monadnocks

If you're still around tomorrow evening, there's an Oktoberfest in the center of town.

Any chance it's off gassing from the plastics or plastic like materials? Does your car get really hot? (Park it in full sun during work, for instance.) I've used Sprayway glass cleaner in the blue and white can. It doesn't smell the best and you need to follow use a microfiber towel but it does a great job of getting the junk off of the interior windows.

In western N. Dakota

Oh, that's absolutely beyond awful.

On the prospect that Russia will take bitcoin for oil and gas?

Hopefully it won't work like when NH cut the cigarette tax. The prices stayed the same and the state lost the tax dollars.

That's a terrific story of history, weather and love.

The attribution that's generally more valid is careful combing through the techniques, malware code, etc. and comparing it with samples from previous work. Yes, locations can be easily spoofed. Also, it's pretty easy to pivot through a hacked network within a target area so your attack source says "Indiana" but that's just the poor folks who were hacked before you. For DDoS attacks, it's really irrelevant where they originate from, I think. You can ban prefixes and it does filter out some of the noise. There's an article floating out there about one of the Ukrainian hackers who just rented Google cloud space to run his bots. It's not so much the DDoS attacks that US and allies need to worry about, it's things like wiper ware (ask Sony about that), tool theft (ask the NSA about that one although that was a leak), data theft and SCADA attacks. Water systems? Utilities? GPS data? There's a lot of worrisome things to think about.

tl;dr: Yes, it's possible to have likely attribution but it takes time, talent and a lot of work. There are groups that are part of a nation state. https://www.crowdstrike.com/blog/who-is-fancy-bear/ There are groups that are affiliated with nation states. The Conti ransomware gang has been cited as being affiliated with the Russian government, for instance. https://thehackernews.com/2022/03/conti-ransomware-gangs-internal-chats.html And the Ukraine has enlisted a host of individuals to hack on their behalf. https://threatpost.com/russia-leaks-data-thousand-cuts-podcast/178749/ I would not want to work on a blue team at the moment. I can tell you that the people that I know who work in cybersecurity are very busy these days.

So we're not taking a bunch of high schoolers to MGM. If there is a discount to be had with the hotels, I'm probably interested. We can't book hotels with minibars in the rooms or where you have to travel through a casino to get to the restaurant or entrance, for example. Thank you for offering to look!

Good to know! The two hotels we looked at on TripAdvisor that had 4.5 stars were in Holyoke. We'll take them off the list.

Anyone have advice staying near West Springfield? I help lead a high school robotics team and we last weekend we competed at WNEU. Drove only once through Armory Street and Saint James to the university; thank you Waze. Driving a large truck full of equipment on this drive was subpar. Our 4 star Hampton Inn (tripadvisior.com) in West Springfield had the sounds of dirt bikes? drag racing? going on past midnight. With a pre-8AM start of 12 hours of competition, this was not what we were looking for. Also, if that's a 4 star hotel, I really don't want to end up at a 3 star. We'll probably return to West Springfield in April for a larger competition (80 teams) which will be at the Big E. I'm trying to find the best intersection between a decent hotel, not too far from the venue and relatively safe. One adult suggested the La Quinta Inn on Congress Street in Springfield but I'm not sure about the area. Our tool boxes generally look like we bought everything a power tool company offers plus a couple of hundred pounds of assorted other stuff. I'm thinking we might not wanting to parking trucks in some of these areas. Any advice? West Springfield (Candlewood Suites)? Holyoke (Fairfield Inn or Homewood Suites)? Thanks for any help!

We have 5" too.

Even something as basic as aluminum has already had pricing go up substantially over a year and I expect it to soar even more. Intellectually, it's going to be very interesting watching this all play out. As a consumer, it's going to change some things. As an investor, I wish I had more time to really inhale all the data and analysis.