Thanks for posting that, there are a lot of quotes that resonated with me. I've had a personally and professionally tough year and will be losing my job in the new year, 50/50 my own fault for disengaging after a reorg at that start if the year. I'm not overly worried and will be taking the payoff to throw my hat in the small startup ring but this quote still struck a chord and made me feel more positive:
“If you hit a wrong note, it’s the next note you play that determines if it’s good or bad.” (Miles Davis)
Enjoy the holidays everyone and remember to look out for each other, we lost a close family member to suicide and new born nephew that only lived a few precious hours this year. Family and friends first, and no more letting others decide my future are my goals for 2026. If anyone is struggling, even if you can't see it people want to help, take that hard first step and ask for help, friend/family/doctor/helpline/anyone, it gets easier after that, it's a step I took myself a few years ago when in a bad place mentally and it turned my life around, my only regrets are I didn't ask for help sooner and I kept my struggle and recovery largely private, I will regret to my dying day that I wasn't more open to my extended family and maybe if that person saw someone else recover they might have taken another road. Apologies for the ramble, the quotes and typing this comment caused a small unplanned reflection on 2025, I was going to delete all this but thought it might help someone. Thanks HN for keeping things interesting and once again pointing me at something that made a difference!
Some time ago I was looking for a chassis like that one, minus the lawnmower hardware, to build something that could "patrol" around my home, which has some irregular terrain that would probably have anything with non huge wheels flip over or get stuck. All I could find are interesting metal robot chassis on Aliexpress which were however way overpriced considering the much smaller size and crappy plastic tracks.
I'm Irish and have a common firstname.lastname@gmail.com
At some point the head of a national hospital thought he had that address and wasn't using his official email for everything, I got several emails that should not have been for me and some were quiet sensitive, I always emailed back the sender to let them know and eventually I emailed his secretary as it kept happening. I've also received purchase order confirmations from Australia, building contracts from Canada, HR emails from a university to which I had to confirm I had deleted the mail as letting them know led to GDPR investigation
I’m in the midst of a similar situation. My firstinitial.lastname email keeps getting very sensitive legal documents from law firms handling the case of someone who does not seem to know what their actual email address is. I called the firm and told them they needed to have an in-person meeting with their client and get a correct email address from them. That seemed to help for a few months. But now I’m getting emails again from a different law firm.
And I worked IT for legal firm, if we were not sending documents over email, we would get replaced by the client.
I spent 3 months on secure document transfer portal system, got scrapped after 4 months because clients wanted their forms as Word/PDF and they wanted them without hopping through any hoops.
Yes I know this was about wrong delivery address (person with same name, wrong account); the point is that email is not completely secure - certainly not for very sensitive (legal) content
Gmail can be fetched via IMAP and leave Gmail's infra entirely. And I don't think Google guarantees that their implementation stays fully on their own owned infra. It's a reasonable assumption but I'd never trust that for a security guarantee.
Email is not an end-to-end secure data protocol without the use of client side encryption/decryption like PGP/GPG, but even then, sender/receiver and time are all in the envelop metadata.
Probably because Law Firms arent necessarily computer security firms. Lots of people have terrible op sec. Additionally if you the recipient are on gmail it stops mattering, now Google knows your legal woes.
Exactly, I’d never use Gmail for anything sensitive. Even for just personal emails I use my own mailserver.
(And again, for truly sensitive stuff I don’t use email at all)
Sure even though, as most others, my server supports TLS, having your email not leave gmail at all may be slightly more secure.
Part of the point however was that when either server or receiver is using Gmail, your possibly confidential email content is still in Google’s hands. Using a personal server reduces that part of the attack surface. Still this does not mean I vacate my overall point that email in general is suboptimal from a secop standpoint.
Why’s that even relevant if the recipient is the wrong address? Email isn’t particularly secure anywhere, and gmail has forwarding and IMAP and aliases and other services that send emails outside of gmail. But sending sensitive documents to the wrong recipient, which was the topic that started this sub-thread, is a case where it does not matter how secure your servers are.
