They didn’t hack anything. Just your plain old DDoS attack which took the service offline for a while, nothing was (at least based on what I read) actually hacked (or cracked as old-school folks like me would like it to be called) or stolen.

It’s the latter. But as a crapload of our everyday services depend on US companies and their servers it would be a service outage we’ve never seen before. Big US companies (Microsoft, AWS, Google, Meta…) could technically mitigate at least some effects if it’s just the actual connectivity which is missing but if they’re forced to shut down all European services it’s a whole another matter.

For your everyday consumer it would mean missing a lot of streaming services, email, personal backups of your photos on cloud services and stuff like that. On some cases even access to their bank accounts would be lost. Depending on your usage patterns a majority of your digital life could vanish overnight. For companies it would be even worse, a ton of them rely on AWS and other services to keep their business running and all that would come crashing down and a massive amount of them would not have workforce, knowledge nor resources (money mostly) to switch over to something else. Also a lot of tax paid service rely on M365 and other cloud based stuff so they would be affected too, but maybe/hopefully not quite as badly as commercial side. Also, our credit card processors are mostly US (Visa and Mastercard) so a ton of money transfers would be halted as well.

So, it would be pretty much a digital catastrophe on government, commercial and consumer fronts for majority of the people. Technically there’s nothing we couldn’t rebuild on our own, but it would take at least months and more likely several years to get everything back online and the bill for that would be astronomical. And if it’s a total kill-switch for US services then Europe would need new mobile operating systems to replace Android/IOS, new OS for their computers as Windows wouldn’t work anymore and so on. And on top of that, GPS would go too, but with Galileo that might not be the biggest problem around. And also a ton of other stuff I can’t remember right off the bat.

Sure, US would be stranded on the internet (and in the real world too at least to some point) after that and EU/UN/some other entity would take the role which is now on ICANN (and the same for other administrative entities). US would of course get a massive economical hit as well by losing all European customers, but on the worst case that would pretty much mean that the Europe’s internet access, at least as we know it now, would end and something else would be built on the ashes.

But hey, at least I personally wouldn’t have a problem to find a new job should I want to.

Official author don’t recommend it due to different semantics. But honestly for my own personal use case its fine for me.

I don’t recommend that either. If you get used to that ‘rm’ doesn’t actually remove files and then your alias is missing for whatever reason it’ll bite you in the rear at some point. And obviously the same hazard goes with a ton of other commands too.

Is there a safe and private way to verify that I am in fact a real human on the internet?

In Finland we have this thing called ‘mobile verification’ which I use almost daily. It’s a service where my phone number is verified to my identity in a secure manner (via multifactor bank account on my case but there’s multiple ways to achieve that verification) and it works as an “middleman” where I can just click an icon on a website, feed in my phone number to the identification service, check MFA on my cellphone and then I’m shown a web page where the identity provider shows what information is delivered to an original website. Most of the cases, at least on my usage, it sends out my social security number, so that I can access my invoices, sign legal documents, check my tax forms or whatever I’m doing but the underlying system can provide pretty much whatever data they have stored. There’s no technical reason why it couldn’t be used to verify that I’m an actual human being too.

Say, if that was used in Lemmy (unlikely as the service costs something per each verification), identity provider would just send to my instance that I’m an actual human being but nothing else. The instance could then store that data and show a pretty blue checkmark next to my username without any personal data from me.

Disney+ subscribers will see interactive ads pop up as well.

The Mouse can fuck the right off with that. We’ve had subscription for quite a while since there’s a ton of stuff for our kids but if they start to overlay shows with pop-up ads not unlike The Truman Show I’ll rather set up a jellyfin server and dust the old pirate hat than continue to give them money.

Why would they even need an “AI” to run a power plant?

Because when you call your automation “AI”, no matter how dumb PID or whatever you might be running, the product is at least 30% more fancy and gains more news articles, possibly funding and atleast some coffee with pastries and pats on the back to some front figure in a suit.

I think there already was case like this with either Google or Meta somewhere around Europe few years back. Or it might’ve been actual search results instead of extracts. The decision was overriden shortly as their web traffic dropped drastically. They’ll 100% do this and don’t think twice.

Generally, heating and cooling are the main energy consumption for domestic purposes. next up is the car, and then electrical consumption. (from what i remember).

I suppose it depends on where you live. Our house consumes something over 20 000kWh per year as our heating is also electric (and rest of the consumption is pretty neglible compared to heating) and we also have a fireplace which consumes around 15m³ of firewood, depending on how cold winter happens to be. Electric grid here has a ton of renewables and nuclear, so co2 footprint should be on the smaller side compared to global average.

Also, as google and microsoft (among others) shoehorns AI “answers” to everything that adds up, but private use seems to be quite insignificant anyways.

https://cybernews.com/security/billions-credentials-exposed-infostealers-data-leak/

Several collections of login credentials reveal one of the largest data breaches in history, totaling a humongous 16 billion exposed login credentials. The data most likely originates from various infostealers.

Because its still bullshit.

Obviously. But I have no context on how much my actions create co2 in the first place. I assume driving a car generates a majority of it, or maybe heating the house, but I still don’t have any clue how many kilograms that might be. But what I do know is how many kilowatts my house consumes electricity and at least roughly how much our appliances use, so if you want to try and blame me for consuming precious resources by generating text or watching a video at least give me an measurement I can easily comprehend.

Is it just me or is that stupid way to measure consuming computing power? The CPUs themselves doing computations do not produce any pollutants (unless you calculate how much of that is created during manufacturing ang logistics, which I doubt). It’s the (without question stupidly large) energy consumption which might, but big players are at least greenwashing their actions by using renewable energy more and more.

Why not create comparison like “generating 1000 words of your fanfiction consumes as much energy as you do all day” or something more easily to compare.

centralised, generic, algorithm-driven social media

Which is always within your fingers. I spent my fair time in IRC and early web-era forums and whatever we had at the time but it was on a full blown desktop computer with CRT displays. It was tied to a location and when you were even on another room that thing didn’t follow you, much less when you left home.

It fits 188 KiB on a sheet of letter sized paper

Maybe I won’t use that to back up my photo library as few rough web searches suggests that the pile of paper would be something around 500 meters tall. Pretty neat technology and I suppose if you really need something stored you can etch that to stainless steel plate or something similar, but data density isn’t the best around.

The “keeping it weak” approach, after all, has already led to Putin.

No one kept Russia weak when Soviet Union collapsed. Yeltsin brought a lot of democractic traits into Russia and it was heavily leaning towards west on multiple areas. Should they kept going on that direction they’d be a global superpower on pretty much all fronts by now, surpassing US and even China.

But they had also pretty big internal problems and a ton of people who desired old soviet times and whatever, so we ended up with what we have today. Wikipedia has way more info and links to study it further.