Americans that lie about their background and then proceed to steal your organization secrets, infect your co-workers and turn your company into a supply chain attack vector - are exactly the same type of the problem.
The thing is, it's somehow mostly (not only) North Koreans utilizing this particular tactics.
PS. They wouldn't allow you this rhetoric, regardless of you being sympathetic with them. It would be allowed only if you embrace the Juche and the Supreme Leader cult in fullest. Otherwise, you're nothing to them, an enemy, you don't deserve the Geneva convention or any of the basic human rights, by the doctrine's definition. The system there is not even like China's "One country, two systems", it's a thing on it's own.
No, they didn't. Not in this case. That's not to say they wouldn't at some point. In some of the previous cases we dealt with, North Koreans were obsessively trying to get write access to CI/CD from the repo owners. They will also try to get your PAT tokens if possible. Similarly, any other access tokens (AWS etc.). We had one case where malicious npm dependency was injected after few months of regular work.
DPRK IT Workers focus is not hacking, it's:
1. Getting paid (The quality of work is variable, sometimes they are not that bad, but most of the time they are basically stubborn junior devs)
2. Then, stealing secrets to exfiltrate to actual DPRK hackers
3. Then, credibility building, so they could return to your co-workers with a job offer or some repository code with an "issue to debug" and force you to open code/attachments.
They will also recommend each other for jobs. If you'll hire one and signal that you want to hire more, they will invite their "friends". In some organizations this can go as high as 3 to 5 DPRK IT Workers for the 10 people team.
Oh yeah, all of those. Plus shitload of trash, of all kind, including old engine oil, that fisherman guy's rotten meat on which he grows he's bait, empty bottles (the ones which are non-refundable at the liquor shop)... at some point even I contributed to pushing trash and fire hazard there.
Mentioned above "district cooperative" flatly refused to remove an old asbestos roof from over the balcony and professional removals don't deal with 1x1m asbestos roofing. I removed it myself, standing on a chair on 10th floor balcony with an old grinder as it was permanently attached to the building through the metal frame, because of course it was.
I pushed it into the same basement as no one was interested in picking it up, no matter petitions, asking nicely, asking not so nicely, making threats or wanting to pay.
Well, the last one (hopefully) I was living in and moved from in 2015, was built in 1971 and it's "district cooperative" was mostly unchanged from that time (starting from technical employees, through administrative ones and ending on "executives") and basically was there to just rubber stamp any inspection. It's not like the building was collapsing of course. It had full 10-floors of tenants. But if going by the actual inspection book - it shouldn't.
Gas leaks - check, Fire hazard in the basement - check, Fire hazard through faulty (aluminum) electrical installation - check, Elevator out of order or just simply being scary - check, Often plumbing problems (no hot water for a month? check!)
and the list could go on and on. The last straw for me was when I installed a water filtration and filters basically turned black in a week and clogged. I just moved.
One of the big advantages of those buildings is often the location. Beats living with no public space (parks, playgrounds, walking space etc) and public utilities (like schools, commies, built those with every new district erected) and on the outskirts of the city
The title is misleading as the article primarily focuses on Bulgaria. In contrast, Poland began re-insulating old blocks en masse about 20 years ago, especially in all the larger cities.
Moreover, the project isn't as "innovative" as it seems to be portrayed in the article. The quality of these buildings today depends on a variety of factors, such as the precise time they were built (during periods of a strong vs. weak socialist economy), the location (growing worker cities vs. peripheral cities), and their maintenance over the years. During socialist times and even up to today, these buildings were largely maintained by legal "cooperatives." The quality of management within these cooperatives can vary significantly. And management of those basically never changes through the decades.
There is also a notable difference in the quality of an average "block" among different Central and Eastern European countries. Having traveled through most of this part of the continent and living in Poland, I've observed that many Balkan Soviet blocks were of significantly lower quality, likely due to smaller economies and greater scarcity of materials at the time, which affected their ability to meet building standards (all these blocks were state-built).
For anyone interested in how these were made en masse in months, here's a link to an old Polish movie archive from 1976, which was pretty much the peak of building these in Poland, following a substantial loans from the western world. The video lacks subtitles, but you can still observe the manufacturing, quality control, delivery, and on-site assembly process.
Here in central europe ticks are a massive problem. Lyme's caused serious year long health issues for a family member. It also almost killed my dog when he caught one of his first ticks ever.
I also do "checks", avoid tall grasses and have the whole system for management of my family's "tick security" (sometimes with their complain in the background). However, studying this problem basically every single summer I once found the alternative explanation as to why tick population today explodes globally in moderate climates.
Collapsed deer predator population[0]. Deer and small rodent populations are unchecked because predators can't thrive in ecologically stressed areas (There's little to no wild forests of enough of the size for wolf in most of Europe). Herbivores had far easier time adapting to the transformed environment compared to their natural predators. They also get less hunted by humans, obviously.
