I mean, the advice I’ve heard for one who’s threat model is “the feds are actively trying to identify me” is to have a dedicated burner computer that you do all of your illegal activities on and no other activities. Then of course on top of that avoid saving secrets onto the device and type them in manually every time (ephemeral distros like Tails are good for that)

Well he did say it wasn’t a good website. You really think they’re just going to take the criticism?

i noticed both of the ethernet lights were on and blinking

So usually one of the lights on the port indicates the link state (up/down and if its at full speed or a reduced speed) and the other light indicates data flow. Both lights blinking suggests either a really shoddy link state or an unusual implementation of status lights on the port. Do both lights blink while its booted and actively transferring a large file? Can you find documentation of how your device implements the indicator LEDs? (I can’t tell if that’s a dongle or a port on your computer)

If the power cord is plugged in but the computer is shutdown, and the light is still on, then that means the network adapter supports WoL or OOB management and must stay on for that reason

Also worth noting that Windows is especially bad about actually shutting down when you tell it to shut down because something something fastboot. I’ve seen similar inconsistently on Linux but I strongly suspect that to be more edgecases with specific hardware and my install.

The lights are blinking because broadcasts packets from other devices on your LAN are sent to every device. This is normal and expected behavior.

Just building off of this, modern computers are chatty as heck and there’s just constantly little bits of chatter spamming out on LANs. This is normal and expected behavior

The EFF had a handy explainer a couple of years ago on basically that subject:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/12/user-generated-content-and-fediverse-legal-primer

Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM): Service providers are required to report any CSAM on their servers to the CyberTipline operated by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), a private, nonprofit organization established by the U.S. Congress, and can be criminally prosecuted for knowingly facilitating its distribution. NCMEC shares those reports with law enforcement. However, you are not required to affirmatively monitor your instance for CSAM.

By my understanding, you don’t have to setup proactive monitoring for CSAM being federated in, but if you specifically spot CSAM or it is reported to you then you are legally obligated to report it

About a month ago I got a dozen for $3 from a neighbor. Delicious!

For public facing only use key based authentication. Passwords have too much risk associated for public facing ssh

What is it with these schools and not just using WPA Enterprise? They already hand out an email to every student so it makes it dead simple to deactivate the account’s PSK upon terming the student

About a decade ago I was playing a game on Linux and the game crashed and took the entire DE with it. So I went to a different tty and started a fresh x desktop session and started playing again until the game crashed again (I was running a bunch of mods so it would crash every couple of hours or so) and still didn’t feel like rebooting so I went to yet another tty and started yet another x desktop session. I did this about 3 times in total before I finally went “I should probably actually reboot because this has to be making a bigger mess of things”

I do both. I’ve recently picked up reading before bed as a healthy habit and I’ve been slowly working through the Discworld series at about 1 book every month or two. It’s nice to not stare at a screen for a bit, although I do generally skip nights where I’ve stayed up too late staring at screens

In the US the FDIC sets security requirements for banks and audits annually, and they keeps raising requirements every year or so. At this point its just easier for a bank to invest in following current best practices and keep updating to the current best practices than to keep chasing every new finding on the FDIC audits each year

Source: I worked in IT at a bank for a while

Distro hopping truly is a way of life!

I have Kubuntu on my personal PC and it feels klunky to me. So I am not sure why is that, since it uses the same base.

In my (admitted probably slightly dated) experience KDE kinda is like that. It’s super loaded with bells and whistles, but then because it has so many bells and whistles it’s really clear when something doesn’t work right. Personally I really like XFCE for having a decent amount of customization while being very stable and very resource light, but it does look like development has become very slow on XFCE (and afaik it doesn’t yet have any Wayland support which might be a nail in the coffin moving forwards) but cinnamon is also very nice for similar reasons

Ubuntu is the only enterprise distro that I can run both at home and at work that also has reasonably up to date packages. Debian and OpenSuse and CentOS (RIP) all run much older packages that may not support what I want to do at home so then my home experience would not match my professional experience.

Sure there’s fedora but I don’t want to be reinstalling my servers every 8 months or so as a new release comes out

Ubuntu has long support windows and reasonably up to date packages on recent releases, so I can do whatever I want to without too much faffing about but not have to dist-upgrade every 6-24 months if I don’t want to. Plus it’s an easy one to whip out at work for something because it’s a well established enterprise vendor

If there’s a decent (even online) used market where you live buying a refurbished computer that’s just a few years old can be amazing bang for your buck. 9th-11th gen Intel or Ryzen 2-4th gen. Any of the more business focused lines tend to be fairly well-built and are designed to be relatively long lasting while being relatively well-maintained during their service life. HP Elitebooks, Dell Latitudes, Lenovo Thinkpads, etc.

so all rules would have to be applied on the Pi itself

Sounds like you’ll want to setup IPTables

I acquired an ewaste laptop with an 8 year old celeron, 4GB of memory and a 500GB HDD. I tossed Linux Mint on there as an experiment to see what would work decently on there. Its not great, but its usable and might become my daughter’s first computer. Running firefox its noticably slow but I can crack open Libre Office or ScummVM and other than the initial load time it’s pretty snappy. I kinda forgot how hard drives give systems that slow-then-fast feeling…

I didn’t know Haiku had actual hardware support!

I once swapped a Debian install with XFCE to just running Openbox instead of a full DE and got down to 300Mb or so of memory usage. This was about a decade ago so obviously YMMV but given literally all I did was run Debian with just openbox and no DE, there’s probably additional tuning to be done that can get them to a more usable state