This article is absurd. They make a credible claim that nuclear deterrence through behavioral norms has failed, and then go on to conclude that the best alternative is ... Nuclear deterrence through behavioral norms. Has the author read their own article?
This is written with the genuinely unreasonable treatment of American claims as legitimate and actions as legal, with no consideration offered to the very real likelihood that the American government is simply lying and committing a war of aggression. Frankly, this piece is emblematic of the failure of the news media to hold fascism to account.
Except you need food to live and tv shows are an artificially scarce resource that's actually free to distribute in unlimited quantities, so the harm is very different.
I contend people starving is a worthwhile problem to solve. Can the tech industry solve it? I don't think so, which makes me curious what the point of the tech industry really is.
All the security issues patched in software have either been there since it was released or are introduced with feature updates. As a security veteran, the end of patching is hardly as dire as this imagines.
Update:
Patching has always been security theater for systems where security actually matters (national security), because it's assumed nation states already know vulnerabilities often years before there's a public disclosure or patch. These patches have always been to deal with nuisance actors impacting non-critical users. Besides, the user getting tricked is always the biggest risk, and patching does nothing at all for that.
If you care about security, don't get on the internet. The device you're using right now is probably already trivial compromised by unpatched vulnerabilities, if not known only by a state actor than a spyware company. Pretending this isn't the case is worse than discontinuing vanity security theater.
This is like everyone freaking out because they're shutting down the TSA. The idea that patches are important and effective is more dangerous than not patching.
I agree that when people say "I'll have to get back to you" it sounds a little less than inspiring. In the military, we always called that "taking a look up" or a "due out," but it helps to be able to articulate well at the time why you can't give a more complete answer (ie what data you need to look up).
Having worked on half a dozen government projects backed by Oracle databases, this really seems to be Oracle's entire business model: ship the shittiest product on earth, years late and oodles over budget. I've yet to witness something they make being better than a free alternative. Their sales department must be something of legend.
I used to work on a DoD special project that required rare earths that we could only get from China and we had to write a monthly memo about the risk to our $10B program that China would just stop selling it to us.
The problem boiled down to the Chinese government buying out and shutting down any competitors anywhere in the world, plus Congress requiring the DoD to go with the lowest cost, which was always China. We knew what the problem was, we made the problem clear, no one did anything about it.
Maybe this administration blowing up the government is good, actually.