Someone that goons is engaging a form of extended masturbation without climax.

I mean that’s just edging. Gooning is generally more disfunctional than that, typically involving excessive amounts of pornography for an extended period of time combined with an excessively self-deprecating mindset. Gooning should honestly be seen as a form of sexual dysfunction in a similar vein to porn addiction

Yeah GDID works the same in a VM as it does on hardware. It’s actually easier to see in action on a VM:

1. Create a Windows desktop VM
2. Copy the VM
3. Create a Window server VM and promote it to being an AD Domain in a new forest
4. Try to join both copied VMs to the AD Domain. You can’t join the second one because the GDID is the same, and you’ll literally have to do a reset to get a new GDID for your VM

This was the most annoying part of messing with AD in college was running through the windows setup repeatedly because that’s the only way to get more than one client VM for your virtual Windows network

I mean Epstein was actively talking about his crimes over plaintext Gmail

This article is super vague about this as well. How does Microsoft not only have the GDID->IP link, but they have Web history as well? Are they just exposing all this through advertising telemetry?

My interpretation was that they had an IP that they suspected was the perp’s home network, and subpoena’d some major platforms to confirm beyond a shadow of a doubt. Given the perp’s sloppiness in using the same machine for both personal and illicit computing activities, they could even have some network traffic in the capture to indicate which platforms they should subpoena

Or if we want to be more conspiracy-minded, maybe they installed a trojan on his computer and this is the parallel evidence trail that law enforcement created so they don’t have to admit to hacking the hackers

In any other context I’d agree with you, but hacking is the one context where you really do want to do things the hard way. Use ephemeral VMs with passwords only saved in your head, have a dedicated machine for your illegal activities to help isolate your real identity from your hacking.

Honestly even if you’re just doing HackTheBox and similar best practice is to spin up a Kali VM and only use that VM for the activity since you’re literally connecting to a network with a bunch of hackers, even though what you’re doing is entirely above the board

And my axe!

…wait that’s not what we’re doing here is it?

I’d argue it was the failure to prosecute the separatists following the Civil War that was the original sin. The laws and precedents that would’ve been set in the process of prosecuting Confederate leaders and political supporters would’ve prevented a lot of the should-be-illegal insurectionist actions that have been ignored as “performative” for decades

This is what I was thinking as well, either there’s something that the EAC was expected to do which he’s trying to prevent or he just decided to fire people he doesn’t like regardless of the consequences to himself

On an unrelated note: I would avoid doing bullet points followed by a sentence starting with “bottom line” or any similar turn of phrase. That’s a common format LLMs spit out. The actual contents of your comment read human written and have plenty choices of phrase that I don’t see coming out of an LLM, so I figured I’d point it out

Alternate headline: Lord of a crumbling, gutted empire struggles to maintain relevancy