China’s really being a champion of peace and stability /s
Thanks for the links, it’s interesting background. In that article from February 2021, The Artlantic states “There was also never a default”.
There was indeed no default as of February 2021. The default occured later, in April-May 2022, so we can’t expect a past article to include that information.
All major lenders need to take part in restructuring the debt indeed. That occured in 2023, and multiple lenders asked for a restructuring deal similar to the first one signed with China. I don’t know about the US, but Japan/India/French lender were looking for a similar restructuration terms. That sounds fair to me.
The country’s default is clear evidence the overall debt wasn’t sustainable. Both Sri Lanka and its lenders have a responsibility on this. China is often the first mentioned because it was (still is?) Sri Lanka’s biggest foreign lender, although it would be good to have transparency of the country’s debt and interest rates on a per-lender basis, to see which ones are the most sustaonables.
The 2022 bloomberg article you cite first state:
It didn’t provide details on the value of the loans which it said matured at the end of 2021, nor did it state which nations owed the money.
I couldn’t read much further due to the paywal.
The Bloomberg article has too few details to make conclusions. We don’t know if AP and Bloomberg articles are referring to the same countries, nor whether it’s a significant portion or that country’s debt toward China.
The Reuters 2021 article has more details, and cite write-offs, as well as specific countries benefiting from deferrals: Angola, Pakistan, Kenya, the Republic of Congo. It’s good to read there’s some willingness to accomodate some countries.
Sadly that didn’t prevent Zambia and Sri Lanka from defaulting. China has lended hundred of billion of dollars with unsustainable terms, and this contributed to countries defaulting. That’s a bad situation for everyone involved.
I hope Tanzania and Zambia read the fine pints on the loan/inversement agreement.
While that’s true, but there’s no indication of Microsoft brute forcing with million of combinations.
The article you link says Microsoft is only trying a few obvious passwords: the filename, and words found in the plaintext message.
Proper encryption isn’t just about using a strong algorithm. It’s also about proper key management, ie not sending the password in the clear via the same channel as the encrypted files.
Better late than never.
ZIP isn’t a good way to encrypt, but what Microsoft is doing is simply reading the email, and decrypting zips with the password found in the email body.
All encryptions schemes can be trivially broken if you have the key. It’s not even breaking, it’s just normal decryption.
Scientists don’t have to explain why they’re leaving twitter. The reasons should be obvious to anyone familiar with Twitter.
Journalists need to explain why they’re still on Twitter, given that platform has so much bots, trolls, hate and lack moderation.
Once the war in Ukraine is over, weaponized drones won’t just vanish. They’re already made by companies with different level of ethics and any country able to pay is or will be able to buy them. Sooner or later, like many weapons, organised crime will get their hands on them, and use them outside of battlefield.
There’s no way to completely prevent it, but we could at least limit damage by regulating the shit out of drones.
A call for resignation may only be the first step, or a way to confront him and calling out his failures.
If that happened, I sincerely hope there is proof, and that it’s on its way to a capable prosecutor.
Hypothetically, it would only make sense to mine rare materials in space, and it would only have environmental benefits if we return significant amount compared to the mass of rockets we send into space.
There is no coal/gas/oil in space, and even if extracting these resources were cleaner, burning that stuff would still be disastrous.
Space mining would be at best viable for very niche uses for a few material. It won’t bring us infinite clean resources, overall we still need to reduce extraction of resources.
I was about to say people can walk and chew gum. But this kind of miss the point.
This is not space exploration, this is not for science’s sake. This is about extracting resources, and making a profit. I heard one of these companies perpetuate the idea that there’s virtually infinite resource, which imply we can continue with humanity’s exponential growth without negative consequences. That mindset landed us in the inextricable mess we’re in.
Link to other sources are welcome.
I searched for sources and picked this article as it’s both relatively exhaustive, and one of the firsts ones published on this topic.