I mean a lot of the services that companies are using are cloud-hosted, meaning that especially if you have branch offices or a lot of remote workers a normal firewall in the datacenter introduces an unnecessary bottleneck. Putting the logical edge of your organization’s network in the cloud too makes sense from a performance perspective in that case, and then turning the actual firewalls into SaaS seems much less absurd.

One doesn’t invade the largest country in the world. Ask Afghanistan and Finland how resisting a Soviet invasion went. all that land mass only helps if the enemy is trying to capture it.

This idea that “criminal” is some kind of basic aspect of someone’s being rather than being a status wholly controlled by the government, who can impose or remove it at will, is mind-boggling. And also probably explains a lot of how conservatives keep finding themselves in the jaws of the leopard.

Anyone remember when Chrome had that issue with validating nested URL-encoded characters? Anyone for John%%80%80 Doe?

Would you believe that there’s a racist element to this as well?

So first off, Ukraine couldn’t have joined NATO because of the active territorial dispute re: Crimea, which had been ongoing since 2014. But more importantly, please for the love of God stop following the cold war colonial logic that only Great Powers have any agency in their own international affairs.

Poland, Lithuania, and all the rest of the countries that Putin wants out of NATO are in there because they wanted to be, mostly because they wanted security against Russian invasion. Like, Poland basically blackmailed President Clinton into expanding NATO by threatening to support the Republicans in the next election.

But why would anyone be worried about Russia invading them if they tried to exercise independent agency and leave Moscow 's sphere of influence? Oh wait, look at what’s happening in Ukraine. Maybe those fears weren’t so unfounded. Sweden and Finland certainly seem to think so, since the war led to the most significant expansion of NATO in decades and gave NATO a direct land border within spitting distance of Moscow.