Discussion

Patrick Quirk

ArekDymalski: >Stacked on top of each other across roughly a hundred days, these events are something a historian of computing security writing in 2050 will probably file as a turning point, regardless of what else happens between now and then.And yet, the public conversation around them has been quiet to the point of being strange.There's a lot current events that once would have been considered historical: trip around the Moon, war out of nowhere, unprecedented explosion of kleptocracy l, enormously scandals and so long. Noone of these are moving much of the needle among general public.Why? I think such indifference or rather apathy/torpor is a result of people becoming tired of constant stream of crises (either imaginary or real) that we're being flooded by. The capacity to react with something more than a shrug is finite. And I think we are being drained.

titzer: The idiocy out of the Whitehouse is an intentional strategy to flood the zone with crap that sucks all the air out of the room. They have intentionally broken the ability of the public to become informed through a number of means: attention atrophy, lowest-common-denominator mudslinging, and massive, manufactured, stupid global crises. People have become deaf and desensitized.The fact that humanity sent people back to the moon barely even registered. Crazy times.

jjmarr: > In August 2025, three of the most notorious financially-motivated crews on the planet, ShinyHunters, Scattered Spider, and LAPSUS$, formally combined into a coordinated alliance widely tracked as Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters (SLH), sometimes called “the Trinity of Chaos” (Resecurity; Cyberbit; Infosecurity Magazine; The Hacker News; Computer Weekly; ReliaQuest). Scattered Spider provides initial access through highly-effective social engineering and vishing. ShinyHunters handles exfiltration, leak-site management, and extortion. LAPSUS$ contributes its own brand of identity-system compromise.Lmao that cybercriminals are closing M&A deals to create vertically integrated SaaS companies.Do you think anyone was made redundant through kinetic means?

smallmancontrov: M&A first, kinetic NDA follows. "If you look around the table and can't tell who the sucker is, it's you."

jrm4: As someone who's older, and is just generally gobsmacked all the time by the sloppiness in cybersecurity, all of this is just not surprising.Look, love or hate it, here's what happened; a LONG time ago (in tech terms) Microsoft and others normalized some very stupid practices; when I teach about it I basically illustrate it like this: "If I handed you a piece of paper that said 'Go jump off a bridge'" will you survive this encounter with me? Because a very large, perhaps majority, of computer infrastructure will not.We managed to put buttons on appliances that don't make the appliance explode, but failed to do that in email links, which are just buttons.And then, we still have yet to punish or hold accountable any large party who made things this way. Until we do that, keep expecting this.

energy123: The precipitous drop in fertility even in low income countries. The rise in populism and fear.It's the phones, humans are being DDoSd. We need government intervention against many aspects of modern technology.The profit motive works when it comes to reducing manufacturing costs and passing some of that on to consumers through the beauty of competition. It doesn't work so great when it's X training a transformer model to maximize the amount of time you spend doom scrolling so they can feed you gambling advertisements.

phil21: > Why? I think such indifference or rather apathy/torpor is a result of people becoming tired of constant stream of crises (either imaginary or real) that we're being flooded by. The capacity to react with something more than a shrug is finite. And I think we are being drained.I think it's more that the impact of all these constant string of "crises" ends up having very little impact on the average American's lifestyle. Groceries a bit more expensive, gas higher, eh. Some giant incomprehensible national debt number gets higher. Those all suck and people complain about them - but they are complaining about them in packed bars while they drink $7 beers and eat $30 burgers and fries.You can only yell so many times that the world is ending before people tune it out, since their day to day lives are largely unchanged. Just look at the focus on complaining about almost irrelevant things like the price of eggs. It's societal bike shedding.I am firmly of the belief (and have been for quite some time) that the "average" middle class American is going to need severe pain - as in widespread great depression level pain - before anything really changes at all at the ground level. Americans have simply become so used to living the lifestyle being part of an insulated hegemonic superpower empire that they have taken that for granted as how things generally will always be no matter what happens.Or put another way: Inertia is a hell of a drug.

iainctduncan: As part of my work in technical diligence, I create medium-long form content marketing material on topics germane to PE investment in tech. In the last six months I did a series (not yet published) on the state of security in the age of gen-AI. Basically, we are entering the ransomware apocalypse. It is insane what a godsend gen-AI has been to the cybercrime sector.Things that used to work reliably - like trusting google ads or sponsored links not to be malvertizing sites - are meaningless now that gangs can trivially spin up networks of thousands of fake interacting sites and linked profiles to sneak by fraud detection. Phishing attacks are ridiculously sophisticated. Supply chain attacks are going to get crazy. Ransomware gangs are running full on SaSS services allowing script kiddies access to big gun material. Attacks that were previously only in reach of nation-state-sponsored actors are now available for peanuts. And all of this is going to worse because of everyone and their dog using gen-AI to pump out huge amounts of vulnerable code. And then there is the world of prompt engineering for data exfiltration...If you are young and wanting a promising trade in tech, security would absolutely be a good choice. Shit is going to get CRAZY.

ckcheng: The strangest thing I found is:> on April 7, 2026 … U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell convened an urgent, in-person meeting in Washington with the chief executives of [major US banks] to brief them directly on the cyber risks posed by [Anthropic’s] MythosThen a similar meeting happened with the Canadian Financial Sector Resiliency Group (i.e. the Bank of Canada, the Canadian government’s Department of Finance, the Canadian Deposit Insurance Corporation (Canada’s FDIC) and Canada’s six major banks).https://www.ctvnews.ca/sci-tech/article/anthropics-new-ai-mo...

And yet, the public conversation around them has been quiet to the point of being strange.

john_strinlai: >And yet, the public conversation around them has been quiet to the point of being strange.i dont think its that strange. there are multiple wars raging on, with many people fearing the breakout of a global conflict. a giant pedophile ring has been exposed that no one in power seems interested in doing anything about. prices for everything are haywire. markets are an absolute rollercoaster, hinging completely on one mans late night tweets. and so on.people just dont have the bandwidth to also learn about what an npm or github is, and why a hack of it is important. news stations are going to pick the news that results in the most people tuning in to watch. that is war, not whatever a mercor is.the non-tech (and many of the tech) people in my life are also just plain tired of hearing about hacks. they have heard that their information has been stolen 10 times or whatever in the last 5 years. they have heard 100s of "this company was hacked" stories. "another hack? who cares?".

tokai: Its the tech worlds equivalent to eating X causes cancer.