You are forgetting targeted attacks. A blind attack would pretty much not have much of an effect indeed, however if the attacker knows the machine, then it’s easy for the attackers to exploit these vulnerability if left “out in the open”, and cause havoc, possibly create a lot of damages or leech informations pumped into those machines via old Windows installations.

Quick question about the overwrite passes: is it overwritten with random numbers or is there a sequence of passes?

Is there a benefit from this over the inbuilt Secure Erase functionality in most SSDs/NVMEs? To my knowledge, it instantly dumps the current from all cells, emptying the data on it.

Furthermore, another issue with SSDs/NVMEs is that it automatically excludes bad blocks, meaning that classic read/write operations can’t even reach those blocks anyways. Theoretically that feature could also be used against you to preserve the data on the disk by marking all blocks as bad, rendering them as inaccessible by the file system.

Of course there’s also the issue of Secure Erase not being implemented properly in some drives, leading to the bad blocks not being touched by the hardware chip during that procedure.

It’s pleasantly surprising to see it getting mentioned it at all. Loved the servers when they were Omegle chatoorms, and it’s a bit sad to see it sort of die out with the death of Omegle. But yeah, the people there are generally nice.

Also, since I mentioned Omegle: I do not recommend any Omegle clones, as they often have an account system in place, which sort of ruins the whole anonymity stuff and also leaves to some stigma to those who do not want to use the account system. Not to mention that these sites generally attracts horny creeps, and finding a good chat partner is thusly hard.

I can also recommend Pimsleur. A bit more expensive, but features more traditional style courses, while offering a lot of what Duolingo has. Plus actual topics with grammar, not just random words!

My guess is that the wires/tracks could get stuck in sewage, and it might make it harder to examine the floor better due to how small the drone might be.

I had the idea of a monorail system, but I guess it would have a similar issue in case the surface the rail was attached to got faulty. Might’ve been cool looking though.

Fun fact about Ayn Rand: BioShock was partly inspired by her philosophy, or rather how disastrous it would be.

Another fun fact about her: at the end of her life, she got financial aid from the government under a fake name.

Generally during the mounting process, which is pretty early on at the OS boot process.

Yeah, that’s a risk. However you’ll always risk having leftovers from programs, even when continuing to use an OS, simply because you might switch programs, the developer rethinks where they store the config files, etc…

In most cases these files are relatively small and won’t be very noticeable in the long run. However if that still bothers you have no other choice but to cleanup your config files regardless.

Also, those config files are generally only for your own user, i.e. user-related configurations, not program-dependent ones. System configs are generally stored outside the user profiles.

Honestly, I’d argue it depends on the use case. A lightweight distro meant for basic tasks will never consume as much as a gaming one. Factoring in that your snapshots will naturally grow over time (and thus disk space) will mean that repartitioning, and getting bigger hard drives, is always a thing.

I’d still just trust the general installation guide, if it offers automatic partition allocation. Just only do partitions for /boot, / and /home, I’ve never found much use for /var /log and such as a separate partition, at least as a home user.

And when in doubt: use LVM with ext4 for dynamic partitions. BTRFS has a similar feature, but it’s still experimental, and thus potentially unstable.

I recommend making your /home a separate partition. It makes switching distros easier and also allows you to not encrypt your installation and only your own files, saving you from the headache in the case LUKS doesn’t work properly anymore.

Honestly, Sailfish is only worth it if you have a license, as there are very few native apps and the android compatibility layer is the only way to have a proper daily driver phone. I did try it with the Sony Xperia X II a 1-2 years ago, and honestly, it was still very buggy.

Generally, GrapheneOS ia pretty much the best privacy-focused android version you can have, as it will strip away anything that’s related to google while focusing on a small amount of supported devices to ensure that not many vulnerabilities are possible on the devices.

LimeageOS are less focused on privacy and more about availability. /e/OS is pretty much a downstream of LineageOS focused on Fairphones. Generally a good choice if you want android without google services.

Funnily enough, AFAIK this is also reflected in the total webpages on the internet. There is an extraordinary amount of German webpages compared to other non-english ones.

EDIT: Third most used language, after English and Spanish.

Scanners like to do funny things

I know it’s not very relevant, but that reminds me of a talk held during a CCC (Chaos Computer Club) convention.

It’s in German, but I’ll try to summarize it: Someone noticed the numbers on a scanned page didn’t match the original, so they hired an expert to find out what happened. Turns out that the printer they were using had a feature that would detect symbols that looked the same and basically copypasted ome cutout of the symbol onto the other to save space on the final PDF. Due to the print/copy quality, this substitution sometimes malfunctioned, substituting similar looking symbols, such as 8 and 0.

While that is true, logging into your OS can also be done via 2FA, namely via a smartcard. It’d offer a similar protection to it, if not better.

Fun fact: those gas station pills also contain Viagra, to make sure they work.

So, just buy Viagra instead. You’ll be safer.

Honestly, due to how it’s a paid app, I don’t see any viable mass adoption. Possibly great for a professional/corporate setting, but considering that Signal is free and some people already have a hard time leaving WhatsApp, it’d be hard to convince anyone to pay for a messaging app.

I disagree. I’m running Bazzite, which is based on the immutable variant of fedora, and it runs like a charm, even without much knowledge. Most drivers are prepackaged, so stuff like WiFi aren’t much of a hassle anymore and I haven’t had any issues with Flatpak. It basically eliminates all fiddling at the cost of customizing your OS as much as other distros. Honestly, SteamOS did show that immutable distros are the de facto future for new users. So far I know of Bazzite and Fedora’s immutable distros variant, but there might be more.

I disagree. The Imperium of Man is basically slowly inching towards its downfall with corpse starch (i.e. ground up corpses) being a common food for hive cities and the Inquisition being an ever looming threat for the populace. Not to mention that if you ever have have the misfortune of being near anything Chaos-y, you are often greeted by the Ordo Hereticus before your life is snuffed out. And considering that Belisarius Cawl frantically fell into prayer when confronted by a powerful AI core of old does show that the Adeptus Mechanicus are far from their power way back when, let alone any promise of immortality for the masses.

Psychic blanks have it even worse, as they might not even be connected to the warp, meaning they might just fade into nonexistence after their death. And overall, being a Chaos Worshipper isn’t that great as well, as most citicem are not treated well, not to mention that the ruinous powers will slowly drive you insane as well.

Last but not least is that the end of the whole 40K in-universe might be overall crawling to an end, as the Tyranids might be unstoppable by organic beings (apart from possibly the Orks), so it might be that the universe-wide apocalypse is slowly inching closer, leaving only the Necrons behind after the Tyranids seek out the next galaxy to devour.

I’d rather choose the old boring life here in this universe any day over the one from 40K.