It starts with proto-Indo-European (PIE), and is a fantastic mixture of history and language and how the two intersect. And no ads!

100% of me lives wherever I happen to be.

Fuck shit stack

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Of course, you know the difference between a Garbanzo bean and a chickpea.

I forget the numbers I’ve heard, but that sounds right. It’s also important to remember that in the 11th century, English vocabulary was much smaller than it is today, so those 10,000 words were a much larger proportion of the English language than might be apparent.

Another thing to know is that English was heavily influenced by Old Norse prior to the Norman Conquest, too. The mixing of those three languages, each having some differences in grammar and inflection, ended with English dropping a lot of inflections and turning to word position in a sentence to determine what’s subject, object, verb.

I did motorcycle safety crew for a charity bicycle ride last weekend. It’s one of the best things I have ever done.

If you make hummus in a mailbox, and eat it later, you are eating it posthummusly.

You would love https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/

This is exactly it, and it has to do with the Norman Conquest. After 1066, French was the language of the hurling ruling class and English was for commoners. As such, a lot of French words got borrowed into English, and they usually carried a higher status. Cow vs beef, deer vs venison, that kind of thing.

Steal it just like I did.

Like Judge Cannon, right?

Not only that - he’s got many other criminal counts still pending. The potential witnesses to those crimes are paying close attention to how much protection these witnesses get in the wake of their testimony.

Lift this gag order, Trump goes on a rampage, witnesses get an increased level of threats or, god forbid, actual violence - that is a chilling effect on witnesses in all of Trump’s other cases, and to a lesser extent, for witnesses in any future cases involving any defendant.

I seem to recall that Mercedes did it without incident.

I’ll throw some more detail, still working from the “your computer” side.

Your computer is almost certainly configured with a couple of DNS server IP addresses, belonging either to your ISP, or to some publicly available DNS server. When you’re going to www.hotmail[.]com, your computer just asks a DNS server that it is configured to ask - it doesn’t go to a root server (although it could, every computer is configured with root server IPs).

But even before that, your computer first looks to its HOSTS file. That’s a local file that contains manually configured matches between DNS hostnames and IP addresses. Under normal circumstances, this HOSTS file would be empty, but it’s there. Side note: DNS (Domain Name System) is what replaced HOSTS files. Prior to DNS, a university network (for example) would distribute a hosts file for everyone to put on their computer, and that was it.

Okay, www.hotmail[.]com isn’t in my hosts file, what next? Not a DNS server yet - next your computer will look to its local cache. You visited www.hotmail[.]com a couple hours ago, you haven’t rebooted yet, computer looks in its local cache and uses whatever it finds there.

Not in the local cache? Now your computer asks the DNS server its configured to ask for everything. That DNS server has its own cache, so if anyone has asked it for www.hotmail[.]com recently, it already has it, and returns an answer to your query.

If that DNS server doesn’t have the entry cached, it may be configured with forwarders. This essentially means “If I, a DNS server, don’t have a listing in my own cache, I will always pass the query to my forwarder instead of going to a root server.” There may be multiple layers of this kind of behavior, maybe the next DNS server even knows who’s authoritative for hotmail[.]com, and says “go ask them.”

The last word, though, is always the root servers. Root DNS servers are authoritative for ‘.’ and they contain lists of TLDs and the DNS servers authoritative for those.

Another thing to be aware of is that if a computer doesn’t have an IP address for a particular hostname (and it is not configured with a DNS server to ask for everything), it only returns “go ask this other DNS server” to the computer making the query, and then that computer goes and makes the full query to that DNS server.

It is also important to make sure that the DNS server(s) your computer is configured to use are themselves trustworthy. “Dan’s Totally Not Sketchy I Promise Public DNS Server” could very easily be configured to believe it is authoritative for the hotmail[.]com domain, and hand you whatever IP address it is configured to hand out from its own “Totally Authoritative I Promise” zone file.

And I forgot about TTL (Time To Live). TTL is measured in milliseconds, and generally speaking, only gets as short as fifteen minutes. If a cached record is older than the TTL, then the DNS server (or your local cache) will discard it and go ask for a fresh one. This does not apply to hosts file entries, or to static entries in an authoritative DNS zone file; those never expire.

Yes, that’s true, but more generally speaking, an external attacker would need to first gain access. The governments who control their national TLDs already have that access. Could the UK do the same thing with the co.uk TLD? They could, but the UK government seems more trustworthy on that point than does the Russian government.

OP asked specifically about the “safety” of .ru sites. I answered that question in that context.

Regarding your number three, a lot of the time you’re cold calling some wage slave who has neither the interest nor authority to buy anything from you.

“Every business is a fuck” gets my vote, but the people you’re cold calling are not necessarily a fuck.

And relieve corporate from all sorts of other liabilities, placing those on the individual drivers, too.

Workers’ Comp claims? Malfeasance (driver or passenger)? Health insurance? Paid time off? Vehicle insurance? All fall to the driver.

Yo cat, I heard you liked cats.

Something which has not been mentioned yet - Russia controls DNS resolution for any .ru site, and here’s how that works:

When you browse, say, www.yandex[.]ru, your computer needs to know the IP address of a server that hosts that site. Let’s say you are not using an ISP or public DNS server to get your name resolution from DNS hostname to IP address. (All of the following is essentially still what happens, just with a less complicated explanation.)

First, your computer contains a list of root DNS servers. Every DNS query starts with a root server, and those root servers are associated with the often-excluded ‘.’ at the end, like “www.yandex[.]ru**.**” - that trailing dot at the end always exists, we just don’t type it.

The root server says, “Here’s a DNS server which is authoritative for the .ru top-level domain, go ask them.”

Then your computer asks the .ru DNS server where to find www.yandex[.]ru, and the .ru DNS server says “Here’s the server that is authoritative for the “yandex” subdomain under .ru, go ask them where their “www” host is.”

Then your computer asks the yandex[.]ru DNS server where to find www.yandex[.]ru, then that DNS server says “Here’s the IP address that goes with that hostname,” and your computer asks the server at that IP for the website.

Again, Russia controls DNS resolution for anything at .ru. All they would need to do for any subdomain beneath .ru is provide their own authoritative DNS server for yandex[.]ru - or for any other whatever[.]ru DNS name. They could then redirect all browsing traffic to anything under .ru to anything they wanted.

Those FBI takedown pages? This is exactly how that is done. The FBI doesn’t reconfigure a server at the “correct” IP; they redirect DNS for the subdomain to their own IP and own web server in order to display the takedown page. That operation is performed within legal limits, but from a technical perspective, such an operation could just as easily happen outside of legal limits, especially when the party trusted to properly respond to DNS queries is Russia.

tl;dr: Russia can very easily redirect any traffic to any .ru site to anywhere they want.