If you walked into a conversation with someone telling flat earthers that the Earth was actually round, would you get pissy with them, ask for their sources, defend the flat earthers, and then tell the round earth advocate to get off their high horse because they’re not the smartest person in the room?

If we were discussing the pros and cons of certain political systems, or other subjective topics, I would agree with you, but we aren’t.

So, you jumped in to white knight for the people who are objectively wrong. Does that make you feel morally superior?

Deniability is not the primary driver for, or purpose of, proxy wars. They are a means of escalation management for great powers, and post-WWII, a way for nuclear armed states to go to a version of war, that doesn’t carry a high risk of nuclear war.

And even in situations where deniability is a factor, that doesn’t apply here. Iran has always been Hezbollah’s primary benefactor, since the organization’s formation, and it’s not a secret that they serve as a proxy force.

The only deniability is the face saving kind, to again, help escalation management for the great powers.

So you just jump into the middle of threads to chime in about your perceptions of attitudes? Ignoring the fact that where and how you inserted yourself meant taking agreement with one side of the discussion?

Maybe you should start reading a thread from the top, and use the context clues, to understand the implications of how you insert yourself.

In case you’re too lazy to do that, let me show you the comment and commenter you came in defensive of:

Some people just aren’t worth engaging with. They get their entire world view from rich “leftist” tankies on twitch and think the israel vs everyone else in the middle east conflict started last fall.

Unless you feel some moral imperative to always turn the other cheek, I don’t understand why my attitude is such a great offense, when you clearly had no problem with their attitude. And even came to their defense.

That’s hilarious that you’re pretending you didn’t just spend the last 10 minutes Googling that shit.

Because if you did know all that, as you claim, you wouldn’t be conflating Hezbollah with a terrorist group.

So which is it? Do you have a basic grasp of the facts?

Or do you believe they are a radical Islamic terrorist organization, just like Al-Qaeda and ISIS?

What sources?

Do I have to cite the Bill of Rights every time I mention the second amendment?

Water is wet, the Earth is round, and Hezbollah was formed in response to Israel’s invasions of Lebanon in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

More accurately, it was a consolidation of various militant Shia factions and groups.

In case you’re unaware, modern Islamic terrorism is almost exclusively a Sunni phenomenon, or more accurately, more fundamental offshoots and subsets of Sunni Islam e.g. Wahhabism.

But sure, that’s just my recollection of past readings and I’m not going to go find the books I read to provide a bibliography.

If I got anything grossly wrong in there, please call me out and show everyone how misinformed I really am.

I did not endorse Azov, or attribute any sense of morality to them.

They were an apt analogy to Hezbollah e.g. militant resistant groups, but not terrorists.

The fact that you all actually believe Hezbollah is akin to Al-Qaeda or ISIS is the real insanity here.

But I get it, you’ve been told that your entire life from mainstream Western outlets, and it’s a hard to leave that propaganda bubble entirely.

I did enjoy how you dismissed me as some “tankie” and Twitch viewer…? Given that I don’t use Twitch, am not a tankie, and have an academic background in related fields that give me at least a slightly above average insight and perspective into this subject.

That’s not even close to whataboutism…I explicitly stated that Hezbollah was not a terrorist organization, unlike the IDF and Israeli security state.

Next time maybe ask ChatGPT before burping out the first thought that pops in your head, it might save you from future embarrassment.

Hezbollah is as much a terrorist organization as the Asov battalion is.

That is to say, you may not like their politics, but they’re resistance groups formed to fight against an occupation.

To that end, Iran is their sponsor, so of course their is coordination between the two, especially at the highest levels.

The irony, is that you’re saying this not even two weeks after thousands of consumer electronics were turned into bombs, and detonated inside Lebanon, and then multiple residential buildings flattened via airstrikes, both actions taken by the Israelis.

I guess to you, any civilians killed in those instances were just collateral damage, and definitely not victims of terrorism.

I don’t watch his releases every week anymore, so does anyone know if he’s announced that he quit his day job?

I found his channel after his first Russo-Ukraine war video was a day old, and JFC how has he kept up releasing an hour-long PowerPoint a week ever since?

I know he was late once or twice, but holy shit, that is an insane work ethic. I hope he doesn’t burn out because videos are still grade A+.

Dell’s inside sales team probably has a much flatter bell curve, performance wise, then their outside (traveling) reps.

So yes, they are looking to do a layoff without the headlines, or severance, but probably aren’t as concerned where on the bell curve those employees rank.

Middle and lower management of those teams is absolutely sweating bullets about their teams getting wrecked, but big picture, whatever impact the C Suite is expecting, clearly isn’t enough to outweigh whatever net outcome they’re hoping for here.

Edit: also, I pretty much guarantee that any of their far high-end outliers on the inside sales team bell curve, will be given an exemption by whoever is 2 or 3 levels above their direct manager.

It’s a center left Web 2.0 / Death of Traditional Journalism outlet, but still credible on a purely factual basis i.e. basic reported facts are probably accurate.

