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The "Fucking for Virginity" approach to infosec strikes again!


Can you elaborate what you mean?

Are you referring to a paradigm where people make their systems less secure in the effort to make them more secure?


Yes, exactly. In the realpolitik of organizational IT security, there's less of an emphasis on making systems more resilient to attack, much more of an emphasis on having an audit trail, so that in case the company is sued over a data breach they can claim "we did the very best that could be reasonably expected of us with the knowledge we had at the time" and provide receipts to back up that claim. Implicit in that claim is also "we used the same tools that everyone else is using so you can't blame us specially for unwittingly choosing something vulnerable to compromise". Hence the proliferation of shitty single-point-of-failure "endpoint security" software that leads to events like the 2024 Clownstrike incident.


I think this refers to "bombing for peace". Sure the West should have just let Iran nuke whoever it wanted.


Nuclear weapons are a MAD red line that will result in total annihilation of the attacker. They are only useful in a defensive capacity.

This kind of aggression, however, does seem to make their value as a deterrent clear.

Observe how nobody is fucking with North Korea like they did with Iraq or Venezuela.


> Nuclear weapons are a MAD red line that will result in total annihilation of the attacker. They are only useful in a defensive capacity.

Also in a "if I'm going down, everyone else is going down with me", which is Ian's strategy in this war (for good reasons). If the IRGC had nukes, and was severely threatened (like, killing the Supreme Leader and threatening to kill all of the replacements until they bend to the US/Israel will), they might have decided to go out "with style".


Yes, but the whole point of having nukes as a deterrent is that the US wouldn't have arbitrarily killed their leader in the first place. "If i'm going down, everyone else is going down" is the feature, not a bug.

To be clear I don't like the idea of MAD one bit. But this is indeed how it's meant to work.


Isn't this exactly what the Samson Option represents?


North Korea's main leverage is not the 3.5 nukes they have, it's Seoul in the sights of their very conventional arty.

Unlike NK, Iran has a leadership that declared destroying some countries their raison d'etre.


Nothing geopolitical about it in the sense I intended, except as a reference to the Vietnam-era catchphrase. It's simply a case of "putting spyware on everybody's corporate PC for security is like fucking for virginity".


Iran wasn't going to nuke anyone.

They want Islam to dominate the world, that can't happen if there isn't a world left to dominate.


I agree with the first part of what you said. Mostly because they didn't have nukes to begin with.


I think it’s possible they already have nukes and want to wait for Israel to over extend themselves so that they can use them for a first strike with maximum efficacy. They’ve done a lot for Russia. The idea that they don’t have nuclear armament is somewhat hard for me to believe.


The whole point of having nukes is letting everyone know you have them.


It depends on your military doctrine, if facing a first strike adversary you wouldn’t necessarily want them to believe you capable.




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