I read close to 40 books this year which I assume is up from the previous year, and way more than I used to read prior to starting to do the Rochester Library reading challenge (which I've done for the past two years). I won't get into a lot of it, but after reading Middlemarch three years ago, Napoleon: A Life two years ago, and The Power Broker last year I decided to read two "big" books.
In the first half of the year War and Peace, which obviously was excellent, although I liked Middlemarch more.
In the second half of the year David Copperfield which was very excellent. Just beautifully written. I still think I probably like Middlemarch more... but it might now require a re-read to know for sure.
This year is going to be Tom's Crossing to start as I just got that for Christmas.
This is it. I had the same thing happen to me a year ago and there was a month between the original access to our system and the attack. And similarly they waited until a perceived lull in what might be org diligence (just prior to thanksgiving) to attack.
Almost this exact thing happened to me about a year ago. Very old account login, SES access with request to raise the email limit. We were only quickly tipped off because they had to open a ticket to get the limit raised.
If you haven't check newly made Roles as well. We quashed the compromised users pretty quickly (including my own, the origin we figured out), but got a little lucky because I just started cruising the Roles and killing anything less than a month old or with admin access.
To play devil's advocate a bit. In our case we are pretty sure my key actually did get compromised although we aren't precisely sure how (probably a combination of me being dumb and my org being dumb and some guy putting two and two together). But we did trace the initial users being created to nearly a month prior to the actual SES request. It is entirely possible whomever did your thing had you compromised for a bit, and then once AWS went down they decided that was the perfect time to attack, when you might not notice just-another-AWS-thing happening.
Thanks for sharing. After digging in, it appears that something very similar happened here, after all. It looks like an access key with admin role leaked some time ago. At first, they just ran a quiet GetCallerIdentity, then sat on it. Then, on outage day, they leveraged it. In our case, they just did the SES thing, and tried to persist access by setting up IAM Identity Center.
Does that count the time it takes to get a masters? I feel like I recall my coworkers in England doing a 1-2 year masters, and then the 3-4 year PhD after.
Maybe a nonsequitur but in grad school I was in a study group which naturally split into two. In one group (mine) we'd read a problem and immediately charge in, sometimes have to backtrack, and meander around until the answer revealed itself. In the other they would plan everything out, and figure out what they needed to do, and from that the answer would reveal itself and they would write it all down.
The interesting part is neither group really finished the problem sets faster than the other. Individual problems my group could, if we knew or guessed the right path immediately, be faster. But over the span of a 10 question p-set it would mostly come out in the wash and both groups would finish in roughly the same amount of time.
I often think back on that when reflecting on how I still work that way years later.
I think it can be OK to have a risk if that's the plan of trial and error.
It's when you don't know, or have an inkling of what's wrong but aren't sure where to start probing, that it's better to have a plan or call in experts in an unfamiliar area.
Library. I order DVDs to my local library all the time. Maybe your library system is terrible, but if it isn't you certainly can do this. There are hundreds a big wide release films with, effectively, are only available on DVD from a library (legally).
Bonus when I go I can still get that browsing the aisle experience like in an old video store (but in this case I am lucky, my local library has a large DVD / Blu-ray collection to browse)
Tolstoy after my old dog. But also because I think a good language name should be able to be iterated on. E.g. C can become D or E or F. Java can be Mocha or Cappuccino. Etc.
With my new language Tolstoy you'd be able to have a little family of languages all named after classic authors. Tolstoy, Dickens, Melville etc. Plus my dog Tolstoy was the best dog ever so bonus for everyone as well.
You have to go pretty deep though for the record. At least, using one of your examples, for Altman if you look at his top 25 films on Letterboxd, 20 of them are available to rent or stream online. And for me at least the other five I can get at the library. There are none that are totally unavailable of those 25.
Where I live, ILLs do not work for video games because the format identification for video games is “Electronic”, and their software is programmed to suppress the request button for these items because it is interpreted as “no physical media”. I emailed the people who run the system, they said it is a known issue, and as far as I can tell that just means they aren’t going to fix it, since it has been this way for at least three years.
I wonder what the material difference is between borrowing a film from the library (is this DVD? Blu-ray? Streaming?) and downloading it from a peer-to-peer network.
I suppose it's an act of support for your public library. But no one with a financial stake in that particular media is impacted in any way by using either method to obtain the film.
Blank Check The Flophouse 99% Invisible Cautionary Tales The Rewatchables
I maintain The Flophouse is the funniest podcast around.