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Cake day: January 13th, 2025

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  • I have a separate boot partition so the rest can be encrypted with luks. That’s all that’s needed in a large majority of scenarios. Most other setups end up needing to resize something at some point which in many cases is a total pain.

    On my primary PC I do have a second hard drive for documents and other long term storage files that I want to access more often than on the NAS. This way it’s nearly impossible to lose those files of I reinstall something and it can act as a temporary backup storage for settings files when I do reinstall stuff rather than having a partition that wastes space or runs out of space.








  • I’d say none will be private in the long term. Acquisitions ultimately break that eventually. It’s hard to run a successful service and not get acquired, eventually. So, I have a self-hosted searxng instance. DDG has already started moving away from privacy and Startpage has some signs it might be moving that way in the near future. I’ll let others comment on the current state of things at each, but if you give your search to any profit driven company it has the potential to be sold. But IMHO Qwant is currently the best option outside of metasearch engines with small nonprofit ownership, whoch can be unreliable, or self hosting.



  • Yes it’s a violation of the law, but much like any other laws, there are defenses to these built into the laws. For example, for murder, if you kill someone, you commit murder (or homicide or whatever word is used), but there is a built in defense that you are allowed to do this in cases of self-defense. So still guilty of the crime itself, but the exceptions make it not a criminally punishable act.

    Similarly, in copyright there is the concept of fair use. Again, any copy you make of a copyrighted work violates the copyright act, however there are scenarios where the copying becomes not a punishable offense. In copyright, these are usually things that there is a benefit to society that outweighs the detriment to the copyright owner such as transformative art which creates new art, or backup for purposes of archiving. So likely the copy itself is protected here. The potential issue comes in the fact that they then share that copy. This is where the legality becomes murky as copyright law in the US has never been updated fully to deal with digital copies which take miniscule cost to produce and are nondestructive of the original.

    But let’s assume that the law supports the music industry. Then we move to harm. How much harm has been done to the owner. Since this is a corporation we’re only talking profit, not emotional or other types of harm that might be involved. In this case they are claiming that for each work shared over the internet, they have been denied $150,000 in potential profit from selling those works.

    This is where the real issue comes in in that courts rarely dispute these ridiculous numbers. IMHO the fact that they are pitting these kinds of numbers in a court document sounds like fraud to me. For much of this work they have no actual copies of the works because they were destroyed or deteriorated. So how could they sell them and make profit? For what they do have, is there even much of a market for any of that content and would that market generate $150,000 for a single random song written many decades before most of us were born. Sure the award will likely be less than that, but I bet the average song on this list might generate less than $1 in the time from when they posted them to when their copyright finally expires. So charge them a few hundred dollars and be done with it.

    The issue is that the works are otherwise not available for sale and any licensing is done across all works owned by these companies and this is how they get the $150,000 per work number. They don’t sell licenses just for old works because the system was never designed to support copyright lasting as long as it does now.


  • I mean, the stuff in the Great 78 Project is stuff that is so old that copyright was not designed to support the lengths of time they currently do so archiving wasn’t as big of a concern because the media it was created on would be less likely to deteriorate in that time. When the owner is a corporation who for the most part not only doesn’t sell but refuses to archive works that are breaking down due to the physical age of the media and would rather the works disappear than allow for archiving, how are they harmed to the tune of $150,000 per recording? And who is this benefiting to let recordings, stories, and other art forms literally turn to dust with no monetary profit going to anyone in most cases if it’s not archived.


  • How do you connect? Is there a domain? Is that domain used for email or any other way that it might circulate?

    Also, depends on if the IP address was used for something in the past that was useful to target or not. And finally do you use that IP address outbound a lot, like do you connect to a lot of other services, websites, etc. And finally, does your ISP have geolocation blocks or other filters in place?

    It’s rare for a process to just scan through all possible IP addresses to find a vulnerable service, there are billions and that would take a very long time. Usually, they use lists of known targets or scan through the addresses owned by certain ISPs. So if you don’t have a domain, or that domain is not used for anything else, and you IP address has never gotten on a list in the past, then it’s less likely you’ll get targeted. But that’s no reason to lower your guard. Security through obscurity is only a contributory strategy. Once that obscurity is broken, you’re a prime target if anything is vulnerable. New targets get the most attention as they often fix their vulnerabilities once discovered so it has to be used fast, but tend to be the easiest to get lots of goodies out of. Like the person who lives on a side street during trick-or-treat that gives out handfuls of candy to get rid of it fast enough. Once the kids find out, they swarm. Lol


  • Google is a Reddit partner now, so they probably don’t want discussion of anything that removes them from the loop, thus privacy is very limited to “privacy from everyone but Google” or whatever corporate blob is currently funding Reddit. This is why Reddit is dead to me, basically it is now all about profit and communities can only exist if they contribute to that goal.





  • Even if Copilot was suspended, the idea was put into the heads of managers and executives. My work laptop current has three applications constantly locking files as they track everything I do and every file that gets touched and upload it all to the servers. Git now takes a ridiculous amount of time to check in and push files since it creates tons of small changes to the cached files that a the tracking applications block further changes or uploads until they can record the information. It takes about 30 seconds to a minute to check in a single small file. Something that used to take a second or two at most. Worst part is if I’m in a WebEx meeting, the fighting over caches in it and git and any other processes,often causes deadlocks that crash the machine. I’m constantly apologizing for being late for meetings because the laptop crashed and had to reboot. It’s gotten to the point that they finally gave me a much faster laptop rather than just excluding cache and git folders and such from the tracking because the people who want literally everything tracked don’t know what cache or git is, much less how much useless data they’re gathering or how the AI that analyzes it all is going yo get distracted by the garbage and not find any useful data anyway. Microsoft needs to get in the game to push the others back out.