I've explained they also have the ability to potentially summon even greater CyberSec ability. I guess you would be surprised how involved the military is / can be in defending against national security threatening, critical infrastructure comprimising kinds of domestic threats. Remember Stuxnet? Yeah other people can do that to us now, we kinda uncorked the genie bottle on that one. Otherwise, just call a local cybersecurity firm to trace the attack and assess damage. It is not everyone's instinct or best practice to immediately hire a contracted firm to do things that government agencies can, and have a responsibility to do. If this was like, Amazon being comprimised, yeah I can see that being a more likely avenue, though if it was serious, they'd probably call in some or multiple forms of 'the Feds' as well. But this was a breach/compromise of a municipal network... thats a government thing. Not a private sector thing. EDIT: Also, you are acting like either you are unaware of the following, or ... don't think its real? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center Kind of a really big deal in terms of Utah and the tech sector and the Federal government and... things that were totally illegal before the PATRIOT Act. Exabytes of storage. Exabytes. Utah literally is where the NSA is doing their damndest to make a hardcopy of literally all internet traffic and content. Given how classified this facility is, I wouldn't be surprised if their employees don't exactly show up in standard Utah employment figures.

I can understand why some programs only allow a single copy to be opened at once, something like email makes sense. However on Linux they got this right... if you try to open a program that is already running, it switches to the screen that program is on and restores the program window to the desktop. There's no guessing why the program "won't open", it just makes the logical choice that you want to see it. Heh that reminds me of another detail from that call... the guy also wasn't willing to reboot his computer (which would have solved the problem as well), but berated me for not knowing what I was doing for making the suggestion. Dude, it's Windows, things break constantly and a reboot generally resolves the issue.

Not sure how to go about marketing that in our current disposable society, though. Ditto. The most likely solution would be EU regulations forcing longer battery life/better battery safety. Maybe the new law for replaceable batteries in smartphones could be enough, it includes a rating on charging cycles which could be the new "muh number is bigger!"

it becomes a form of censorship when snall websites and forums shut down because they don’t have the capacity to comply. In this scenario that's not a consideration. We're talking about algorithmically-driven content, which wouldn't apply to Lemmy, Mastodon, or many mom-and-pop sized pages and forums. Those have human moderation anyway, which the big sites don't. If you're making editorial decisions by weighting algorithmically-driven content, it's not censorship to hold you accountable for the consequences of your editorial decisions. (Just as we would any major media outlet.)

They stopped sending to me when I replied that every text message after would cost them $500 each. That's an actual thing. They got scared.

The platform owners don’t consider engagement to me be participation in meaningful discourse. Engagement to them just means staying on the platform while seeing ads. If bots keep people doing that those platforms will keep letting them in.