Sure it is, and your own comment above about gmail to gmail being fairly secure demonstrated that. Using a photocopier is intentional, and everyone knows what a photocopier is. Most people don’t know what IMAP is, and an email sender does not know if the recipient uses IMAP.
And this is still irrelevant to sending email to the wrong recipient, so I don’t know why you’re stuck on infra security.
Even if the law firm uses a Gmail account - which most of course don’t - Google still has access to your sensitive legal email content.
(And that’s apart from the meta data leaking)
if you attach documents by linking to a Google Drive document, sure.
if you attach documents 'inside' the mail (i.e. MIME encoded multipart) that is most definitely not secure.
1) you do not know how that mail gets delivered, not necessarily via servers that support encryption
2) you do not know how that mail, or the attachment, gets stored on the local machine
3) you do now know if the mail, or attachment, is sent to someone else
4) you cannot revoke the access to the document once the Need To Known stops
In our ISMS, sending Highly Sensitive data (ex: customer data) by attaching directly to a mail, is strictly not allowed by the IT charter. We explain it during an on-boarding meeting to all new staff members. And it's a fireable offense.
There are several people with my name at the company I work for. I frequently get email meant for someone else.
Worst was at another company where a person with the same name has just left, so they gave me that email address. Turned out he was subscribed to several Confluence pages for which I now received updates. But I didn't get his Confluence account, so I couldn't unsubscribe from those updates.
I have a canonical gmail address for what I thought was not such a common name pair. I get so much sensitive stuff. I used to email the sender but I have given up. One of them runs a business and the businesses that interact with his business just keep emailing me. Or stop for a couple of years, change personnel and start right back up.
Same here. My Google Account is something along the lines of jose86@gmail.com (a common hispanic first name + birth year; I'm German).
It's unusable. I have received full blown mortgage applications from couples in Mexico (including paystubs, tax forms, credit ratings, phone bills, passports). Mostly, these days, it's transaction notifications for a guy in Nigeria and phone bills for people in South America.
I have myname.wifename@gmail.com (we use it for bills, children activities, and other family stuff where you can't register more than one email address).
Neither of our names can be confused with a last name and yet I had multiple people writing to it incorrectly, including: as the email attached to a Diners credit card (I called Diners and they asked me what's the right one and "if I don't know the right one how do I know that it's wrong"), as the email for a school 400 km from home (another family must have had the same idea), once for some lawyer stuff (I then learnt that about 100 people in Italy do have my wife's name as a very uncommon last name), and lately as the recovery email for another Google account.
Your use case is why I bought my own domain name. My wife and I create shared aliases we can both send from. It’s made spousal ensuing with schools so much easier, etc.
I used to get email for an org that had a similar domain as me (they had an extra letter in the middle). Thankfully, not a very big org, I would just bounce addresses that got a lot of misdirected email and I think they shut down and that really solved the problem.
Still annoying, but not as bad as gmail. I just got an email, in Italian, about someone adding a passkey to their ebay account. No way to tell ebay it's not their address / it's not my account.
Similar boat (~25 years) and, while I've run into some sites/services that rejected my domain, I'm pretty sure it's happened fewer than 5 times, total.
YES! I have no idea if we're related, but imagine the surprise when you "first get internet at home", and my father and I decided to search our surname on Altavista, and we found foosball tables and tournaments!
> I'm Irish and have a common firstname.lastname@gmail.com
At the risk of nitpicking, @gmail.com email addresses use a dots don't matter policy [0] so really you have a common firstnamelastname@gmail.com and are free to add dots wherever you like.
Recently learned, to my surprise, that other major providers have not followed Google’s lead on this, so there are plenty of places dont.scam..me@ is a valid email (social engineering or typosquatting).
