Web archives preserve information the US Government has deleted, like reports on the economy, climate change, and Black history. In general they work against censorship of the internet. This is just another case of using “protecting the children” as a cudgel to kill politically inconvenient sources of information.

Yet. Some exec at Microsoft is thinking “the problem is that PCs aren’t locked down like phones and there’s nothing stopping you from running an alt OS on the desktop yet.” If they can’t force everyone to use their AI crap they’ll lobby the US Government and give Donald Trump some fake award, and before you know it desktop Linux will be a crime just like fixing your own tractor is a crime.

Since they give no indication of how they’re doing it or what information they’re gathering, no one can really explain. It may be some kind of traffic analysis where an AI provides heuristic recognition of probable VPN traffic.

I see they’re promoting something called the Helium network. What’s the relationship between that and Meshtastic? Are they completely different things?

Your posts are a bit confusing to read because you don’t capitalize Windows To Go. Capitalizing it would make it easier to understand.

I’d use a Kill-a-Watt or similar to check how much power it uses, before deciding whether it’s worth installing anything on it. Also check how much noise it makes, unless you have a separate room for servers. Enterprise servers aren’t always a good fit for home use.

The thing about this one is no one seems sure of the source (it appears to be from multiple sources, including infostealer malware and phishing attacks), so you don’t know which passwords to change. To be safe you’d have to do all of them.

Some password managers (e.g. Bitwarden) offer an automatic check for whether your actual passwords have been seen in these hack databases, which is a bit more practical than changing hundreds of passwords just in case.

And of course don’t reuse passwords. If you have access to an email masking service you can not only use a different password for every site, but also a different email address. Then hackers can’t even easily connect that it’s your account on different sites.

A password manager is still a good idea, but you have to not use a hacked one. So only download from official sites and repositories. Run everything you download through VirusTotal and your machine’s antivirus if you have one. If it’s a Windows installer check it is properly signed (Windows should warn you if not). Otherwise (or in addition) check installer signatures with GPG. If there’s no signature, check the SHA256 OR SHA512 hash against the one published on the official site. Never follow a link in an email, but always go directly to the official website instead. Be especially careful with these precautions when downloading something critical like a password manager.

Doing these things will at least reduce your risk of installing compromised software.

Presumably once YouTube finishes rolling out age verification, all these age restricted videos will require logging in to view them and anonymous front end apps will be locked out.

I’m not saying this is the ideal solution, but I’ve had decent performance from the house to a shed 60 feet away using Asus ZenWifi AX XT8 nodes in the house (with one in the window at the back of the house) and an Asus RT-AX56U extender in the shed. Most days I get decent speeds, good enough to use for work and watching videos. Very occasionally there’s a bad day. I originally tried with the dual-band Asus ZenWifi AX Mini cubes, but they were not powerful enough. Their bigger tri-band units work better.

There are probably better solutions though, using directional dishes. I just did this because, like you, I didn’t want to have to mess with holes for ethernet cables, mounting dishes to poles, etc.

Oh, and I once had bad signal so I put the unit at the back of the house at what would roughly be the focal point of a large metal kitchen bowl and pointed the bowl at the shed, and the signal improved dramatically

The Asus boxes are overpriced when new, but you can get them for cheap used.

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Mint or Fedora would be my first choices. I use OpenSUSE Tumbleweed for my own computers but I think those others are better for people new to Linux. In my experience Fedora does a good job of combining up-to-dateness and stability. Mint is less up to date, but close enough to Ubuntu and Debian that loads of the help materials out there will apply to it.

Your title still says “Kagy” instead of “Kagi”.

You can talk horsepower and dogpower all day, but I won’t really understand until you convert it to bananapower, for scale.

Sometimes companies gradually reduce the usefulness of the free product to incentivize people to pay. They may do this.

I think legally this suggestion makes you a pirate, a thief, a terrorist and a mass murderer.

The best possible scenario is that they’re just using it to entice people to pay for a premium subscription and will leave it that way. But the chances are that once they’ve pulled enough people in with the offer of free software, they’ll alter the deal.

So they’re planning to hook people in with freebies then boil the frogs a little slower.

Github Copilot is somewhat useful for programming (or it feels useful when it cranks out some boring and routine code to my specs - not sure it actually saves me time though because I always review it all), but of course Microsoft have given a range of products all the same name for maximum confusion, as they do. The Copilot in Windows may be rubbish for all I know. I haven’t ever felt the need to press the button.

It’s like gambling the entire US economy on Clippy.