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Cake day: June 24th, 2024

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  • External HDs are good for short term backup - I do use them for that myself.

    But they are not suitable for long term backup, they are susceptible to damage, sector errors,bit rod and interference.

    If you leave them unpowered for longer times the chances that the mechanical components are gonna fail are actually increased.

    Some of these issues can be reduced,but never fully.

    Additionally there are ransomware viruses that directly attack them - they intentionally encrypt the backups first when the drives are connected before they attack the live data. And in at least one case I know of the attackers bricked the HD firmware.

    Therefore for long term storage of really important things WORM (write once read many) media is to be preferred - even if the attackers can access the disk for some reason they cannot alter the once written data.


  • Personally I store all “Very important data” on it - things I really don’t want to loose even if my data storage at home and my cloud storage gets compromised. Among them:

    • Photos of life events. Wedding, photos of the kids, photos of relatives that are now deceased, etc.

    • Important documents. Birth certificates, copies of IDs, passports, insurance documents, degrees and certificates, banking/taxation/accounting documents, bills for the important stuff like major renovations, the expensive IT stuff, etc.*

    • Backup of important files (for me Uni files for my lectures, some work files, backup of the password DBs, plans for the house, a tutorial how to receive files from the cloud storage, decryption keys, etc.)

    (*: This is more a theoretical choice - as I can get 100GB media for the same price as the 50GB I currently simply copy the full paperless file storage. But the script normally only copies these. They are flagged with a custom field in paperless)

    I do not use addition to the storage,so no “these files are new since the last copy” but I simply make a full backup of these files every time (usually three times a year). This reduces the risk of one backup being compromised - very likely I only fall back 4 month which is tolerable. The discs itself are stored in a locked box in a bank vault a bit further away. I have to go there a few times a year anyway,so it’s not hassle. (And they have great coffee). The box costs me 50€ a year and has enough room for 50 years of M Disks and a few extra items.

    Anything taxation related must be stored for 10 years even by private individuals here,so there is that.

    My customers (smaller health care organisations, e.g. your fellow neighbourhood dentist or GP) usually store patient data and accounting data on them. They need to store them long term (up to 30 years) for legal reasons, additionally they don’t want a opposing lawyer to later tell them “you have manipulated the data”. Having multiple copies that cannot be manipulated reduces that claim to “you manipulated before you stored it” and we have other ways to fight that.




  • M-Disc/Archive Blue ray discs are currently pretty much unrivaled if one needs WORM(write once read many) storage for important data.

    Anything cloud is an issue in that regards, while a few options exist that somewhat imitate WORM to comply with regulations they are often expensive, harder to maintain and, if long term storage is required, prohibitivly expensive.

    The next option, Tandberg RDX needs a far less popular writer, it’s WORM media is far more expensive, far more sensitive towards exterior influences and it’s much harder to make sure you will be able to read the data in 20 years.

    LTO is nice, the tapes are somewhat cheap but the drives are extremely expensive - far to expensive for smaller businesses or consumers.

    (And please for the love of god, normal exterior HDs,etc. are NOT backup media for long term storage, especially not WORM- which is important in times of ransomware attacks)

    So in the end verbatim would be an absolute idiot to destroy this market. I work with a lot of smaller healthcare facilities and they all exclusively work with them - they routinely burn their data on a M-Disc that is then stored in a secure location, as they all need to provide their patient records for at least 10, mostly for 15, in some cases for 30 or more years. The doctors can literally go to jail if they do not comply with that.(And getting hacked or your building burning down is not an excuse)

    As a CEO of a small company we also need to retain certain tax and accounting data for 10 years, some for 20 years. And even as a individual I have some stuff I legally must retain for 10 years.

    And of course photos of important life events and some documents (insurance, mortgage) are also something I don’t want to loose if the house burns down. Therefore the important stuff gets burned to a M-Disc three times a year and then locked into a bank vault quite a bit away.



  • A friend of mine worked on the team that wrote the EU AI legislation. He is a fucking genius and so are his colleagues. There is little chance he can simply “change the definition of open source”. He might be able to challenge the EU definition in court and postpone paying,but be will pay.

    The brussels bureaucracy is a absolutely fed up with US tech bro antics by now and both Microsoft and Google have already learned their lesson. Zuckerbergs Meta still tries to resist,but he will fall as well.

    Funnily this is absolutely speed up by their antics in the US as this leads to more and more lawmakers here realising that the European societies need to be protected from them the same way it needs to be protected from China.


  • As others have already said: Prevention is a point: There are people who should not be out in the open,honestly. I worked with people who rightfully will not be freed unless they are basically close to hospice care. They are dangerous and some even say this of themselves. I worked with a nice gentleman who shared his recipes with me. For cooking human meet - which he had real life experience in as he killed his family and ate parts of them. (He is very likely dead by now) Another guy raped at least 30 woman/girls,some as young as 5, and tried to rape female staff around him while in a psychiatric hospital (and in a regular hospital that just saved his life after another patient attacked him).

    Should these people be kept separated from the society? Yes. Should they be miserable and suffer for the rest of their life? No. They are still human and the absolutely abysmal conditions in the prison systems of some countries, especially the US are a disgrace.

