What kind of place do you go to to find these things? Sometimes I get really lucky (see my post history about my wonderful new printer), but if I could increase my odds that would be cool.

Dude. I thought That was bad. Just now I went to arstechnica to view one article and I did the same thing to “support” the site. It was 36MB in one minute.

This seems a bit weird because as detestable as Yeonmi Park is, she’s Korean and spends her time spinning lies about Korea. Does she talk about China?

Just yesterday I was on a news website. I wanted to support it and the author of the piece so I opened a clean session of firefox. No extensions or blocking of any kind.

The “initial” payload (i.e. after I lost patience approximately 30s after initial page load and decided to call a number) was 14.79MB transferred. But the traffic never stopped. In the network view you could see the browser continually running ad auctions and about every 15s the ads on the page would cycle. The combination of auctions and ads on my screen kept that tab fully occupied at 25-40% of my CPU. Firefox self-reported the tab as taking over 400MB of RAM.

This was so egregious that I had to run one simple test. I set my DNS on my desktop to my PiHole and re-ran my experiment.

Initial payload went from almost 14.79 -> 4.00MB (much of which was fonts and oversized images to preview other articles). And the page took 1/4 the RAM and almost no CPU anymore.

Modern web is dogshit.

This was the website in question. https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/welcomefest-dispatch-centrism-abundance/

The Epson initially worked with 3rd party ink then after a software update didn’t

Infuriating!

Interesting observation. It is indeed already installed with Fedora.

Apple bought and sponsored CUPS, essentially, until they no longer did. That story is very briefly touched on here https://www.phoronix.com/news/Apple-No-More-CUPS

I don’t know the full history of mdns and zero config networking, but Bonjour is indeed Apple’s implementation of it. In my printer’s web config page it specifically lets me enable/disable Bonjour, so I assume they are using Apple’s implementation. On Linux we have Avahi as a competing piece of software to provide the same service.

Seems unfair to not share what I’ve been printing! Plus some status/config pages and I ran a few tests to see how I can manually duplex print (odds then evens on the back). I only have a few sheets of printer paper so I’ve been running them through again and again 😆

Palestinians, remember the following: you can resist your occupation but ONLY on the occupiers terms.

For the rest of us, remember the following: you can protest genocide, but ONLY on the genocider’s terms.

So to be perfectly clear, setting up Wireguard is about bridging two LANs (or devices) to make them virtually appear as if they belong on the same network. For every client that connects they would need to be issued a key and every device would have to be set up. But all the traffic between the two “LANs” would be encrypted and secure.

But I don’t think WireGuard is what you’re looking for, because this would require setting up all these other people with WireGuard as well. Or doing a more complex setup where you use a VPS and WireGuard and have that serve an exit point instead of your home connection. Or any other number of more complex setups that would work but require a lot more effort… and it sounds like you were just looking for basic port forwarding.

Mullvad took that feature away a couple of years ago (presumably to combat CSAM dissemination). So if you were hoping to just have a secure path for someone to connect to your media server routed through Mullvad, I don’t believe that’s possible anymore.

It’s a somewhat convoluted story. Here are some links

• https://proton.me/blog/climate-activist-arrest
• https://old.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/ydcek3/what_became_of_the_french_climate_activist/
• https://www.wired.com/story/protonmail-amends-policy-after-giving-up-activists-data/

The takeaway is when he logged into his Protonmail they logged his IP address which helped track this individual down. But note that Reddit thread I linked. I also cannot find that much information about “what happened next,” or the details of who was arrested and why.

There may be other examples, but this particular case kinda hit the rounds back when it happened.

Depending on how you’re accessing this, and how many people you’re trying to set this up for, it would probably be easiest to learn how to deploy your own Wireguard network. In my case, my phone automatically connects to my own Wireguard on my server (an 11 year old laptop) and whenever I’m on the go I have full access to my LAN + PiHole DNS filtering.

So, what’s the point? The point is that you will be able to securely connect to your media server without exposing it directly to the internet, all without paying for a service to do what you can already do yourself, provided your ISP allows you port forward.

