Yes. And best don’t turn any setting off or change things around unless someone knows what they’re doing. Power off the entire computer and unplug the storage device physically. (And subsequently, take it as an invitation to learn more about automated backups.)

As far as I know it uses the B.A.T.M.A.N. mesh protocol. On a channel within the regular 2.4GHz wifi spectrum. So no license needed unless it collides with laws for point-to-point beams. All people communicating to each other obviously need to agree on a channel. It comes with some hierarchy where I’m at. There are local chapters who make up some config and who also operate nodes and exit nodes into the internet. These are necessary because Germany has stupid laws.

There’s Freifunk as well!

I think they tried to make an effort. At least in the New Testament they do things like testemony from several people. And miracles as evidence for divine intervention. So… I think there’s some early attempt to get logic into the mix… Of course it’s a bit unfortunate for reproducability how people stopped walking on water, God stopped doing supernatural things a long time ago and wine and fish multiplying or things burning without burning isn’t open to research and study any more… 😆 Maybe he has other hobbies these days or died in the meantime…

Sure. I mean I have some grasp of how computers work. I studied computer science and they told us everything from how high level code gets translated down to machine instructions. And then we had some lectures on logic gates and how the processor architecture fetches instructions and how adders and the basic building blocks work, with a short prospect on how CMOS realizes these things and why a transistor works. Of course I don’t know the details of all of this. And manufacturing these things seems magical to me. I have no clue where these silicon wafers / crystals come from, how they’re processed and how the physics at nanometer scale works. It’s just that I have a broad picture and it’s complete enough so there isn’t much room for religion in it. We were forced to do some of the maths on it to make me think I know roughly how it works and the rest is complexity and scaling it up… At least to the point where I hand things over to the electronics people doing their “magic”.

But your point is very valid. We live in a very complex world. And things change fast. There’s a lot of information out there. We used to have polymaths. But that was a long time ago and in modern times it’s just straight up impossible to know everything even about a single domain.

I’m also split on this. I drive an old car. It has 3 knobs to control the AC. No display or touchscreen to display error messages to me. The gas pedal has a mechanical link to the motor… I can fix the lightbulbs and some minor stuff. When I was in my twenties I could take off a carburator of a motorcycle. And that’s not how any of the modern technology works. Cars have advanced in the last 20 years so you can’t even replace a lightbulb. Neither can anybody understand how any of that really works. And it doesn’t seem to me like the mechanics know either. They just hook it up to the diagnostics and it’ll be some error #2704 and they order a new flux capacitor from the manufacturer and replace it… There are some advantages though. Modern car lights are much brighter and better focused than my old front lights. And sometimes I wish I had better visibility in autumn when it’s dark, rainy… And modern cars can apply the brakes automatically and prevent some accidents. I think that’s great but it’s also a bit strange how they do things the engineers taught them to do and not what I make them do by my steering wheel and pedal input… And this is added complexity. Same thing with computers and everything and these devices just do some magical stuff in some cloud and the user is just presented with some result… hopefully with what they wanted it to do.

And I have no clue whether I’m just getting old and it’s a problem with me, or if this is about technology. I mean even with my old car I put a lot of trust in the engineers, that they put reinforcement in the correct places so I don’t die in an accident, and design it to last and not rust after a few years. And seems they did an appropriate job. I don’t think relying on other people’s expertise is anything new. I think the amount of intransparency is, however, a new thing… And we’re at the brink of being unsure about if we’re in control of our devices, or the machines or some external parties are assuming control about how things in our lives get done…

It’s very important that we have good science journalism to make science results available to the average Joe. And education. When I went to school I learned some facts about the world. And also the scientific process and we got our hands wet with colliding billiard balls and how it’s done to learn something about physics that way… I mean we live in this world where we have these magic slates in our hands which enable me to write this comment. A car or train gets me to work in the morning and it exists because enough people understand science and are able to engineer these things. And I don’t have to die at 35 like people did in the middle-ages before science made its way to medicine… It’d be a shame to lose our scientific skills and lose the advantages of modern life. And first and foremost we’ve grown to something like 8 billion humans on this planet and this is only possible due to scientific advances in agriculture… We certainly need science and a good amount of people to follow it or the world will change drastically.

