DigitalDilemma

Absolutely.

These services are also used by many governments around the world and considered critical infrastructure.

Terrifying, right?

Canonical is UK based, so scrub that.

But Redhat, Rocky, Alma are all owned by US legal entities and can absolutely be legally forced to do as you describe.

Technically blocked is something else, mind. We’re clever, resourceful and motivated people and US laws wouldn’t directly affect us.

However - you’re thinking small. US influence of IT is massive. Routers, servers, hardware of all levels. The most enterprise level software is US led. All of these things can be restricted, or tarriffed heavily, or sanctioned entirely. If the US wants to hurt the rest of the world, it just has to tell Broadcom to turn off vmware outside of America. Ditto Cisco, Ditto Dell, Ditto… etc etc. Sure, it would be illegal, but does the American government care about that?

Anyone telling you that “Y won’t happen because it’s unthinkable” clearly hasn’t been paying attention this year.

Coo - I’m a big David Mitchell fan and never even heard of this. Thank you.

Hopefully some of the 87 million eligible voters who stayed at home in the 2024 elections might have realised that voting does matter, and does change their life.

I’m not going to answer your question directly - others have done that already.

I will say that, as an older man, my brain has thrown up random things from my childhood multiple time, so the same may happen for you. I’m no psychologist, and I’m also late-diagnosed autistic, but it seems that the brain can lock away memories from that period because it didn’t know how to process them. Then, much later in life, it’ll dig one up, dust it off, and put it at the forefront of your mind and say, “Go on then, you’re all grown up and know so much now, what about this then?”

This has happened to me at times of trauma (like I didn’t have enough to deal with at that time already - and may be the same for you with your OCD), but also at times of peace. I had a traumatic childhood which I won’t go into, but it’s provided a rich seam of suppressed and painful memories to randomly spit out and obsess over throughout my life.

I think my point in writing this is… Just to say that you’re not alone in having random thoughts from your past take over, and that overall I don’t think it means much that it’s come back to mind.

This is what I don’t understand about Americans.

You literally have a large percentage of your population who carry guns and prepare for civil war because you don’t trust your government or police. Yet here we are, with every sign an indication that exactly what these people have prepared for is actually happening and… where are they?

We’re seeing lots of peaceful protests, but where are the nutters?

ChatGPT

You’re welcome.

Yes, you can create a list of files that takes little space, in linux that’s just “tree” to produce a list of directories and files (I don’t know about Windows, sorry)

But only you can answer what you need to back up. If you judge the effort to re-download this data is more than the effort of backing it up (especially if you’re on a slow link), then backing it up makes more sense. Everyone has their own appetite for risk and their own shape of what they can spend in both time and money in sorting this. The important thing is that you’re thinking about it before you need it, that’s good!

A pet subject of mine.

Firstly - sit down and consider what you need to backup.

• Tier 1 - unique data. Stuff you created that doesn’t exist elsewhere.
• Tier 2 - Stuff that would take a few days to repeat. Local configs, etc.
• Tier 3 - Stuff you can just download again. (Steam library, media etc)

Don’t backup Tier 3. I’m betting the size of data you need to back up shrinks a lot.

Secondly - automate it. If there’s anything manual, then you’ll eventually stop doing it. Automate, automate, automate - and throw in some manual or automated checks of the backups to verify they’re actually usable.

Thirdly - airgap it if you can, and if there’s much Tier 1 data. Offline disks. This gives you some protection against ransomware. Consider the risks and how to protect yourself. Obviously media failure, accidental deletion and ransomware, but also consider theft and fire. Do you really want your backups in the same location? Do they need encryption?

I wrote quite a long blog on the subject if you’re interested in more.

Kind of - a personal website that I post articles on for various things. I like to share what I’ve learned, but it never gets much interest and less now. It’s something I’ve been doing in various forms for over two decades.

“Good” or “trust my life with”? The two can be mutually exclusive. If I was in the wrong, would a good person defend me?

I’ve met a few people with genuinely good morals in my life. They do exist and are almost incorruptible. Most people are flexible in that we can make justifications for almost anything.

You’re right, but sometimes you need someone to hold the other end of the rope when you lower yourself over a cliff.

They are literally undermining human rights, including the rights of LGBTQ people.

There’s a new country to add to this list from this year.

deleted by creator

“Surely you can’t be serious.”

A real passion project.

Good on you!

he people making these decisions have no idea what life is like for a poor person.

It’s worse than that, they actively despise anyone who isn’t at least a millionaire.

They’ve been very blatant about that, and it reflects every single action they’ve taken since getting office.

Debian stable is as hassle-free as you’ll get.

It sounds like your issue is more with having to migrate to a new laptop. Firstly - buy laptops that are more linux compatible and you’ll have fewer niggles like with sound, suspend and drivers.

Secondly - use “dpkg --get-selections” and “–set-selections” to transfer your list of installed software across to your new laptop. Combined with transferring your /home directory, user migration can be speeded up.

No, because it never was.

Kids confused it with good because it was the equivalent of running around an abandoned building throwing dog shit and broken glass at each other while spraying paint on the walls, because no adults told them not to. But when you tire of that, it’s just an empty husk full of dog shit and glass.

Special interest forums still hold.

For me, the Royal Enfield motorbike forums are exceptionally good, and that’s largely down to the admin. There’s also a Series 2 Land Rover forum that has a unique collection of people with a phenomenal combined knowledge about that car.

I’ve hosted a few in my time - since the early 90s and Fidonet when BBSs were the thing. But things change. Facebook killed of a whole bunch way before Reddit and Lemmy just because that’s where people were already, and it was easier for them to feel involved. Facebook is impossible to search, though, so the post history of a forum that was so useful has gone entirely.

It’s sad, but things change. What’s constant is people’s desire to socialise and discuss topics they are interested in. I’m kind of curious what that will be next.