If in the future you think you might bring family/relations onboard to the password manager, it may be worthwhile to pay for a BitWarden family plan. BitWarden is really low-cost and they publish their stuff as FOSS (and therefore are worth supporting), but crucially you don’t want to be the point of technical support for when something doesn’t work for someone else. Self-hosting a password manager is an easier thing to do if you’re only doing it for yourself.

That said, I use a self-hosted Vaultwarden server as backup (i.e. I manually bring the server online and sync to my phone now and again), and my primary password manager is through Keepassxc, which is a completely separate and offline password manager program.

Edit: Forgot to mention, you can always start with free BitWarden and then export your data and delete your account if you decide to self-host.

You might notice that your Windows installation is like 30 gigabytes and there is a huge folder somewhere in the system path called WinSXS. Microsoft bends over backwards to provide you with basically all the versions of all the shared libs ever, resulting in a system that can run programs compiled from decades ago just fine.

In Linux-land usually we just recompile all of the software from source. Sometimes it breaks because Glibc changed something. Or sometimes it breaks because (extremely rare) the kernel broke something. Linus considers breaking the userspace API one of the biggest no-nos in kernel development.

Even so, depending on what you’re doing you can have a really old binary run on your Linux computer if the conditions are right. Windows just makes that surface area of “conditions being right” much larger.

As for your phone, all the apps that get built and run for it must target some kind of specific API version (the amount of stuff you’re allowed to do is much more constrained). Android and iOS both basically provide compatibility for that stuff in a similar way that Windows does, but the story is much less chaotic than on Linux and Windows (and even macOS) where your phone app is not allowed to do that much, by comparison.

Ok good luck with your state-sponsored reeducation programs in your Nazi-adjacent Western democracies where the left holds no political power 👍.

For everyone else who has a fucking clue: when your government has a gestapo police state that rounds up and deports the people the state has deemed undesirable, guess what? The Nazis are already in control.

This is one of the most libbed up things I’ve ever seen a lemmygrad user post… Are you just a wrecker account?

Interesting. May need to check it out, but I pmuch only use Gnome or KDE. I hate having to configure the extra parts in a WM (widgets for bluetooth, wifi, etc…).

What makes hyprland so good? It just seems like another WM to me, but maybe I don’t get the interesting parts of it.

I use Bazzite on my Steam Deck because I wanted to get LUKS encryption for the hard drive (and otherwise do not wish to manually maintain the computer). I cannot take what is effectively a general purpose PC out and about without encryption. Especially not with the current political climate in my country (USA).

From dealing with SteamOS, I am already familiar enough with how to set up a full dev environment on the immutable distros. So while that is not a challenge for me, it is still a hassle to deal with. I’d rather just directly install my libraries and binaries rather than do workarounds in containers (and then remember the containers).

I think we’ll truly be in the immutable desktop distro future when I can do something like install the base distro image AND simply dnf install something (e.g. nvidia-vaapi-driver or gcc) on top without having to layer it with rpm-ostree. That is, my dnf installs should transparently live on top of the base distro, and that way my base system will never break even if something on top of it does. The problem with layering with rpm-ostree is you are running the risk of a future failed upgrade. It would be like if your MacBook said “sorry, you installed a weird XCode library and therefore we cannot upgrade the OS” – and that should obviously never happen. Restoring my computer to a base state could be as simple as dnf remove * or a GUI option to “Revert to base + keep user files” and that should leave me with a functioning basic system.

Anyway, even though I only use an immutable distro on one device I do see it as the future of Linux desktop computing. I am not up-to-date with the development efforts, but I think we’ll eventually reach a day when using and configuring it, even for advanced users, will be no more difficult than traditional distros. Maybe by 2030 that will be the case.

I made my remarks w.r.t. rpm-ostree and the Fedora family of distros because that’s what I use. Obviously the other immutable distros have their own versions of these tools and their own versions of solving the problems related to them.

Between Steam promoting Linux and GOG promoting DRM-free software, I will never purchase from another storefront that doesn’t even pretend to do something good for the broader community (Origin, Uplay, Microsoft Battle.Net, iOS App Store, etc).