Judge raised concerns over whether or not the man was in breach of the anonymity order granted by the Circuit Court judge if he had submitted details of the case, which could identify the alleged victims, to the online AI tool.
I can see a valid use for a version of chat control where the communications of all elected officials are retained forever and audited on a regular basis for doing anything illegal, proposing anything illegal, actions not in the public interest, cronyism etc. All data should be released when they die, 10 years after they leave office or upon conviction of a crime related to political appointment.
Logically it follows that anyone who "has something to hide" will seek the safe harbor of a political position. How many election cycles until all politicians are terrorists and pedophiles?
They should have used S3 Object Lock for her...Since she had already a previous track record of deleting data. When she was the German Defence Minister during the Bundestag “consultants affair” inquiry, data/SMS on her official phones were wiped after they were requested as evidence.
And of course the fact that her husband was working for a Pfizer supplier, while she was sending private SMS to the Pfizer CEO, is of course an incredible coincidence.
Well yes of course but don't think this couldn't happen here either. A lot of countries like France or Germany are very close to falling to the same extreme right forces the US has.
I don't think unlimited free speech is the answer anymore. I see a lot of bad actors taking advantage of this. For example a lot of republican anti-LGBT propaganda is flowing across the Atlantic through Instagram and TikTok. A lot of people are now repeating the same tired tropes like the toilet thing (which make no sense of you think about it). A lot of people making themselves angry about made-up scenarios that aren't even real. These are organised manipulation campaigns targeted at demonising entire communities.
This in turn is leading to fascism rising here as it has in the US. Like AfD in Germany , PVV in Nederlands, Front National in France. This is not a good thing IMO. We need buttons to be able to push to disconnect from that when it gets too bad.
So I don't think this is a bad thing. Though Thierry Breton was a stooge who was mainly interested in promoting his befriended French tech companies yes. Still, even bad people can produce ok things sometimes.
Fight misinformation with verifiable factual information. We should never accept censorship.
> This in turn is leading to fascism rising here as it has in the US. Like AfD in Germany , PVV in Nederlands, Front National in France.
These parties are gaining momentum because the parties in power are completely ignoring the will of the people and are cheerfully destroying Europe as we know it.
> Fight misinformation with verifiable factual information.
This doesn't work. As an example the toilet BS. So many times I've tried to explain that that is such an unimaginable scenario that it's completely unrealistic, let alone warrant the amount of anger against the community. But people don't care. They love being angry at someone, they revel in it. They don't want to know facts, they want to be angry and rile against something.
The same with the migrant thing. They're blamed for everything that's wrong in society. Even though these things are actually the result of decades of externalisation to the poorest in society, driven by right-wing pro-corporate policies. They try to convert that into even more right-wing votes.
> These parties are gaining momentum because the parties in power are completely ignoring the will of the people and are cheerfully destroying Europe as we know it.
It's not the will of the people but of a small group of tiktok influencers that are riling the people up without any actual facts.
It's the same in the US, it's not about facts anymore. Most of the things Trump says are provably false. Yet his followers worship him. It's become a religion. You can't fight that with facts. Nor does this 'will of the people' originate with the actual people. Nobody wakes up and thinks "Hey let's cut healthcare today", "Hey, let's hate on all the gay people that never harmed anyone". They're slowly manipulated into it.
What we have to do is stop the algorithms that try to maximise 'engagement' with hate. And the dark forces that publish all this misinformation.
Have you been to Berlin, Frankfurt, Antwerp or Brussels recently? Not watch some videos but actually been there? These cities are slowly turning to drug-ridden illegal immigrant hellholes. Many of those immigrants have been order to leave but the governments do not follow thru and they just stay. The current governments do nothing to stop it and EU is pushing for more immigration and have established quotas for countries to take in immigrants.