It’s brand of leftism would best be described as progressive Democrat, and their analysis and editorial choices should be understood as primarily coming from those sensibilities and culture affectations e.g. educated, middle class, and a socially/culturally left brand of neoliberalism.

Handjobs are never worth it, and at this point in my life, if I ever received a good handjob, it would set off all my red flags alerts and alarms.

Of course, I am speaking as a straight man. I’m assuming gay men don’t have this problem, but can’t speak to that with any authority.

Sure, as long as the device doesn’t automatically connect to open networks, and if it does, you don’t live in an apartment, or moderate density area with available open wi-fi networks in range.

“I keep overcooking my steak, any advice?”

“I haven’t had meat in 40 years, have you considered simply going vegetarian?”

Edit: FYI the key to cooking a good steak is salt, butter, and to flip it every 30 secs, until you’ve reached your preferred level of doneness. If you’re really trying to impress, and don’t care about a heart attack, you can also baste with butter in between each flip.

Now, learning how much time it takes for each different type of cut and the variations within, that mostly comes with experience.

If there are open wifi networks near your TV that you can’t lockdown, you’ll want to confirm it your make/model is known to automatically connect to those, and then take whatever mitigation steps are justified for your own use case.

For example, if you have multiple TVs, maybe you can swap models around based on their capabilities and location, or look up the schematic for the TV and see if it’s easy to block it’s internal antennas.

Or maybe that seems like too much of a hassle and you just say fuck it, and don’t worry about it. Which is always an option, because given how much data already gets sucked up by surveillance capitalism, my evening TV viewing habits have to be some of the lowest value data points, as I already block ads and avoid all ad supported services.

I pirated for a long time, and even though I had(have) large media libraries and the home server capacity to manage everything just fine, I stopped.

Not sure when, or why, I’m guessing a service broke and I just said fuck it, I already have Prime+Netflix, and that was years ago at this point.

Netflix’s password policy and Amazon showing adds had me spin them up again, and even migrate over to Jellyfin because Plex is just another enshitified privacy nightmare.

Which was a pleasant surprise, because the last I tried Jellyfin years ago, it was not worth the hassle. Also, Plex wasn’t nearly as bad as it is now.

To swing this back around to this article, I’m betting eventually they’ll force their TVs online by disabling features, capabilities, or even the device itself, if it’s not phoning home.

I think you’ve confused my previous comments as some sort of moral equivocation, which they really weren’t meant to be, but since you brought it up…

You may believe that America’s intelligence agencies, on balance, are more moral than Russia, and you’re probably right, but that is damning by faint praise.

Espionage is literally the act of committing crimes on behalf of a government. It’s not altruistic and it’s not used to fight the good fight of corruption, or the mafia. In fact, it’s often done in conjunction with those actions and organizations, because that is what the job often requires.

Either way, Russia doesn’t need Kaspersky to run its domestic surveillance network or it’s myriad of police state apparatuses.

FYI oftentimes terrorism is blowback from actions taken by intelligence agencies years, or decades, prior. That is, the groups and ideologies they fund, train, and use, for their own ends, don’t cease to exist just because they’re no longer useful, or needed, by those agencies.

Retail generates the most margin, while enterprise generally the most revenue.

At least, that’s how it works at most vendors that operate both B2C and B2B sales and product channels.

But no, Kaspersky is a major legacy player in the B2B security market with both mature and cutting edge products/solutions.

A better question might be, which companies in America were still using Kaspersky up until this month, and why.

My guess that is a mix between budgetary constraints, incompetence, and weighted risk analysis.

Imagine you’re a Midwestern ice cream wholesaler, it’s been a bad few years, and your 200 Kaspersky licenses were renewed with deep discounts.

You’re not likely to lose any contracts for using Kaspersky, nor be a target of state sanctioned espionage, but spending $10,000 between new licensing and man hours, to rip, replace, and configure a new solution, now that could cause real issues for you.

So, between a rock and a hard place, you just wait it out as long as possible and hope that when the other shoe drops, it doesn’t wreck your budget.

No problem, happy it helped.

Your summary is mostly accurate, but I think a better way to understand it would be like this:

Low level security software, by nature, is the ultimate attack vector, if compromised.

Assume that all countries that have both a domestic tech sector, and a well-resourced national security apparatus, have some version of on demand government initiated supply chain attack capabilities.

So it’s not like I believe that all Kaspersky installs include a RAT piped directly to some GRU/FSB unit, just the ability for a malicious payload to be inserted - just as the NSA can do with American tech companies.

Not every risk can be mitigated, but some risks just shouldn’t be taken.

That is so wrong that it’s actually impressive.

Either you’ve never worked in this space, or because it wasn’t present in the few IT departments you’ve worked in, you extrapolated that to mean it wasn’t present in any large organization.

By all means, I don’t disagree that American firms should not be using Kaspersky, just as Russian firms should not be using Sophos (UK based), but to pretend that they aren’t one of the oldest and most well-established brands in the space is misinformed at best.

I think you confused the fact they have a retail product presence, to mean that they don’t have serious enterprise solutions, but they do: NDR, XDR, agentless for hypervisors, etc.