Yes. I think several clients have open feature requests. The Stalwart documentation has a list of projects. There is one command line client as of now. But I’m not switching to a cli mail client or proprietary software, so I’ve postponed it. We’ll see where this is going.

I welcome these modernization attempts. Though in theory I’d love to see someone revamp email in its entirety, add encryption, signatures, chat and crack down on spam and phishing. Not sure if that’s ever going to happen, but that’d be great, too.

Unfortunately JMAP isn’t supported (yet) by a lot of email clients. I don’t think there’s a good open-source email suite for computers available… But I’ve tried Stalwart as well and it’s really sleek and seems to come with good defaults.

Mostly I can’t be bothered, or Roblox won’t run, or some stereotypes about Linux being difficult.

Thanks! Learned something today. Last time I opened port 53 to the public it didn’t take long and I was sending out several Megabits per second in DNS traffic. Constantly. Mostly querying the same few things. But I guess I had it the wrong way round and that wasn’t the target. Or I’ve seen a different attack type… Guess I can now try again with the new knowledge.

Seems knot-dns has DNSSEC turned on per default. But what’s all the IP addresses in the config for, if not to offer recursive lookup? That enables an amplification attack. I think they’ll do lookups to put strain on other servers, not necessarily your zones.

By the way, when self-hosting open DNS resolvers, add some security measures and monitoring or your shiny new server will mostly deliver DNS amplification attacks to people after a few weeks. That seems to be missing in the config here.

Thanks. I still don’t get it. But I guess that’s alright.

Can someone explain the joke to me?

Isn’t that a body-horror movie with Demi Moore? Is it good, should I watch it? (I mean for the plot, cinematography, horror… not porn crossover scenes)

Nice Thinkpad! I recently installed Linux Mint Debian Edition on one of the more recent Thinkpads. But the other suggestions here are fine as well. Mind an older Laptop with a spinning harddisk inside might not be as snappy as a people expect these days.

Not sure about the guides, but there are entire distributions specifically made for this: https://www.thinstation.org/

I’ve heard they have government-approved VPN providers. And companies there use VPNs for their job. They’ll also do business on platforms which are blocked on the regular Chinese internet. Of course business is guided by the communist party so you might have someone keeping an eye on your company VPN (mis)use. People who went there told me they’re more lenient with foreigners. Your European/American company’s corporate VPN might work well, you might also experience connections being dropped and the Great Firewall messing with it. And there are some attempts at circumventing blockage, like TOR’s Snowflake, though all of this is a cat and mouse game, some (illegal) thing works for a while and then they shut it down and you’ll move to the next one. Though as a citizen of an oppressive regime you’d better think twice before engaging in a cat and mouse game with authorities.

Didn’t they just release their Ryzen AI Software as a preview for Linux? I think that was a few days ago. I don’t know about the benchmarks as of today, but seems they’ve been working on drivers, power reporting, toolkit and have been mainlining stuff into the kernel so the situation improves.

I think CUDA (Nvidia) is still dominating the AI projects out there. The more widespread and in-use projects sometimes have backends for several ecosystems and they’ll run on Nvidia, AMD or Intel or a CPU. Same for the libraries which build the foundation. But not all of them. And most brand-new tech-demos I see, are written for Nvidia’s CUDA. And I’ll have to jump through some hoops to make it work on different hardware and sometimes it works well, sometimes it’s not optimized for anything but Nvidia hardware.

It’d be a really bad situation. I mean we rely on VPNs and tunnels a lot. For half the people doing home-office, logging into the company’s VPN is the first thing in the morning. Field crew relies on them. That’s an additional layer of protection in the ATM of your bank…

It’d wreck half the economy in the process. Or “they” need to outlaw specific things. Like private VPNs. And gather a list of private VPN providers and ban them via a great firewall. That’s possible. And would make life worse in a country. It’s possible to circumvent these measures. And it’s difficult to discern traffic and distinguish VPN traffic from other encrypted traffic so the country might want to implement some harsh measures as well. A police force knocking on people’s doors if they suspect them to evade law and demand they show their computer and smartphones.

So in conclusion your best option is probably to move to a different place if you can afford to, once that becomes reality. (Edit: Maybe your best option is to protest this, do campaigns, call your representative and try to stop it. So we dont get into this situation in the fist place.)