Agreed, call it future shock or the Singularity or just overall outrage fatigue, people just aren't reacting to these kinds of things at a level commensurate with their risk or danger.

The idiocy out of the Whitehouse is an intentional strategy to flood the zone with crap that sucks all the air out of the room. They have intentionally broken the ability of the public to become informed through a number of means: attention atrophy, lowest-common-denominator mudslinging, and massive, manufactured, stupid global crises. People have become deaf and desensitized.

The fact that humanity sent people back to the moon barely even registered. Crazy times.

> people becoming tired of constant stream of crises

They aren't tired, they're distracted. X/TikTok/et. al. are all fire and motion mechanisms.

The precipitous drop in fertility even in low income countries. The rise in populism and fear.

It's the phones, humans are being DDoSd. We need government intervention against many aspects of modern technology.

The profit motive works when it comes to reducing manufacturing costs and passing some of that on to consumers through the beauty of competition. It doesn't work so great when it's X training a transformer model to maximize the amount of time you spend doom scrolling so they can feed you gambling advertisements.

> Why? I think such indifference or rather apathy/torpor is a result of people becoming tired of constant stream of crises (either imaginary or real) that we're being flooded by. The capacity to react with something more than a shrug is finite. And I think we are being drained.

I think it's more that the impact of all these constant string of "crises" ends up having very little impact on the average American's lifestyle. Groceries a bit more expensive, gas higher, rent continues to creep up. Some giant incomprehensible national debt number gets higher. Those all suck and people complain about them - but they are complaining about them in packed bars while they drink $7 beers and eat $30 burgers and fries.

You can only yell so many times that the world is ending before people tune it out since their day to day lives are largely unchanged. Just look at the focus on complaining about almost irrelevant things like the price of eggs or whatever totally irrelevant culture war topic of the day. It's societal bike shedding.

I am firmly of the belief (and have been for quite some time) that the "average" middle class American is going to need severe pain - as in widespread great depression level pain - before anything really changes at all at the ground level. Americans have simply become so used to living the lifestyle being part of an insulated hegemonic superpower empire that they have taken that for granted as how things generally will always be no matter what happens. There is zero consideration for the amount of sheer effort, will, and constant vigilance it took to build and maintain such a state of being.

Or put another way: Inertia is a hell of a drug.

Its the tech worlds equivalent to eating X causes cancer.

HN is a bit of a bubble in that people here tend to be quite privacy focused and would be horrified at the prospect of their details being leaked.

For a lot of normal people that's not the case and as long as they don't get someone actually stealing their identity etc. they aren't really concerned about these kind of things

Frustratingly, I have my foot in both worlds to a degree. I'm interested enough in tech to pay attention and often lurk the tech bubble that is HN and hear about the raging dumpster fires from the folks who live and work in that domain. But I exist in a mostly non-tech world IRL where this exists among the other burning dumpster fires to the point that I can't care about another data hack, and i hate that I don't have the bandwidth to care. To a more acute degree, my mother was nearly wiped of half her life savings by "hackers"/fraudsters posing as employees of her bank. Being "hacked" is a part of life now, and outrage fatigue is real.

> a giant pedophile ring has been exposed that no one in power seems interested in doing anything about

But that's not true. The European Union and many other countries are taking extreme measures to ensure that what happened in the United States never happens with them and they are introducing a bunch of different measures to strengthen control over society, the media sphere, and other measures to ensure that no pedophile rings could be exposed.

As fatiguing as legal breach notices are to lay people, it's equally frustrating as a dev because security is not a distinguishing feature we can advertise in our product so we can't prioritize it at all. Let the lawyers figure it out later seems to be best practice now.

And of course vuln finding is now automated so even if we do a good job locking it down this morning, nothing will not keep out the next wave tonight.

Plus, our current political atmosphere encourages digital chaos, for example gutting CISA.

> a giant pedophile ring has been exposed that no one in power seems interested in doing anything about

This was one of the things Trump got 2024 elected on - many Republican voters were extremely keen on this being addressed. I'm glad Trump's fumbled it now so the Democrats are interested in addressing it, though for the wrong reasons.

The issue is also one of agency: the public has absolutely no agency in this. There is nothing an ordinary member of the public can do to avoid having their data exposed, there is nothing they can do to cause corporations to have more robust security models nor to cause actual consequences for all the executives that chose profit over security at every possible decision point.

To the public this becomes like the risk of being hit by lightning or being in a car accident, just background noise we avoid thinking about as much as possible. It is just the cost of living in this economy.

> And then, we still have yet to punish or hold accountable any large party who made things this way. Until we do that, keep expecting this.

This is the key. No incentive to change. It's always "the hacker's fault" and never "the manufacturer's negligence" or "the developer's carelessness" or "the user's gullibility." Combine this with the currently-prevailing Don't Blame The Victim mentality, and it's the perfect environment for never improving cybersecurity.

>As someone who's older, and is just generally gobsmacked all the time by the sloppiness in cybersecurity, all of this is just not surprising.

as someone who used to work in cybersec, most of the time it isnt sloppiness.

1) people fight tooth and nail against anything that inconveniences them. security is almost always going to be an inconvenience tradeoff, so it is always fought against. from every person and every department. rolling out 2fa was worse than pulling teeth, despite it being a single button press ("approve") on the phone, once or twice a day.

2) security offers no immediate or visible return on investment. so, it gets little attention by c-suite and even less budget. you end up with underpaid, under-qualified, over-worked people trying to figure out which thing they might be able secure out of the 10 things that need securing.

even here, a forum of hackers, security is often put in scare quotes and almost always mentioned beside the word "theater". people brag about still running windows 7, because it was the last good windows. antiviruses arent needed. X security feature is just a lie so that company Z can control my device. people mad when a company rolls out mandatory 2fa. and so on.