A real person who expresses an idea and gets downvoted by a passing Russian propaganda bot may see the vote (and subsequent Reddit weighting algorithm fuckery that turns the one well-timed vote into 10 votes, which a lot of people aren't aware of) and feel ridiculed, which will discourage that person from expressing the same idea in the future.

Other people who see the same post with X downvotes will take note that that idea is unpopular, and may unconsciously realign their own views on the idea to fit what appears to be the prevailing opinion.

And of course crappy old forums have the other advantage of not having any single standard registration process or API that can be exploited by bots en masse. That's not going to keep them out entirely, but it drastically increases the logistical cost.

But $100k for a car like that is a complete insult to good taste. It'd be like selling a luxury 1.5m container home. The low price tag is the entire point of the jank aesthetic. You're supposed to be communicating that you reject the idea of "keeping up with the Joneses" and wear the aesthetic imperfections of the lower economic class as a badge of honor.

Of course, as with every cultural movement of any nuance, real world Dr. Eggman completely missed the point here and shat all over everything with his tone-deaf Rich Frat Boy With Asperger's schtick.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/signal-will-l...

Would a malicious URL be able to activate this feature as part of the request?

Every tech company he owns, he bought. He doesn't do any of the engineering. The only genius he possesses is in creating public hype for products he has invested in. It is 100% persona.

As for it getting banned, TikTok was banned partly because of credible accounts of it having been used by China to track political enemies. Are we thinking they'll expand the argument on national security to say that any application that transfers data to China is a national security threat? Because that could be a very slippery slope.

And in any case, such a measure seems like it would only bar access to the DeepSeek app. Surely no one could argue that the underlying open source model, if run locally on American soil, could constitute a security threat, right?

Not to mention it'd defeat the whole purpose of a "free market" economy. (Not that that means much of anything anymore)

The guy's an insufferable manchild with no more actual tech chops than the average boomer, made all the more dangerous by a severe case of Dunning-Kruger. He can't distinguish between reality and sci-fi, and goes around and buys companies that he thinks will make him look like real life Tony Stark.