It's insane how infested Lemmy is with anti-Western shills stirring the pot against the West in any way they can. My fiancee is Jewish but I'm not religious so we have debates/arguments about the war, but it's clear here that any comment not "Israel is literally Satan" is downvoted to hell.
Don't get me wrong it was bad on Reddit but Lemmy is on another level.
That's a problem with decentralization that needs to be solved because at the moment the only tools to deal with any of the tens or hundreds of Lemmy instances plagued by propaganda is to defederate them (on the Admin side) or block each individual user/server/sub (on the User side).
At least with centralized services you can detect and (shadow)ban obvious bot activity quite easily. As far as I know of Lemmy infrastructure, your IP/User-Agent/other identifying metadata only goes as far as the server you're registered to.
Running a popular Lemmy server is probably a nice way to collect some juicy 0days from governments though, if you have the skillset.
I'm wondering if this was a rural rough Scottish couple who decided to go climb Everest for some reason and decided "eh, let's do it" or someone putting their trek onto social media and took their kid for attention.
I hope it's the former, sometimes people don't understand danger.
It may be the same Moody's, I can't tell, but they have a different domain name and have a long list of departments including investments and portfolio management, compliance/KYC, supplier risk management, and many others. They are a large financial services company. https://www.moodysanalytics.com/
Regardless, this is a very interesting investigation.
Nicotine is a potent stimulant. If you don't smoke all the time and get tarred lungs then I could see why that would be very bit official. like running a marathon on Adderall to a lesser degree
You only hear about their failures and campaigns they want you to hear about. Like when Trump gave up info that outed some of our top Russian spies, and like this.
Their counter-intel is fine. This is a public campaign designed to generate awareness and make as many people aware as possible. They see the uprising. HUMINT from thousands of widowed women may give them valuable information that otherwise could've slipped past.
The balloon was 200ft tall. The payload hanging beneath it was 200ft wide. The sidewinder has the ability to explode near its target which is why it was chosen. It was the equivalent of popping a party balloon with a firecracker. They also waited for it to be over a large body of water so the 2,000lb payload (many sensors, propellers, antennas, transceivers, etc) didn't fall apart on descent and crush people/things, and while they can control a missile if it misses it's target, they can't control bullets, which could rain down and hit whoever/whatever happened to be unfortunate enough to be in their path. Bullets fall at terminal velocity, even after they've lost initial momentum, that's why people on the ground die from guns being fired into the air during celebrations.
So unless they found a way to reverse a Globemaster mid-air and put the payload in the trunk, they made what seems to be the best call. Seeing as the first missile did miss on 1 of the 3 objects, I'd say that call was right.
The FBI has been analyzing the wreckage after the dive team retrieved it.
That said, if we start getting heavily astroturfed with bots and spam I'm going to be a little less zen about it.
The spammers aren't here in custom full-force software_dev_lemmy_bots mode yet, but when they come, moderation tool development will increase in effort tenfold.
The nation states are already using their "play Guess The Bot and lose" games. It's the ones who post often and with clear lines in the sand you need to worry about. Problem is, there is a sea of regular people just like that.
Lemmy needs to go through a fork or three before it becomes viable to the mainstream. Currently Lemmy users produce much less legitimate worthwhile information on far less subjects than reddit, and even Quora shudder thinking about it.
Granted, I've only been here for about a week before reddit disabled 3rd party apps. Maybe the first 3 years were the golden years. I'm only speaking as to the bot infestation I see currently.
I'm not sure why you're downvoted. It's China. If they can do it, you know they are. But the question is whether they can. I imagine cloning sheep and small monkeys are much easier than cloning humans.
I thought it was a half smoked joint.