The developer said the agent deployed multiple CloudFormation templates, I'd bet that AWS waived the charges for the unused resources - like EC2 instances that were idle most of the time, very high margin SKUs, etc.

Now, for 100 Gbps of egress (which didn't actually happen) - and this is grounded speculation - I don't think that AWS would give a discount that is greater than CloudFront rates.

100 Gbps is A LOT of data.

Unfortunately there isn’t an easy way to report abuse to the telcos (and regulators).

At most I think you could negotiate CloudFront rates, but even then, the sob story would be if you had been DDoSed and got hit with this traffic and AWS failed to protect you from this attack. Actively creating the outbound traffic is something that I don't see how AWS would be sympathetic to providing any refunds.

shit, I'm too old to remember those...

There won't be a permanent solution unless all Windows applications start using NT path formatting - which won't happen.

Innovation does not grow out of KPIs.

The Chinese, since they lack computing hardware due to US export controls, are.

At least we have the CIA to blame on religious fundamentalism.

Eh, not Vivado, but back in my undergrad days I RE/cracked a tool used in a very specific niche and definitely kept my mouth shut as the developers could a) do some investigation and then sue me, a student without any legal budget to spare; b) improve copy protection on future releases; and/or c) prevent my access to future versions of the tool that I was using for my thesis.

On other threads about Denuvo you always see somebody saying they've got the chops but the risk to their livelihoods is not worth it.

I think there are a lot of (now) hobbyist reverse-engineers that learned the craft back in the day and kept the knowledge for themselves.

Pretty sure these newer formats do the same.

They were a manufacturing org and only managers had licenses to MS Office and users in Active Directory. Everybody else was registered on a separate OpenLDAP directory to avoid paying MS licenses.

Chime was cheaper per user than onboarding everybody into AD and paying Teams, and they could tack Chime usage into their AWS bill.

former Oracle salespeople

I guess my ISP allocates static IPs from a separate pool, and probably my IP block neighbors are better behaved (probably SMBs and other fellow nerds), aside from platforms learning that my IP is safe.

Captcha difficulties are way down now.

10 years ago I was still traveling with a bunch of $100 banknotes and reading blogs to find the most honest shady currency exchange place with good rates wherever I went. Fun times!

I even paid for two! iPhones in cash back then!

Today? I just stop by an ATM and withdraw some cash, everything else goes contactless on Wise.

School is closer to a prison than to a place where one can be creative and build things.

There is historical context why schools are designed and operated in this way: it creates factory workers that follow instructions, not critical thinkers.

Of course, there are schools that use more humane pedagogical methods, but they are the exception.