Europe is losing its safety and identity in pursue of "diversity". The immigrants refuse to integrate and instead bring their work ethic, religions and habits that made their own countries shitholes they are desperate to leave. European people naturally do not want this. What do the right-wing parties have in common? They are strictly against immigration. They will gain more and more support as long as nothing changes and rightfully so.
This is not true. The EU isn't asking for immigrants to "pursue diversity". It's just about sharing the load of legitimate asylum seekers as currently the load is too heavily borne by the border countries.
And we had crime before we had immigrants. It's a feature of social economic status not ethnicity. Before we had the Moroccan gangs in Amsterdam we had the local Mafia which was just as bad.
I do think immigrants without a permit should be evicted but the problem is that many countries like Morocco refuse to take them back.
And yes I live in a major EU city. The drug problem isn't as bad as you describe. And it's more a result of police budget cutting than immigration.
> On the other side, who the hell would pay for pro EU propaganda?
No one - the EU gets its money from force: taxes on citizens and fines from companies created in more entrepreneurial environments than the EU can produce.
> Seems like we agree: you don't need to advertise when you can force money out of people through VAT and rent-seek your citizens as customers.
Not really. Like, the EU only has the powers given to it by national governments, 1% of VAT is probably too low tbh as there's a bunch of stuff that would be better solved at EU level. The politics around that are pretty tricky though.
Considering that they destroyed those messages, I guess that most likely the EU paid way too much for the vaccines or Pfizer paid so much in kickbacks that if it ever got out it will lead to a lot of people being prosecuted.
> All communication in the Government Offices is based on the core values of transparency, factualness and comprehensibility, relevance and topicality. Public access and oversight shall characterise all activities.
> The Government Offices' communication policy covers both internal and external communication.
Sweden is generally pretty good at transparency, both regarding representatives and everyone else. For example, given a full name, you can get a person's address, telephone number, what cars and businesses they own, and even what their salary is, for better and worse :)
I think most people don't want to interact with computers and people will use anything that reduces the amount of time spent and will be be embraced en-mass regardless of security or privacy issues.
I completed my degree over 20 years ago and due to dot com bust and the path I took never coded as a full time role, some smallbits of dev and scripting but nothing where I would call myself a developer. I've had loads of ideas down through the years but never had the time work to complete them or learn the language/stack to complete them. Over the last 3 weeks I've been working on something small that should be ready for a beta release by the end of August. The ability to sit down and work on a feature or bug when I only have a spare 30 mins and be immediately productive without having to get in the zone is a game changer for me. Also while I can read and understand the code writing it would be at least 10 times slower for me. This is a small codebase that will have less than 5k lines and is not complicated so github copilot is working well for me in this case.
I could see me paying for higher tiers given the productivity gains.
The only issue I can see is that we might end up with a society where those that can afford the best subscriptions have more free time, get more done, make more money and are more successful in general. Even current base level subscriptions are too expensive for huge percentage of the global population.
The full terrible title is "A team of engineers saved Morgan Stanley more than 280,000 hours this year. The bank says its tool won't take jobs."
The article is about using AI to generate new requirements based on legacy code.
“If you hit a wrong note, it’s the next note you play that determines if it’s good or bad.” (Miles Davis)
Enjoy the holidays everyone and remember to look out for each other, we lost a close family member to suicide and new born nephew that only lived a few precious hours this year. Family and friends first, and no more letting others decide my future are my goals for 2026. If anyone is struggling, even if you can't see it people want to help, take that hard first step and ask for help, friend/family/doctor/helpline/anyone, it gets easier after that, it's a step I took myself a few years ago when in a bad place mentally and it turned my life around, my only regrets are I didn't ask for help sooner and I kept my struggle and recovery largely private, I will regret to my dying day that I wasn't more open to my extended family and maybe if that person saw someone else recover they might have taken another road. Apologies for the ramble, the quotes and typing this comment caused a small unplanned reflection on 2025, I was going to delete all this but thought it might help someone. Thanks HN for keeping things interesting and once again pointing me at something that made a difference!
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