Chauvinism aside, this would be a terrible time to vote for a third party, and by no means am I trying to present it as “morally superior”. You’re trying to fix a broken system, and I’m trying to keep it intact long enough to prevent it from exploding and killing even more people.

After we get Trump out of office, we can start dismantling western chauvinism.

I mean, I didn’t put her forth, I wanted Bernie. Everything got worse because she didn’t get elected. I guess she wasn’t that electable.

The point is more to joke that the two party system sucks, but one side is “better”.

Look, I don’t disagree, I just don’t have a decent opinion on how to repair a hundred years of US hegemonic abuse. I can only tell you that if we don’t put forth an electable democrat, it will get much worse for everyone.

If you want to help fix my chauvinism, I need something other than laying the history of American foreign policy violence at my feet.

Yes they were, but it wasn’t as bad, which is sort of the whole point.

Would you rather have hand-wringing neoliberals with some accountability, or hardcore right wing authoritarian nazi republicans with no accountability?

One leads to a new holocaust in the US, the other leads back to the status quo. Take your pick.

Ah well, if there’s no difference you can vote for the side building concentration camps in the US then I guess. I mean, the DHS is literally unfunded at the moment because democratic lawmakers are demanding ICE reform.

Or, if you start your own party let me know, I’ll vote for ya. 😉

Life is full of choosing the lesser of two evils.

In reality, one of these sides is significantly closer to the edge of the pool, and much less slippery.

Magnetic platter drives still have the highest storage density per dollar and so they are still heavily in use. Theoretically, overwritten data can be recovered from them by analyzing the magnetic fields directly from the platter. However, this is extremely time and money intensive and requires specialized equipment and expertise. Overwriting a partition multiple times severely complicates this process just by performing multiple overwrites.

Realistically, overwriting once with random data is enough, especially if the drive is to be physically destroyed. You can also use a powerful magnet (top end neodymium in direct contact) to scramble the delicate magnetic fields that encode the data on the platter, but at that point you may as well shred the drive anyways.

SSDs are a fundamentally different storage paradigm that make this kind of recovery essentially impossible. Due to the limitations of NAND memory, data can be written to blocks inaccessible except at the hardware level. To make SSDs secure, modern drives usually implement processes (TRIM) that erase blocks marked for deletion. Or, all data written to the drive is encrypted by onboard hardware (SED), and “erasing” the drive simply deletes the encryption keys.

We’re all drinking recycled dinosaur piss from millions of years ago.

Microsoft has been built on a 40 year old tech monopoly under which it has fully leveraged abusive anti-consumer and anti-user tactics that have kept it there. It’s amazing they have lasted this long while accreting so much hate. This greed, their creepy starry-eyed cult-like adoption of LLMs, and the destruction of user trust by the outright THEFT of user data will be their downfall. You simply cannot vibe code a good operating system.

Watching one of the largest corporations ever conceived BEG users to use OneDrive and Edge, then surreptitiously change settings and install software to make it so is mind boggling. They simply cannot STAND that you won’t let them train models on your data, glowing bright green with envy at Google and Apple’s closed hardware systems.

I’ll say it again and again, I would have happily paid for Windows 10, but they gave it away for free, then marched an unwilling user base to 11 only for it to be the worst OS since Windows Vista. Extreme wealth breeds insanity.

The “free market” at work, folks.

From the article:

Nest cameras, by contrast, can send clips to Google’s servers even without a paid subscription. Google offers a small amount of free cloud storage — older models store clips up to five minutes long for three hours; the latest models store 10-second clips for six hours. That means some footage is uploaded and stored, at least temporarily, whether you pay or not.

According to Nick Barreiro, chief forensic analyst with Principle Forensics, deleting footage from the cloud doesn’t necessarily mean it’s immediately gone. “When you delete something from a server, it doesn’t get overwritten immediately — the file system is just told to ignore this data, and this space is now available to be used. But if no new data is written over it, it’s still going to be there, even though you can’t see it.”

This is more or less how local storage works as well. The creator of BleachBit, a file cleaning tool made famous for being present on Hillary Clinton’s email servers, has some great insights in their documentation about the methods for destroying data on hard drives. As it turns out, data “deletion” is just a series of operations on your hard disk like any other, and retrieval depends on the methods used - de-indexing, metadata and file structure removal, and overwriting to name a few.

Once, I accidentally formatted the wrong drive in Windows and it ended up being my 20TB platter (oops). I was able to recover 99% of the files on the drive with some free recovery software just because I disconnected and stopped using the drive immediately. The only files lost were large ones partially overwritten by the new blank file system created when I formatted the drive. Windows had only deleted the file system indexing the drive, and all of the file data and metadata was intact, waiting to be randomly overwritten. I had to string together four cheap failing 4TB SATA drives I bought used on Amazon, but it worked.

The point is, if I could do this as an amateur, and storage technology operating on the same principals is in use at enterprise scale, what are the lengths that the likes of the FBI and Google are willing to go to recover old data that has been “deleted”? I’m frankly surprised that Google does not overwrite their discarded data, and it’s probably for reasons like this, beyond the additional processing time it would take. Given their vast resources and storage capacity, it could be some time before “deleted” data is at least partially overwritten, if ever.

If you ever have data that you absolutely need destroyed, overwrite the entire drive with random data more than once, then physically shred the drive completely. And never connect your devices to a cloud storage service. It’s the only way to be sure.

All advertising is abuse.

Rippin’ fat bowls of dark roast

The modern internet: where “fuck” is censored, but fucking your grandma is not.

Forgive them father, for they know not of stepping on a 2x2 brick at 3am.

Legos my eggos

Lovers from another brother’s mother.

Discord is not needed. Quit. Kill it. Watch them BEG to get us back, then say no.