"Using World War 2 as an example, the Army Air Forces immolated Japanese cities with white phosphorus and napalm before the atomic bomb was available. In Tokyo alone, hundreds of thousands of people were reduced to ash, and the glow of the firestorm was visible from hundreds of miles away. Those actions, followed by the atomic bombing, are marginally controversial today but largely accepted as 'ok'."
How else would you deal with an enemy that would not give in? Most people fail to understand that the axis was all in, in every way, shape and form. When it comes to the Japanese, they flat out were not going to give up. Their will had to be broken, somehow, someway.
> “the vast destruction wreaked by the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the loss of 135,000 people made little impact on the Japanese military.”
- Plaque hanging in the National Museum of the US Navy
> In its one paragraph, it makes clear that Truman’s political advisers overruled the military in determining how the end of the war with Japan would be approached.
> "the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan"
- Truman's chief of staff
> “the Japanese position was hopeless even before the first atomic bomb fell, because the Japanese had lost control of their own air.”
- Commanding general of the US Army Air Forces
> “[Byrnes] was concerned about Russia’s postwar behavior…[and thought] that Russia might be more manageable if impressed by American military might, and that a demonstration of the bomb might impress Russia.”
- Manhattan Project scientist Leo Szilard, talking about Secretary of State James Byrnes
It doesn't seem like dropping the bombs served any military purpose.
The military capability being broken was not the goal, and it also not what decided the war.
> made little impact on the Japanese military
That would matter if the goal of the bomb or impact had been about 'material' but it wasn't, and its not how the war was decided.
> the Japanese position was hopeless even before the first atomic bomb fell, because the Japanese had lost control of their own air
Again, that doesn't matter. Their position was hopeless literally the second they started the war. They literally started the war knowing they couldn't win.
The bomb was not there for military impact as militarily japan had already been beaten along every possible measure of such things. Japan was surrounded, had no food import its navy and air force were done.
> It doesn't seem like dropping the bombs served any military purpose.
The military purpose was ending the war. And in fact it did exactly that. You can actually go read about the highest level of Japan decision making. This is well researched now. Not a single member of the high highest decision council was for ending the war or even negotiation. Literally nobody. Despite starvation, fire bombings and military defeat.
After first bomb fell the they were starting to have meeting where they discussed the situation and the waste majority of them still were absolutely against ending the war.
After the second bomb the mood shifted, multiple members changed there position and with support from the emperor managed to overrule the still considerable opposition to peace from many of the military leaders.
The idea that this would have been possible without the bomb is simply not historical. Some people claim the Soviet invasion was the deciding factor, but just like losing territory to the East and South, losing territory in the West would not have changed them.
Here are the alternative options:
- Surround Japan for extended period of time
- Full invasion of Japan
The first option would have been essentially a 10+ year genocide of much of Japans population and transforming it back into an agricultural society. The government would simply not have given up, they knew about the starvation that would happen in Japan and they were perfectly willing to endure that.
The second would have cost the US 10s to 100s of men, and the Japanese likely 10x as much.
There were 1000s of civilians suicides even in some of the outer islands, and 10-100s of soldiers who essentially committed suicide by attack. What do you think would happen when a US army went from village to village, city by city threw Japan following a retreating Japanese army and government north right across all of Japan.
The Japanese army was willing to turn every city int Stalingrad. Endless bonsi charges where US soldiers would have to basically mass execute 1000s of Japanese soldiers who had run out of ammo.
Because for all the crap people give America for conducting foreign policy according to its economic interests, everybody else does the same. And right now, doing business with China is lucrative because of their human misery arbitrage.
Because its impossible to say fuck allah in front of a muslim Eduated or not they are way too conformance to religion. I can the same to a christian or any other religion friends and joke about it and does not have to fear.
In politics, everything happens primarily to gain or maintain power. If some group of people is not relevant for either, people in power will not stick up for them.
Muslims are hardly a unified front. Look at how many majority-Muslim countries have had civil wars or wars against each other at some point in the last 30 years.
Because Muslim countries by and large are not in geopolitical or economic positions to act unilaterally in any way that is a)remotely effective, and b) not massively costly in economic and political terms.
Everyone is utterly dependent on cheap Chinese manufacturing. The price of manufactured goods would probably quadruple overnight if companies had to abandon China.
