pandapoo

It's all relative. My cheap Chinese spyware SmartLife devices are free to report the hours I turn my lights on back to China as they please, but they sit on a segmented VLAN with per client isolation.

If they ever EOL'd them, I've got more than my money's worth, and yes, some of them can be flashed, but I'd probably just buy another well established cheap Chinese competitor.

But I agree, the above is not the use case and situation for every IoT device out there, and there are plenty of devices that I would never consider an internet/SaaS dependent version of e.g. medium to large home appliances.

As others have said, fast opening quick notes with basic formatting.

For example, if I get an unexpected call I need to write down more than a call back number, Wordpad was my go to.

Well, at least when back when I used Windows regularly.

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.

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.