    I am fairly happy that at least in my country the constitutional courts have set clear boundaries how prisoners and institutionalised patients have to be treated, especially after they served their jail time and are only kept locked up for preventional reasons. And that the level of danger to the society they posses needs to be reassessed periodically.

    The other side is punishment. I am far less certain about this side of the issue - prison terms have a deterrent effect to most people,but not all of them. And it seems that we haven’t yet found a good way to address this. For most people the thought of being locked up and therefore being under total external control does at least give them enough “discomfort” to not actually do anything stupid and if they do they often are at least “suffering” from that enough to not do it again.

    Suffering is initially set into “” here, as it is not meant to equal actual suffering like what some politicians and some populations want. The inmate suffers enough by being deprived of his/her freedom, being under external control. We know that for sure. They do not need to be punished more by make their life hell. The same goes for “extremely long sentences for minor stuff”. Firstly this does actively endanger the population. We have pretty good data around sexual assault for that. We can surely agree that rape is a horrible crime and a rapist should be punished. But making rape as bad as murder is a bad idea. Because now the perpetrator has no incentive to not kill his victim - instead the perpetrator now has one to do so. If he/she goes to prison for the same amount of time, why not reduce the risk of victim identifying them? Same goes for the act itself - when every sexual assault is rape for some perpetrators their sick logic comes to the conclusion that they can go “all in” anyway. (I literally have been told that by an inmate)

    The same goes for “life sentences without the option for parole”. This leads to only one thing: You have an inmate with nothing to loose. Once they learned to survive the first stint in solitary and without the things “good behaviour” can get you, they will have nothing that the prison staff can take away from them - and they can take away a lot from everyone else. Therefore punishment must always give people hope - hope that they will get out at some point. Even though there are some that are unlikely to live to that point.

    Lastly we know that bad conditions in prisons and a lack of reintegration as well as the stigma that some countries (e.g. the US) put on their inmates actively push people into reoffending because they develop mental health problems, can’t find a stable life outside the prison,etc.

    Anyway: the main problem OP has is a different one - it’s the lack of help people with chronic diseases are getting. This is what makes their destiny far worse than that of prisoners - because they are always in it for life.




  • Posteo is another alternative for Mail that a lot of people overlook.(And far more “real privacy” than fucking Proton)

    Bitwarden sadly still is a US company and while it hosts in EU as well, some might not think this is enough. In that case Vaultwarden can be selfhosted easily.

    It is not that much work to actually get rid of most possibly unreliable US services,but it’s far more work to get other people to switch as not all services are interoperable yet…


  • Hetzner is rock solid in my experience (and I run multiple server with them both for private and business use). I really can’t complain.

    I have my S3 backups at Ionos these days, they are also fairly large, only marginally more expensive and so far it’s working well. Their cloud/VPS service (the proper one,not the consumer one) is also decent and offers a few (rarely needed) options that Hetzner doesn’t have.



  • Oh. Thoughtscreen.Well,then none.

    In the real world I talked to someone about how to prepare human meat. (Well,he more or less held a monologue about it) And the difference between childrens and adult female meat. And yes, he knew what he was talking about. He had the real life experience.

    …before you all freak out: This was within the high security part of a psychiatry hospital and the guy was locked in there for multiple decades at this point and very likely is dead now. Or in his nineties.

    I worked there part time for a while and he did that with everyone. Only the ones who did not flinch were “worthy” in his eyes. Afterward that he was fairly docile and actually saved a female therapist from being raped once. Luckily I had been warned.



  • Proton has always been sketchy - and I caught flak for it countless times, especially here. But: A company claiming they are "private’ and “secure” because they operate under Swiss privacy laws is already sketchy from the beginning. Why? Because Swiss privacy laws suck,are the worst in Europe and Switzerland is a country known for multiple cases of major intelligence agency overreach - especially towards foreigners and cross-border traffic.

    Legally the Swiss intelligence services can order any “service provider” (that includes proton) to provide them access to traffic coming from foreign countries - this also includes the mandate to provide “technical means”, which is often seen as backdoors. And to make things better the service providers are not allowed to talk about it.

    This alone is a problem. In Protons case what makes matters even worse is the fact that they are an US company de facto operating from the US and therefore are bound by the homeland security act and similar legislation.

    So in the end both the Swiss and US services might read your data.


  • Literally been at one where the rubble was still smoldering and another one where we didn’t even knew how many people we were looking for. And saw an actual emergency landed airliner from a few hundred metres away. But I work as a paramedic. The first one was a small prop plane, one two people miraculously survived, but with life altering injuries, the second one was a crashed glider, sadly the pilot died, but it’s highly likely that he was dead before he crashed - a medical issue was suspected.

    The third one had a few lightly injured passengers but they were already transported by the time we arrived.

    Ah. And a Fastfood joint I used to go to as a kid was the site of a gnarly crash where a small two engine plane crashed into a bus and said Fastfood joint a few years earlier.

    The current crash hits home differently as I have spend countless hours on the same aircraft type and the same (aeromedical) setting. While I did not know the crew, have left the field long ago, the community is tightly knit and I know people who knew them.A truely sad case.