It’s not just cheap labor. China has all of cheap labor, lax environmental laws, cheap energy, a very manufacturing friendly government, a tech ecosystem, local expertise, and infrastructure. It’s literally the ideal place to manufacture, at least from an amoral economic perspective. Nobody can compete with China in manufacturing except in niche high skill areas.
VMS is / was popular in the transaction processing industry: financials, lottery, casino, etc. However, most of the folks I know working in that industry moved on to other platforms over a decade ago.
I have an AlphaStation as part of my retro collection. It has OpenVMS on it, but hasn't been booted in a while.
A university I worked at migrated from independent VMS systems (student, finance, HR) to an ERP system. To make that implementation easier, they only converted the most recent few years of data.
Last I heard they had some sort of virtual machines emulating Alpha hardware still running those legacy systems.
My current employer (also higher ed.) is hosting somebody's ES40. Some people in higher ed. really, really liked VMS and the Alpha/Itanium platforms.
I haven't worked there for a few years, but I'm 99% sure that German stock exchange in Frankfurt (https://www.deutsche-boerse.com/dbg-en) is still operating their clearing operations (central counterparty) and some others on OpenVMS/Itanium servers from HP
If you're dealing with anything Apple you're probably running macOS VMs on Apple hardware. At least for things like build servers, signing and such (CI/CD) when the projects start growing.
It doesn't work in FireFox 85.0 x64 on Windows. I went to the site, did the demo, my number was A5 94 D6 7E 4A DE and when I came back in private mode it was 51 ED 26 D8 66 FC.
I can't tell from your post if you are surprised by this or just pointing it out for others who would prefer to avoid this sort of tracking, but just to be clear, this is by design:
It may have been their intention, after reading the bugzilla report they made[1].
> I also think that it would have been appropriate to notify about the ulterior motive behind this defect report at the latest when the paper got published. This underhanded approach of reporting a defect just leaves a bad taste, really. The behavior may be an actual defect in the classical sense, but I'm just wondering what would have happened, had this been addressed "in time" by the developers. It would seem that the researchers would then have triumphantly proclaimed that all major browsers are prone to their newly found attack. Must be somewhat disappointing that it didn't get fixed "in time" to make it into the paper that way
Honestly, this is a big deal here. A "security researcher" attempted to _introduce new vulnerabilities_ into a major open source project just so that they could report these vulnerabilities later.
There’s a perfectly plausible charitable interpretation offered by the reporters in comment 10.
They say that they filed this bug before they had devised their attack on the favicon cache; and so they reasonably asked, “why isn’t Firefox caching it like everyone else and as we believe everyone should?”—because as :mossop explains in comment 13, the spec suggests it should be cached, by remaining silent on the point.
Then, they developed the attack, and reported it to the affected browsers, which excluded Firefox. Certainly it was not great to leave it open without adding a comment saying “hey, don’t go ahead with fixing this yet, we developed a fingerprinting attack if it does get cached”, but it’s easy to understand this being overlooked. Also, as the reporters of the issue, they would receive any progress on the issue by email, so if you assume good faith, then they would have pumped the brakes if someone had actually gone ahead with implementing the initially-requested caching.
It’s possible that there was bad faith, but I find the good faith explanation entirely plausible—that there was a minor error of judgement only.
This is perhaps related to the topic of an article that was posted here a few weeks ago, which was about CVE databases adopting some sort of charter because of a trend to use CVE reporting as a way to stuff one's resume.
To clarify, falsifying results was never my intention: During my work I tested Firefox (v 84.0) and everything worked fine under Windows & OSX.
Due to your feedback I've updated the table in the GitRepo and the website and added that the current FF version (v 85.0) is no longer vulnerable! ~jonas
Same on Firefox on linux. I got a fingerprint on one tab, and when that finished, I opened a new tab and ran the demo again - which gave me a new fingerprint ID.
You don't even need to come back with incognito mode. At least for me, just pressing the "try again" button gives me a different ID. (Firefox 85, windows)
How else would you deal with an enemy that would not give in? Most people fail to understand that the axis was all in, in every way, shape and form. When it comes to the Japanese, they flat out were not going to give up. Their will had to be broken, somehow, someway.