No amount of DEET will solve that. There's also no need to CRISP'r anything or spend a decade of research on poor quality vaccination. This is system's fragility problem.
Then again... ticks were a very common occurrence for the first settlers in North America. There're diary entries mentioning them "in swarms" explicitly. But, what's different today is that you don't need to be even close to a deer trail to get 23 ticks of your dog after the walk.
It did suck though. Remember that serfdom (or mandatory military service) in Europe was formally abolished only at the break of the XVIII/XIX century. But even without it, we are talking about generational periods of a moderate poverty (by prices going occasionally down, not by better pays or surplus economy) or just the regular poverty where 90% of time/energy is spent on earning on food only (sometimes, rarely, clothing).
You are right about "no walls everywhere". At the time there were also no concept of a country border as it's today. If only a free peasant, you could walk from France to Russia, start settling some land there and no one was any wiser. It would be a local administration problem at best (if any was present), but not an international one like today.
I always wondered if an oss-bid-for-pr marketplace has a point. Even repo owners could be in the loop - either taking up the offer, leaving it for others and just resorting to accepting the PR or straight up refusing the change (equivalent of closing a PR).
In a way it feels against "the spirit", but maybe it's exactly the same way of thinking you're pointing out.
I had the same thought. Doesn't aggregation of this type fall pretty squarely with federated/activitypub/bluesky -kind-of-a-thing?
It became almost pointless to try to host such a small search/aggregator as a separate web (discovery through web search is almost impossible and it's hard to make people stay on a new website today because of activity sinkholes like twitter/reddit. add to it a hassle of managing modern application at scale etc).
I don't know. But I feel that projects like such will have a higher 1yr survival rate when developed directly as a "feed".And, AFAIU, that's what activitypub got created for.
Hey, good luck with dropping it, 30 days is already a milestone!
First 3 to 6 months is always terrible. I also had issues with sleep because of dreams, and also used cannabis for that purpose. Getting back to sleeping without THC in the bloodstream is, well... an experience on it's own.
It's funny how all of the adults I've heard/read basically share the same experience of dropping it (REM rebound, heart rate and anxiety/strange thoughts). And, yeah, today's weed is far more potent than weed I initially started to smoke almost 2 decades ago.
I wonder if New Kind of Science will end up like Godel, Escher, Bach ended up after release of GPT4[0]. It will be interesting to see what concept/formalization(?) will basically invalidate 50% of the research made by Wolfram.
I'll spare myself commenting on Wolfram, it's enough to do Ctrl+F on "arrogant" in this topic. Frankly, I don't even care. It's just that New Kind of Science didn't meaningfully advance anywhere beyond being "an interesting concept" for all of his natural life.
You can arrow through it to just have a look at the slides. At 39 minute presenter talks about extreme orbits that made some of the objects hard to discover for decades.
I would probably never visit the restaurant with app only menu. It's weird for me that someone had such an idea and still would call the place a restaurant. I know I am overblowing it but it's just mind-boggling to me.
There're countless studies conducted during the Ukraine-Russia war pointing out what sectors to hit with full export ban to grind Russian military capability to a halt (e.g Austrian GFM manufacturing equipment for artillery barrels production). But this is very politicized discussion. Obviously companies will want to protect their interests and politicians prefer to make strong and visible statements in place of the working ones (like, freezing Russian assets outside of Russia does very little damage to Russia itself right now, compared to, say, decimating their heavy equipment supply chain)
Business is separate from war (see Sweden's metallurgy industry during WW2).
It also says something that most of local newspaper websites already disabled their comments section few years back because of this exact reason. That's what at least happened to the few I was visiting. It was really bad though. Made you wonder that those are just regular folks walking the same sidewalks as myself and in their past time they just go on and express fantasies of violence under some "grassroots" politics column.
Yeah. I always feel that the solution for clean and abundant energy globally is to start with better energy grid management (and storage). There's already so many fit-to-all-geography solutions available. It's just that current grid is used to supporting lines centralized around big energy plants and not small producers.
I also always feel that there's a lot more to take down from energy consumption per household by simply making more efficient devices (especially for heating and cooling). It's possible that modern AC/heaters are already close to the peak electrical efficiency, but I guess even better producer standards for things like insulation, thermal conductors or precision sensors could still squeeze something out of the nation-wide usage.
More recommendations on this topic? Paper's great. I also know about Martin Klepmann's Designing data intensive applications but it's less about data structures and more about databases.
The thing is, it's somehow mostly (not only) North Koreans utilizing this particular tactics.
PS. They wouldn't allow you this rhetoric, regardless of you being sympathetic with them. It would be allowed only if you embrace the Juche and the Supreme Leader cult in fullest. Otherwise, you're nothing to them, an enemy, you don't deserve the Geneva convention or any of the basic human rights, by the doctrine's definition. The system there is not even like China's "One country, two systems", it's a thing on it's own.