sp3ctr4l

Firefighter who loves burning their face off with spicy food, ahahah, I love it!

You sound like you'd be fun to share a brew with, though I can only imagine your schedule is also insane, hahah!

No clue if your user instance indicates where you're from, but you just saying that reminds me of passing a boot around at a schnitzel house (haus?) back in the day =P

Sure. But VPNs were around long before the consumer-oriented VPNs were a thing.

No argument there, you're right.

(technically =P)

Or they just had one person handling their IT and needed help, and didn't want to pay an outside contractor.

Nah, read the links I provided.

It went from the normal IT department, to the city level Emergency Response Team, to the Nat Guard and FBI.

Cities, larger ones anyway ... often have their own sort of local mini-FEMA, who have their own capacities to order around other local agencies, but also have a whole bunch of protocols for... who to contact when something exceeds the capacity of everything they can more or less order around with their own authority.

I'm honestly surprised the National Guard was called at all. If If anything, that shows how backwards Minnesota is, or at least the mayor of St. Paul.

I am not in particular familiar with St.Paul specifically... but ...

1. It could overall make sense given the capacities of the city (the Twin Cities, St. Paul + Minneapolis), and them knowing their own constraints.

2. It could also make sense if they rather rapidly at least suspected a very sophisticated, foreign threat actor.

That second half is kinda most of my argument:

Why would you start up the Military chain of escalation unless you either suspected a potential foreign nation state actor, and/or, critical infrastructure systems were breached, so critical that they'd been previously deemed an actual national security risk, should that happen?

I am not certain of what happened, nor certain of the validity of this logic... but this is my logic, from the original comment.

Sure, they could have just panicked. I don't know that they did or did not.

But I have worked with people who've been employed by, led things like FEMA and DHS and City level emergency response teams, their specialities being the cybersec/netsec variety, and... this seems like actually following a previously outlined set of steps to me.

I'd expect that if my state government got hacked, they'd call in a local cyber security firm to come audit things, and we have plenty of them here (I'm in Utah, so not even a big state).

Ahahah, two things here:

1. Basically, see what I just wrote above.

2. Really? Utah, prime recruiting ground for the CIA, Utah, with the largest NSA data center complex in the country, possibly the world, that is archiving essentially all US internal communications they can so they can search through them later if need be, Utah, with more and more corporate datacenters all the time... you don't class Utah as a big state, in terms of the tech sector?

Perhaps I am misunderstanding you, but I just find that silly.

Holy shit, he is actually just doing 'give me $600bn of FDI to kickstart capex for US based mfg, or I'll blow up world trade.'

Like, regardless of what... has or has not actually happened, actually been agreed to, ... the above is what is going on in his brain, what he is trying to do.

I... what do you call this other than Hitlerian?

Beyond his shrivelled brain to consider ... you know, some kind of actually, specified, 'ok you guys focus on these industries, but give us some leeway on these ones' type.of... actual negotiation.

Nope, just a mob boss shakedown.

I guess my confusion here comes from trying to reconcile the broad, colloquial understanding of a VPN, and the actual, precise, technical definition.

When a news article runs with VPN in a wide audience usage... 95% of people think SurfShark or Nord or PIA or whatever, something that is consumer oriented, that accesses/fancy proxies the broad internet, as you give in your first example, where it basically functions as a more elaborate set of proxies than what most people could probably manage on their own.

So... yes, it technically is a type 2 VPN as you've listed, but it technically isn't a type 1 VPN, which is what 95% of people think a VPN is.

I've worked remote for a decently long while, and most other remote workers I've known... they do not have really any understanding at all that their work login thing... is fundamentally the same kind of VPN as Surfshark, just configured differently.

My goal was to emphasize this difference, but yeah, I could have used better wording.

And yes, I know as well that Nat Guard CyberSec are by no means the creme de la creme of cybersec specialists, but the fact that a top level Municipal agency went 'oh fuck' and basically escalated the issue to the next level of IT support, the State Nat. Guard... that means they got pretty fucking spooked.

Also, the FBI is involved as well, they'd be the ones to pass it up to NSA and/or Homeland Security, I think... and the Nat Guard would be the ones capable of passing it up to... Army CyberCom... and I think if it makes it up to either Army CyberCom or the NSA or Homeland Sec, well at that point, its theoretically possible that any member of the alphabet soup could be called upon, or at the very least, have it come up on someone's desk.

I am not exactly sure what the CoC of escalation pathways is here, but it seems like this got escalated to as many people as the Municipal Emergency Response Team could, quite rapidly.

Its 'the emergency response team looked at this for 24 hours and then called in another emergency response team'.

I mean, myself personally, I prefer to simp and fanboy for my favorite exploitative corperate overlord, because I'm sure there are good reasons everyone uses them, despite their well documented history of massive fuckups and fuckovers of all possible kinds!

/s

I am not a capcacin masochist, I will not be persuing this, but I do very much appreciate the knowledge dump, I enjoy learning about what the real shit actually is so I can laugh at fools, ahhaha!

(Ok, and possibly maybe try your first suggestion, I lied, I am slightly a masochist / innately curious =P)

...

I still remeber when someone I was with at a restaurant asked me to pass 'the hot sauce', I passed them like, you know, actually kinda hot, basic tabasco red sauce, and they got angry at me.

They apparently classified Sriracha as 'hot sauce' in their brain, and ... thats what they meant by 'hot sauce'.

Oh honey, oh dear, almost all Sriracha at a restuarant is basically a slightly more interesting and flavorful ketchup, it is not hot sauce.

Like, you, Mr./Ms./Mz. ColeSloth, you seem to be in the spice-pain tolerance range of like, an order(s?) of magnitude beyond me, but I hope you can see just the... sad confusion and hilarity of someone genuinely thinking Sriracha is 'hot sauce'.

No we literally do not.

It is pretty much impossible to afford a studio apartment almost anywhere in the country with a full time, min wage job.

Our guidelines for what counts as poverty are a total joke.

I live off of about 24k a year while I am recovering from a bunch of injuries, and most states do not consider that poor enough to qualify for pretty much any assistance.

We also just gutted Section 8, so basically about 5 to 10 million people are gonna become homeless by the end of the year.

No no no!

We need food deserts and just barely not literally slave labor wages!

How else could Instacart generate profits for billionaires?

Think of the yachts that will never be laid down, you sick, sick bastards!

John Oliver did it.

We can just join his church, call his show televised sermons.

Literally, why the fuck not?

Our legal system is now Whose Line Is It Anyway?:

The rules are made up and the points don't matter.

Anyway, praise be to the one true prophet Oliver, blessed be his name, the only man personally touched by the noodly appendage of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, the one well-intentioned of the Eldritch Gods, who resides most of the time inside a teapot orbiting the Sun between Mercury and Venus.

yep, 24 comes to mind.

Result:

Credit:

https://mystickermania.com/sticker-packs/kirby/kirby-cat

I... don't know that heated, aerosolized birth control of any kind would... be an effective delivery mechanism...

But uh, honestly, his heart's in the right place, a child born addicted to meth is an absolute tragedy, basically just completely fucked from Day 0.

Cutting meth with BC drugs is ... probably way, way, waaaay safer than all the idiots currently cutting it with fentanyl, carfentanyl, the even stronger shit where an actual speck of sand's worth csn be the difference between a high and a completely guaranteed OD.