Remember that most of the participants in J6 walked away and were later rounded up and arrested across the country once the FBI had collected voluminous digital and surveillance evidence to support prosecution.
The J6 insurrectionists committed real crimes, and it's very good that they were rounded up, but afaiu most of the evidence had to do with them provably assaulting officers, damaging property, and breaking into a government building. Not that they messaged other people when they were legally demonstrating before the Capital invasion.
The real protection for the legal protesters and observers in MN is numbers. They can't arrest and control and entire populace.
People were also charged for coordinating and supporting J6 without being there, e.g. Enrique Tarrio of the "Proud Boys" was charged with seditious conspiracy based on activity in messaging apps. If people in these Signal chats were aware that people were using force to inhibit federal law enforcement, which some of the leaked training materials suggest is most likely true and easy to prove, and there are messages showing their support or coordination of those actions, I assume they could face the same charges.
Right, usually law enforcement gets chat logs from a participant (search warrant for a phone, informants, undercover FBI agents, etc) and uses the metadata to connect messages to a real person's identity.
Fortunately for us (or really unfortunately for us) most of the competent FBI agents have been fired or quit, with the new bar simply being loyalty to the president.
The FBI is weak now compared to what it was even two years ago.
Most are probably just keeping their heads down, trying to wait out this administration. When you're in that kind of cushy career track, you'd have to be very dumb or very selfless to give it up.
The era of microservices and micro teams gives all "company X uses us" claims a different vibe. Maybe it used to actually mean "this is the thing Facebook uses to power its website on millions of servers" but now it's usually like "the team of 6 that runs the analytics platform for Apple Fitness+ uses this on 5 servers"
In 2018 a provision was attached to the Farm Bill to legalize "hemp". The public and presumably the senators were led to believe this was about legalizing textiles and things like that, not drugs. It turned out that the language actually legalized delta-8 too. Many people were displeased with that outcome, because in many states it's completely unregulated with no additional taxes or anything like there is in "legal cannabis" states, and again because it was not understood or anticipated by most people. So now that provision is being reverted in this year's Farm Bill, passage of which was part of the shutdown deal (I think because SNAP benefits are part of the farm bill).
Until a month ago in Texas my kids could buy Delta-8 weed gummies at the gas station by my house (the Texas governor issued some emergency regulations to limit this). You didn't even need to be 18. This bill is targeted at those products legalized by the 2018 loophole.
This is a perfect example of the opportunity for federalism. Any state could —and many did— close the loophole. You mentioned emergency regulation from the Texas governor. New recreational substances are discovered and introduced to market continuously. States can use their legislative authority to address them. Delta-9, Spice, and other delta-8 THC analogues have been successfully addressed by states.
The side effects of this provision make hemp plants in the ground illegal, according to Senator Paul. It is reasonable for the public to be outraged about a hastily-written amendment whose authors failed to understand the unintended consequences.
But I’m not aware of many (any?) states that chose to close the loophole with a ban. Most, even ruby red Texas, just passed a state regulatory regime that included testing and taxation, as well as a 21 year old cutoff for buyers.
This is what always happened with Republican shutdowns too.
- You get nothing
- Eventually everyone understands they're going to get nothing, so they ask some sacrificial lambs to vote to end it while they posture and pretend they would have "kept fighting"
With Republicans this was called "RINOs" and "tea party" but it's the same thing now.
The reality is that most SNAP recipients are not going to go to food banks or anything like that; they're just going to use their own money and buy groceries or McDonald's.
Now, what that means is that they'll have to spend less money on other things to buy groceries. Sometimes that's concerts and fancy clothes. Sometimes it's car repairs or the electric bill; depends on the person and their situation. People in tight financial situations are typically accustomed to getting behind on bills and borrowing money sometimes, and realistically in the short term changing their grocery habits is going to be a lot more of a pain than just spending money.
3 months from now in the unlikely scenario that SNAP hasn't been renewed that's a different story.
> The reality is that most SNAP recipients are not going to go to food banks or anything like that; they're just going to use their own money and buy groceries or McDonald's... Sometimes that's concerts and fancy clothes....
I'm sorry, it seems like maybe we have very different understandings of the concept of living paycheck to paycheck, while also relying on SNAP benefits. Non-white collar employees of both Amazon and Walmart do so regularly. There is no three month cushion for millions of Americans, there is not even a one week cushion for many.
I am not saying this as snark. I just don't think that 99% of us folks on this website live this reality, so it might seem impossible. Please help us get on the same page here. Maybe I am the one who is misunderstanding, but what you said sounds a lot like "fly-over state" type mentality, that somehow does not take into account the real struggle of millions of Americans. We have a lot of real poor people here, are you really telling them to "buy less concerts and fancy clothes??"
edit: Nvm. I don't want to make this a giant thread on this post, about if poor people exist or not. I will not reply further, as I just now realized that I got baited into politics. The actual reality is that millions of Americans will now be skipping even more meals. If you don't believe that they exist, then there is nothing I can do about that. Clearly you have never been hungry, and that is a level of naivete that I wish upon everyone.
Most "smart" devices simply don't function without connectivity back to the manufacturer's cloud, and this is basically just the same thing with extra steps.
It clearly doesn't need the cloud, it intentionally bricks itself if it can't exfiltrate it's logs. It's not like it's sending data necessary for its immediate operation.
Sure it does need the cloud - you might have notice that the kill command was delivered _over cloud connection_. And author carefully blocked not entire connectivity, but only the part that they considered "logs". They wanted to keep cloud control, just not the whole thing.
Given the complete lack of relevant technical details, it could be something as simple as "internal log storage full, refusing to start up until logs uploaded". We'd never know.
