stupid_asshole69 [none/use name]

MONEY can be spent on GOODS or SERVICES

Nah they’re right.

.mpreg uses a sophisticated algorithm to identify repeated sections of the compressed file and retain only one of each part with a list of pointers to where they go. The single repeated sections are stored inside the end of the file and during the decompression process they’re inflated and passed out of the end of the file (or removed from the file by cutting into the bitstream at their stored location where they’re inflating).

It’s a new technology that has made traditional file creation kind of obsolete. In about a decade there will probably only be mpreg.

Youre working at this from the wrong angle.

You dont know how to judge if something bad has happened. You dont know what to do if something bad had happened. You dont know how to recover from something bad that may have happened.

You do know that something has happened because the computer is exhibiting different behavior now.

You cant know what happened and it’s not worth the time for you to develop the skills and tools to understand or even be able to use systems like virustotal et.al. which might provide some insight.

Stop using that computer. Turn it off.

If you don’t know where your data is saved, figure it out. If you determine that you want to save data off that computer, pull the drive and order a usb to sata or m2 adapter, whatever the drive is. Plug the drive into the adapter and attach it to a different computer, copy only what you need.

Do you have a way to reinstall windows? If not, go to massgrave.dev and figure it out then reinstall windows.

Do you have some system for backing up your computers? Go ahead and test it out now. If you don’t have a system, decide on one. It could be as simple as an external drive you plug in once a week and as elaborate as you like.

Now you have recovered from whatever happened and you have a system and toolkit for dealing with it if it happens again.

First of all: get rid of the broken ones. You’re not doing anything with the running systems, so there’s no need to hang on to the ones that don’t run.

Next, make a list of the things you want to do and start doing them.

If you’re worried about power consumption, don’t be. If you’re still worried about power consumption, get an inline watt meter (a kill-a-watt), take some measurements, do the math and feel at ease. If you don’t feel at ease, look up wake on lan. You can have powered down computers turn back on when they get a packet so you don’t need to worry about power consumption.

When you feel like you’ve done enough stuff, get rid of the computers you’re not using.

Atop, btop, htop, top.

If that’s not good enough sar.

If that’s not good enough, set up cacti.

When you realize none of that stuff is actually helping you, journalctl and grep.

The zone has become dangerous

I have both and I use both.

The big benefit from mullvad is that you can get anonymous much easier, it’s easier to ditch an account and it’s harder for you to screw it up. People get mad about proton turning over metadata to authorities or suspending account access but they’re required to do that by law if they can identify the accounts. The structure of what proton offers requires that they have some way of verifying who a user is, so if you’re okay with being able to be identified if someone really tries (or doesn’t really try that hard if you give them payment information or something) then proton is fine for you.

Air is a good cheap vpn for piracy. If you wanna take the maybe smarter route of using separate services for your own privacy and for piracy that’s what I’d do.

No, also the browser is the thing that gets breached. It would be like bricking up all your windows so no one could break them and get in your house but only having a screen door in front.

Yes technically the browser alone is a “reduced attack surface”, but it’s reduced by .001%.

Switch to 21h2 ltsc iot.

Everyone, make sure to reply to this person instead of just downvoting their comments.

It’s your responsibility to manage their feelings, not their responsibility to use an instance without downvotes, or even turn off downvotes in their own control panel.

What router?

Point Shodan or grey noise or something at your public ip. Find your public ip by disabling your computers vpn, asking google what your public ip is then comparing that to the address shown at your routers wan interface.

Another person said to just update it. Just update it. But before you do:

Look at freshtomato, openwrt, pfsense etc to see if any of the open firmwares support your hardware. You may like them better.

About the best you can do without opening it up, finding a uart and watching is to put a device you control between it and the isp device.

Don’t worry about swap, you’ll be fine unless you’re usually working with huge chunks of data like big 4k video files or something.

The firewall built into mint is the kernels included nftables the same one built into Debian and Ubuntu (I think, I don’t fw Ubuntu). It’s fine. Don’t touch it. When you need to mess with it you can figure out how to open ports or split routes or whatever really easy because there’s lots of documentation out there.

Putting everything in your home folder is fine. Programs will install automatically to /bin or /usr/bin or something like that and if you want them in your home directory you could make a ~/.bin/ directory and add it to your path and have your private programs there, but:

Stop using flatpaks or snaps unless it’s your only choice! You have a built in package manager with decades of testing and development behind it and a very capable team of maintainers who watch over the packages, use that instead! That’s why they say not to use the snap store, it’s a vector for using Joes Weird Program that no one has tried before and requires Joes Special Version of a normal system library.

