sylver_dragon

This could just be a really stupid format, put out by a specific application for creating PDFs, because the original authors didn't want to pay Adobe (never attribute to malice, that which can be sufficiently explained with stupidity).

Does pdfinfo give any indication of the application used to create the document? If it chokes on the Java bit up front, can you extract just the PDF from the file and look at that? You might also dig through the PDF a bit using Dider Stevens 's Tools, looking for JavaScript or other indicators of PDF fuckery.

Does the file contain any other Java bytecode? If so, can you pass that through a decompiler?

would love it if attempts to reach the cloud could be trapped and recorded to a log file in the course of neutering the PDF.

This is possible, but it takes a bit of setup. In my own lab, I have PolarProxy running in one Virtual Machine (VM), using QEMU/KVM. That acts as a gateway between an isolated network and a network with internet access. It runs transparent TLS break and inspect on port 443/tcp and tcpdump capturing port 80/tcp. It also serves DNS using Bind.

There is then the "victim" VM which is running bog standard Windows 10. The PolarProxy root cert has been added to the Trusted Roots certificate store. The Default Gateway and DNS servers are hard coded to the PolarProxy VM. Suspicious stuff is tested on this system and all network traffic is recorded on the PolarProxy system in standard pcap format for analysis.

War rarely decides who's right, just who's left.

Can we follow this up by murdering most of the generic Top Level Domains (gTLD)? I have yet to see anything except spam and malware coming out of the .top domain.

there wouldn’t be any reason to tweak and replace it all constantly.

There really wasn't.

There is the legal concept of Mens Rea which has to do with the mental state of the person committing the act. And I think that applies in this case. Archeology has generally been about learning and providing knowledge of previous cultures. While the methods, mindset and actions of 18th and early 19th century treasure hunters left a lot to be desired, some of them did make some reasonable attempt at documenting their finds and preserving the context to provide that knowledge. Modern archeologists go to painstaking lengths to properly document finds and preserve as much knowledge as possible from finds. Grave robbers do none of this. Their motivations generally revolve around personal gain and they will destroy any context and knowledge in their attempt to make money.

Consider your own reading on the Valley of the Kings. Where did all of the information we have on the Pharaohs in those tombs come from? It's from the work of the archeologists documenting everything found in those tombs. While there is certainly an argument for leaving things in the same state they were found in, that also means that the artifacts will continue to deteriorate and any further knowledge which might be gleaned from them will be lost. Sending artifacts to a museum isn't all about putting them in cases for people to gawk at. It also means that actions are taken to preserve those artifacts and maintain them for observation and study in the future. Sometimes this does cause damage. Again, 18th and early 19th century preservation was often just as, if not more damaging than leaving those artifacts in-sutu. But again, the intention was to preserve, not enrich.

So, that's how I would draw the line, based on the reason and methods used for the removal of grave goods. Is it done with the intention for the furtherance of knoweldge of previous cultures? Or, is it just done to enrich someone? And is the work being done using the current understanding and methods to best capture and preserve that knowledge for future generations?

While I would never support it, the main way to improve online discussion is by removing anonymity. Allow me to go back a couple decades and point to John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory. People with a reasonable expectation of anonymity turn into complete assholes. The common solution to this is by linking accounts to a real identity in some way, such that online actions have negative consequences to the person taking them. Google famously tried this by forcing people to use their real name on accounts. And it was a privacy nightmare. Ultimately though, it's the only functional solution. If anti-social actions do not have negative social consequences, then there is no disincentive for people to not take those actions and people can just keep spinning up new accounts and taking those same anti-social actions. This can also be automated, resulting in the bot farms which troll and brigade online forums. On the privacy nightmare side of the coin, it means it's much easier to target people for legitimate, though unpopular, opinions. There are some "in the middle" options, which can make the cost to creating accounts somewhat higher and slower; but, which don't expose peoples' real identities in quite the same way. But, every system has it's pros and cons. And the linking of identities to accounts

Voting systems and the like will always be a kludge, which is easy to work around. Any attempt to predicate the voting on trusting users to "do the right thing" is doomed to fail. People suck, they will do what they want and ignore the rules when they feel they are justified in doing so. Or, some people will do it just to be dicks. At the same time, it also promotes herding and bubbles. If everyone in a community chooses to downvote puppies and upvote cats, eventually the puppy people will be drown out and forced to go off and found their own community which does the opposite. And those communities, both now stuck in a bias reinforcing echo chamber, will continue to drift further apart and possibly radicalize against each other. This isn't even limited to online discussions. People often choose their meat-space friends based on similar beliefs, which leads to people living in bubbles which may not be representative to a wider world.

Despite the limitations of the kludge, I do think voting systems are the best we're going to get. I'd agree with @grue that the Slashdot system had a lot of merit. Allowing the community to both vote on articles/comments and then later have those votes voted on by a random selection of users, seems like a reasonable way to try to enforce some of the "good faith" voting you're looking for. Though, even that will likely get gamed and lead to herding. It's also a lot more cumbersome and relies on the user community taking on a greater role in maintaining the community. But, as I have implied, I don't think there is a "good" solution, only a lot of "less bad" ones.

Like many of the differences, I suspect that one came out of the attempts as English Spelling Reform, which took greater hold in the US. Ultimately, the process hasn't succeeded, but it has excised some of inconsistencies from the English. Though, it has also led to some confusion, as in the tire/tyre case.

Real Druids are kinda an unknown. We have writings about their practices and beliefs from Roman writers and much later Christian writers. The former were known to be exaggerate and just make shit up when it came to "barbarians" and the enemies of Rome. And the later were often working with incomplete knowledge and also making shit up. This was muddled further by 18th Century work which liked to make ancient cultures even more fantastical. And then you get all the Neo-Pagan revival crap which cast their own beliefs onto ancient cultures, such as the druids, which completely muddied the waters. The fact is, we don't actually know a whole lot about the real Druids.

Ya, absolutely. My point was that, we shouldn't assume that vendors are doing things right all the time. So, it's important to have those layered defense, because vendors do stupid stuff like this.

This is a good example of why a zero trust network architecture is important. This attack would require the attacker to be able to SSH to the management interface of the device. Done right, that interface will be on a VLAN which has very limited access (e.g. specific IPs or a jumphost). While that isn't an impossible hurdle for an attacker to overcome, it's significantly harder than just popping any box on the network. People make mistakes all the time, and someone on your network is going to fall for a phishing attack or malicious redirect or any number of things. Having that extra layer, before they pop the firewall, gives defenders that much more time to notice, find and evict the attacker.

Also, Whiskey, Tango, Foxtrot Cisco?

This article brought to you by the manufacturers of the interceptor missiles.
If we were actually in a hot war or expecting one very soon, yes we would want to ramp production like the US did during WWII. Right now, the excessive costs of wartime production should not be considered. It's always best to remember Eisenhower's words:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. . . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

Even worse that acquisition links back to the Embracer Group. Hopefully KC:D 2 makes it out the door before Embracer full fucks up Warhorse.