sys110x

https://www.vantrinh.com/about/public-record

I can only echo what others have suggested - seek medical advice.

There is no logical ties between some of the facts you state. ie:

Conservative activist Charlie Kirk was assassinated on a college campus. Jimmy Kimmel was suspended for his monologue about Charlie. I watched it. The joke was mild. I later found out Grace Van Patten was Kimmel’s last guest before the suspension, and Canadian singer Sarah McLachlan was his first upon return. Then it all clicked. I was living in Los Angeles at the time, where Jimmy's show is based. Kimmel was trying to help, so the chairman (appointed by Trump) used his position to take Jimmy off the air. In other words, they used Charlie...

1. How many people on the planet have the name "Van" somewhere in their name and have appeared on TV? (IMDB gives me at least 50 but it doesn't show a total results. I'm willing to bet its >10,000)
2. How many Canadian singers are there? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Canadian_musicians)
3. How many people live in Canada? (About 41,600,000)
4. How many people live in LA? (About 3,800,000)
5. How many Canadians live in LA? (About 40,000)

These are large subsets of people to specifically link coincidences to an individual.

I'm surprised how many people didn't realise this. I used to play Ingress, which was also from Niantic and similar to Pokémon Go but involved agents and hacking POIs rather than Pokémon trainers and Poké Stops.

Niantic discussed at the time that this was to support their work on the N+1 navigation problem, although I can't for the life of me find a quoatable reference for this. I played Ingress knowing that my location data was being harvested thinking it was to solve a problem.

I also wonder how many people realise Niantic Labs was started as a Google internal startup: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niantic%2C_Inc.

Windows NT 3.1 was one of the first 32bit OS's.

It's the memory address space for the hardware - 32bit can work with 2^32 memory addresses (bytes) while 64bit can work with 2^64 memory addresses. In terms of what that means for your gaming PC, it basically means a 32bit app can work with up to ~4GB of RAM (2^32 = 4,294,967,296) and 64bit can work with up to 18EB (2^64 = 18,446,744,073,709,551,616).

What it means for the survey? No idea, but if I had to guess - it's either emulation of a 32bit OS or app (like a VM or something).. or a large group of people desperately need to upgrade from Win NT lol

We can go dark if we want to, we can leave the light behind,

If your friends want light, and if they use light, well they're no friends of mine,

Say.. ᕕ(ᐛ)ᕗ

I use LibreELEC on a mini-PC for my home TV. LibreELEC is a Linux distribution that runs Kodi and is pretty good for a media centre straight out of the box. I use a Rii Mini K25 remote (with a dongle) to control it: https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/B06XHF7DNQ

The downside is I can't control the TV itself with this, but this can be sorted out with a USB IR receiver (like this: https://amzn.asia/d/0hvzkP93), LIRC (https://lirc.org/) or something similar, *and a universal remote. On my to-do list lol

I have a DHCP reservation for the TV itself and it's blackholed on my network. The only reason it's connected at all is so I can monitor what it tries to do.

Edit: Also need a universal remote for the IR solution so it can talk to the PC IR receiver and the TV IR receiver separately.

If your house plumbing is leaking there is water going out where it shouldn’t be.

Yes. Correct. Personally Identifiable Information openly exposed on the internet is information going out where it shouldn't be.

If your house is leaking, whether there's someone out there with a cup doesn't change whether your house is leaking or not. It only changes whether someone took your water ie. a breach

Data leak and data breach have specific definitions:

Data Leak vs Data Breach: What Is the Difference? While many use the terms "data leak" and "data breach" interchangeably, there is a difference between the two. A data leak often comes from within the organization either by accident or intent, while a data breach occurs when confidential or otherwise protected information is accessed, stolen, or used by outsiders without authorization. https://www.fortinet.com/resources/cyberglossary/data-leak

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/security/business/security-101/what-is-a-data-leak

https://www.oaic.gov.au/privacy/your-privacy-rights/data-breaches/what-is-a-data-breach

https://www.ibm.com/think/topics/data-leakage

https://www.trendmicro.com/en/what-is/data-breach/data-leak.html

This is a data leak. We don't know yet if it's a data breach. We might not know until active exploitation.

Given the lack of control on this data, and that it wasn't fixed until the researchers told them about it, do you trust IDMerit to have the scrutiny on their logging to know if it was accessed externally? I don't.

If your house plumbing is leaking, its not a leak to you unless you see it? How do you know it hasn't been accessed?

Thankfully we don't need to rely on your definition of a data leak: https://www.fortinet.com/resources/cyberglossary/data-leak

A data leak happens when an internal party or source exposes sensitive data, usually unintentionally or by accident.

This is sensitive data that's accidentally been exposed on the internet. That is a leak. You are misinformed on what a data leak is.

It's not misleading. A database of personally identifiable information being exposed on the internet is a data leak. Personally identifiable information is legally required to be protected, while an exposed database on the internet is about as far from 'protected' as you can get.

The article and title make no claim to active selling or known exploitation of the data, but to write this off as nothing would be a mistake. Are you sure that only the Cybernews team found it?

The Cybernews team discovered the exposed MongoDB instance on November 11th, 2025 and immediately notified IDMerit. The company secured the database by November 12th.

We don't know how long it was exposed for prior to it being discovered on the 11th - it might've been that day, it might've been a few months.

That's part of the trust problem though; when I have a $10 note in my pocket, I trust that it will still be $10 when I go to pay for my coffee later that day.

If I get $10 worth of Bitcoin out of an ATM in the morning, I don't have that same faith in the afternoon. It might be $7, it might be $3, it might be $15,000. That volatility is exactly why I can't trust it as my standard currency.

Sure did!

https://www.cnet.com/health/sleep/owners-of-luxury-smart-beds-literally-lost-sleep-due-to-aws-outage/

Oh my god, I totally missed that. Amazing lol Thanks for that!

Would you mind elaborating on why this is your favourite? I tried to find some context for it but all I can really seem to find is the quote itself.