Readit NewsIt is kinda comparable to hypersonic missiles in that it can penetrate air defense, but that is about the only overlap, the railgun is long range for a gun, but nothing compared to something like a hypersonic missile.
Which parts of the story were embellished and who they were embellished by is an interesting question but the degree to which the original story being bogus is balanced out nicely by the degree to which this article (and the overblown title) itself is bogus.
The facts: a SIM farm was discovered. It had a very large number of active SIMS. It was found in NYC. It was active when it was found.
What is speculative/hard to verify:
It was used for specific swatting attempts. It was put there by nation state level actors rather than just ordinary criminals.
What is most likely bullshit:
That it had anything to do with the UN headquarters being close by.
But that still leaves plenty of meat on the bone.
Does anyone remember the full page ads in WSJ for programming language, that no on quite yet knew what it really was? So my formative impressions of Java on were emotional/irrational, enforced by comments like:
“Of Course Java will Work, there’s not a damn new thing in it” — James gosling, but I’ve always suspected this might be urban legend
“Java, all the elegance of C++ syntax with all the speed of Smalltalk” - Kent Beck or Jan Steinman
“20 years from now, we will still be talking about Java. Not because of its contributions to computer programming, but rather as a demonstration of how to market a language” — ??
I can code some in Java today (because, hey, GPT and friends!! :) ), but have elected to use Kotlin and have been moderately happy with that.
One thing that would be interesting about this list, is to break down the changes that changed/evolved the actual computation model that a programmer uses with it, vs syntactic sugar and library refinements. “Languages” with heavy footprints like this, are often just as much about their run time libraries and frameworks, as they are the actual methodology of how you compute results.