We also need more individuals paying for “business” Internet connections at home. We need self-hosters to be able to feel comfortable running public services from their homes. And so we need a set of practices and recipes to follow, so a self-hoster can feel confident that, if one thing gets broken into, the other few dozen things they’re hosting will stay safe.

The “family nerd” hosting things for the family needs to be a thing again. Sorry, friends, I know family tech support sucks. It’ll suck so much more when it’s a web site down and nobody can reach their kid’s softball team page, and there’s a game next weekend, etc. But we’ve seen what happens when we abdicate our responsibilities and let for-profit companies handle it for us.

(I wish so hard that I had a solution ready, a corporate LAN in a box, that someone can just install and use. I’m working on something, but I’m pretty sure I over-complicated it. It doesn’t need to be Fort Knox, it just needs to be pretty good. And I suck at ops stuff.)

Friend, PGP signed messages were around in the 90s. Key signing parties. Web of trust.

Wait… I just had an idea.

Make a tarpit out of subtly-reprocessed copies of classified material from Wikileaks. (And don’t host it in the US.)

One part white vinegar to four parts water. Maybe a little apple cider vinegar for flavor. But soak your fresh berries for like five minutes, then rinse in clean water, dry, then put back in the fridge. Not in the same container or the contamination goes right back on.

I’m an American in that third group, theoretically quite comfortable, as a software developer with a six figure salary living in the Midwest.

I have no rebuttal. What you wrote is scarily accurate.

That’s right. Even if you have to use a windows app that Linux compatibility layers don’t support, you can banish Windows 11 to a virtual machine.

Oh, weird, even in a virtual machine it wants an account. Anyone know where I can find a bypass method? :-)

These systems all have disaster recovery plans. We can’t possibly know how competent their admins are or how up to date their backups are. But it’s not our job to know this. Debating details isn’t the point, and there’s zero amount of online discussion that will make the worry and anxiety go away. Just remember there are backups and be calm.

Personally I know that media companies, who use their content to sell ads, will not protect me from this “worry and anxiety denial of service” that’s going on. They sell more ads when people doom scroll. So I have to protect myself. I want you to protect yourself as well.

I try to recognize when there are things I can’t do anything about, but that I know good people are still working to protect.

I’m genuinely worried it’s yet another deliberate denial of service against our ability to detect evil. I work extra hard to only pay attention to what is actually done that seems like it could stick.

Mostly I trust that good people in positions of trust (e.g. ACLU or EFF) will call out when there’s an opportunity for mass mobilization to make a real difference.

I’m a little worried about the distraction this is causing, distraction away from taking real action that can help. Like, felon and nazi are real and useful predictive attributes, but we kind of already knew some of that.

I feel like a better focus would be on taking action - donation, volunteerism, things your class valedictorian would do - to counter actual harmful or evil changes that are made in actual legislation. It sucks to have to prop up things that make America actually great ourselves because narrow minded politicians cut public funding. But to keep these things alive, we have to step up.

We already made our predictions known. Deep down we already know this isn’t convincing anybody new. The next step is taking action. Local non-profits want to hear from you. If it’s a cause that you think might be threatened, and you care about it, you might be able to help.

Plagiarism should be part of the conversation here. Credit and context both matter.

How much stock ownership remains with the nonprofit Raspberry Pi Foundation? And will that be enough to hold off shareholder complaints that they aren’t being evil enough?

A 20 lb (or so) sealed lead acid battery and an inverter, at U Nebraska at Omaha around 2003-2004. I had imported a Sharp SL-C700 and it was very power hungry. Smart phones were barely a thing (blackberries) at the time.

I think I was vaguely aware of the possibility of some unexpected metal shorting the battery and getting hot enough to start fires, so I bought a green rubber bath mat (which I remember had little sucker feet on one side) and wrapped it around the battery.

I finished my undergrad in 2004 with no incidents.