Use your package manager.

You’re not at the point where you understand enough to do the stuff in the linux hardening guide without making decisions that unexpectedly cause you pain somehow. That’s not an insult, sometimes you just don’t recognize the “universal” symbols for engine oil as opposed to coolant and ruin your car by the side of the road because you just don’t know. You can learn that stuff later, but it’s best not to mess with it yet. Speaking of:

If you don’t have a backup solution setup and you haven’t recovered using it and aren’t periodically checking to make sure it’s still running right, turn off disk encryption. It’s much harder, sometimes impossible, to recover data off an encrypted disk. If you don’t have a backup and you don’t know how you’d access the files on the disk without booting the computer then turn disk encryption off.

Have you considered confirmation bias?

It’s rambutan season and you saw an ad for rambutans. You haven’t mentioned that seeing the ad was weird so I gotta assume you see other ads they’re just not related to something that you searched for recently or something you recognize as being related to something you searched for recently.

Everyone, the ops post has been edited and is clear.

Thank you for your attention in this matter.

Man, they out here spackin any old game nowadays.

Op if you like Goldberg so much why don’t you get tazed?

Tell me too, I want to spack my game!

To go a little further, I used the example of heroin and machine guns in my other reply, but there are lots of countries where people licensed to use these (or technology that’s similar like oxycontin) are allowed or there exist analogs (like bump stocks or binary triggers) that avoid the law.

Heck, in the us any knucklehead can get on the good boy list for heroin or machine guns they just need to pass a bunch of checks and submit to a series of audits and inspections.

The point of banning vpn use would be to keep people from using the technology to skirt identity laws, not to prevent the use of the technology altogether, so it’s likely any ban would take the form of legal wording that looks like “use of computer networking technology to conceal ones identity or aid or abet or perpetrate any crime is unlawful under this section.”

So again, yes they absolutely can do it and no it wouldn’t mean corporations would suddenly have to turn in all their edge devices.

I’m really surprised that on this instance no one has replied with the “laws are threats made by the dominant social economic class” copypasta. Fake ahh anarchists…

Set up some computer with a pair of nics to run pfsense. Get two wireless routers that are supported by openwrt/tomato/whatever. Get a switch that operates at the highest link rate in your network. Plug it all up and configure the two wireless routers to operate their wireless network as either access point&wds or wds, I can’t remember which.

If you have the money to buy a synology of some sort squared away, here’s how to make something better(?) for a fraction of the price:

Buy a used drive shelf. It’s the part in a server rack with all the drives in it. It plugs into a sas card to move data around and into a network switch to be managed. Get one with all the drive sleds present - $2-3 hundred for one that can take about 24 3.5” drives.

Buy some cheap sff pc. These things are everywhere and they have all you need for a little server. Favor cores over threads, 16gb of ram is more than enough but you can easily add more later. anything in the seventh or eighth generation of intel chips or later is fine. ~$30

If your sff pc has a second Ethernet port, that’s cool! It’s okay if it doesn’t, but if you want the option of a management subnet then you can add one in a half height pcie for almost no money.

Another option is a video card to handle decoding media. When you stream some crap to your tv or set top box or whatever, it needs to be decoded. Most of the time those CPUs are tough enough to do the job but for 4 or 8k media using recent encoding schemes, a half height video card is useful. What’s nice here is media decoding is insanely solved as a problem, so a $50 card will be overkill as long as it natively supports your target formats.

Buy a hba card and the wires to connect it to your drive shelf. You want a half height hba with external connectors that are the same or later in spec than your drive shelf. You can get sas wires that are terminated for 80xx on one end and 86xx on the other end. $50-100 for the card, $20 for the wires.

Plug it all up, put in your drives, install whatever dumb software you wanna use and you’re off to the races with the capacity to use 24 disks for 300-450.

The downside:

You have to have somewhere to put it. You’d need somewhere to put your synology too, but a relatively quietly humming shelf of drives that would look more at home in an industrial environment belongs in the closet, not on the same credenza some people like to put their synology.

You’re actually responsible for it. There are fewer guardrails and if you don’t make backups you can just lose data or end up with a broken system. You’re already using a system you’re responsible for though, so this would just be a bigger better version of what you have that doesn’t go into conniptions like rpi type beats does.

Do update first, do dist-upgrade.

Stop using kali.