Northern Mariana Islands May Have Been Taken Over by Debian!!
Many people all around the world have looked up Saipan - earlier this week and in the future too! - because of the "show trial" of Julian Assange (basically coercing/forcing him to "confess" in exchange for immediate freedom). With a population of 43,385 as of 2020 there is probably quite a lot of data to gather for statistical analysis in Saipan and the Northern Mariana Islands, the latter with a total population of 55,650 as of 2022. The place is strategic for military reasons (like a giant aircraft carrier with running water) and it's populated by many US troops, just like Guam. How apt a location for a show trial over revelations pertaining to the US Army!
The official site of the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands is http://gov.mp/, which funnily enough presents this at the moment (probably not due to overwhelming traffic levels):
It's hard not to recall this old story of Tuttle:
- Oklahoma city threatens to call FBI over 'renegade' Linux maker
- Don’t pick a fight with Linux nerds
- Misconfigured Webserver, Threats to Call FBI
From The Register:
The heartland turned vicious this week when an Oklahoma town threatened to call in the FBI because its web site was hacked by Linux maker Cent OS. Problem is CentOS didn't hack Tuttle's web site at all. The city's hosting provider had simply botched a web server.This tale kicked off yesterday when Tuttle's city manager Jerry Taylor fired off an angry message to the CentOS staff. Taylor had popped onto the city's web site and found the standard Apache server configuration boilerplate that appears with a new web server installation. Taylor seemed to confuse this with a potential hack attack on the bustling town's IT infrastructure.
"Who gave you permission to invade my website and block me and anyone else from accessing it???," Taylor wrote to CentOS. "Please remove your software immediately before I report it to government officials!! I am the City Manager of Tuttle, Oklahoma."
Few people would initiate a tech support query like this, but these are dangerous times, and Taylor suspected the worst. (Er, but only the world's most boring hacker would break into a site and then throw up a boilerplate about how to fix the hack.)
Many years have passed and not much has changed. High-level officials speak in buzzwords like "app", "the clown", and "Hey Hi" (AI). It is awful and this is also considered acceptable. Policies are made by these people. Ignorance is perceived as acceptable as long as they parrot and name-drop the latest hype, contributing to the valuation bubble in an official and professional capacity. As Cory put it back in December: "Our policymakers are putting a lot of energy into thinking about what they’ll do if the AI bubble doesn’t pop – wrangling about “AI ethics” and “AI safety.” But – as with all the previous tech bubbles – very few people are talking about what we’ll be able to salvage when the bubble is over." █