"Emails" It's a messaging system where you pay like $.25/message, you have to be manually approved by the prison to contact the inmate and all messages are saved and screened for things like PII and criminal activity. You can be permanently suspended if either person breaks the rules (I think the inmate can be put in the box and lose gain-time also), the screening process often just rejects things without explanation, and it may take 24-48 hours to be delivered It's better than the $.15/minute phone calls, but it isn't exactly a Gmail account. It's basically another service provider that DOC has given their blessing so that they can fleece the families of inmates. It's cheap, breaks all the time and costs a ridiculous amount. It is completely unsurprising that this happened.

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.

Unfortunately, they thought of that. Some of them are known answers that they use to be sure you're answering honestly. They'll fail you on those even though they know you're not a bot.

Into volunteers it's not standard practise to randomly put a chip in your head.

Don't get them wrong, they don't do this for you, or even morals. It just affects other interests too much.

I believe that's what a write down generally reflects: The asset is now worth less than its previous book value. Resale value isn't the most accurate way to look at it, but it generally works for explaining it: If I bought a tool for 100€, I'd book it as 100€ worth of tools. If I wanted to sell it again after using it for a while, I'd get less than those 100€ back for it, so I'd write down that difference as a loss. With buying / depreciating / selling companies instead of tools, things become more complex, but the basic idea still holds: If the whole of the company's value goes down, you write down the difference too. So unless these guys bought it for five times its value, they'll have paid less for it than they originally got.

intellectual property is grotesque. under no circumstances a creator should be barred from his creation. if shit like that happens I'd rather there not be any intellectual property at all

Though babble fish is a funny term, Douglas Adams named the creature "Babel fish", after the biblical story of the tower of Babel.