You only hear about their failures and campaigns they want you to hear about. Like when Trump gave up info that outed some of our top Russian spies, and like this.
Their counter-intel is fine. This is a public campaign designed to generate awareness and make as many people aware as possible. They see the uprising. HUMINT from thousands of widowed women may give them valuable information that otherwise could've slipped past.
The balloon was 200ft tall. The payload hanging beneath it was 200ft wide. The sidewinder has the ability to explode near its target which is why it was chosen. It was the equivalent of popping a party balloon with a firecracker. They also waited for it to be over a large body of water so the 2,000lb payload (many sensors, propellers, antennas, transceivers, etc) didn't fall apart on descent and crush people/things, and while they can control a missile if it misses it's target, they can't control bullets, which could rain down and hit whoever/whatever happened to be unfortunate enough to be in their path. Bullets fall at terminal velocity, even after they've lost initial momentum, that's why people on the ground die from guns being fired into the air during celebrations.
So unless they found a way to reverse a Globemaster mid-air and put the payload in the trunk, they made what seems to be the best call. Seeing as the first missile did miss on 1 of the 3 objects, I'd say that call was right.
The FBI has been analyzing the wreckage after the dive team retrieved it.
That said, if we start getting heavily astroturfed with bots and spam I'm going to be a little less zen about it.
The spammers aren't here in custom full-force software_dev_lemmy_bots mode yet, but when they come, moderation tool development will increase in effort tenfold.
The nation states are already using their "play Guess The Bot and lose" games. It's the ones who post often and with clear lines in the sand you need to worry about. Problem is, there is a sea of regular people just like that.
Lemmy needs to go through a fork or three before it becomes viable to the mainstream. Currently Lemmy users produce much less legitimate worthwhile information on far less subjects than reddit, and even Quora shudder thinking about it.
Granted, I've only been here for about a week before reddit disabled 3rd party apps. Maybe the first 3 years were the golden years. I'm only speaking as to the bot infestation I see currently.
I'm not sure why you're downvoted. It's China. If they can do it, you know they are. But the question is whether they can. I imagine cloning sheep and small monkeys are much easier than cloning humans.
Yeah that's already how it works. That's why in certain browsers logging in takes forever if you have a ton of mail, it has to decrypt the metadata of each email, then the contents when you click that email. Try enabling email content search on proton with over 5k emails.
Are you the guy who writes "DO NOT EAT" on rat poison?