Yeah, it’s definitely a problem, and genetic information could end up getting linked. Even if a person thinks they might not have DNA in any existing database, whether criminal, medical, or otherwise, there’s no telling what might happen in the future. I can think of a few different ways a person might involuntarily, through no fault of theirs, get their DNA forcibly taken with no legal recourse.

Every path here will have some tradeoffs. But the odds of getting linked are probably much lower outside your home country.

I voted you down because HIPAA absolutely does include privacy provisions, and requires written consent for data use in the way I described above.

My best recommendation would be to go to a testing lab and provide a fake name. It should work. I’ve never been ID’d at any doctor’s office, and one time did even receive healthcare under a fake name with no trouble. Of course, that means your insurance won’t cover anything, but that’s the unfortunate reality of US healthcare. Also, they probably won’t delete your data. HIPAA includes no right to be forgotten, and in some cases, may even mandate retention for several years.

Sorry I don’t have a better solution. I think your best bet is to distance this genetic data as much as possible from your real identity.

Alternately, you could try going somewhere outside the US.

I completely agree that HIPAA is dead. One time when I went to a new doctor’s office, totally unaffiliated with any doctor I’d ever seen before, the doctor instantly pulled all my medical records from several other places. They didn’t even get my verbal permission; they just did it. If that’s the level of security on these databases, and doctors are allowed to access them on old unsupported Windows computers, then it’s almost certain that the databases have tons of undetected data breaches. They’ve probably been scraped completely by multiple attackers.

If you want to get a fair price at Dominos, you have to play their game. At least look through the website for special offers on pizza, because the “menu prices” are 2.5x higher than the average price a person pays. After that, if you still want a lower price, search the Internet for coupons (although that doesn’t work as well nowadays since they use account-locked rewards systems instead of coupons).

Even if you play the game, it will still be more expensive than you remember, due to massive inflation.

I don’t go to Dominos any more due to repeated bad customer service, their website malfunctioning in a lot of ways, and the last time I visited the store it smelled strongly like ammonia.

I cannot recommend any USB-connected drive for long-term use. (Only for portable devices that get plugged in for a little while at a time.) In the long term, any USB drive will randomly reset during periods of heavy use – including heavy writes, meaning some data will get lost.

USB enclosures tend to just crap out completely after a year or two, if used continuously on a server. I know because I twice used 1TB external drives with OpenWRT (home router) devices. The data will be safe on the drive, but you’ll have to replace the enclosure.

1. My first recommendation would be to look very carefully at the chassis and see if there’s any way at all to fit another SSD inside it. 2.5" SSD’s are usually thinner than 2.5" hard drives, so it may be possible, and most motherboards have more SATA ports than they need.

Is there possibly an NVMe slot on the motherboard? Or an open PCIe slot where you could put an NVMe adapter?

2. My second recommendation would be using a 2.5" hard drive. Newegg has a 5TB one for $135, but unfortunately that’s as large as they seem to go. It will be a bit slower than an SSD, but still probably around 150MB/s for sequential access.

3. My third recommendation, if money is really tight, would be an additional server, with a large 3.5" hard drive. This will be a lot cheaper than an 8TB SSD, but adds complexity, electricity use, space use, and possibly fan noise.

What do you expect them to say? That they’re proud of this guy? Even though he’s clearly a madman?

I know IRL gun nuts, and none of them would identify with this person. Also, none of them subscribe to the fallacy/straw-man of a “good guy with a gun”. The ones who carry concealed would remind you that they are carrying for themselves, not for you. If you find an active shooter in a mall, you can count on them… to run away.

Skillful gun nuts know that shooting defensively is never worth the legal hassle unless it saves your life (or a family member’s life).

The shooter in this article is nothing like any of the gun nuts I’ve ever met. This shooter is another Kyle Rittenhouse, someone anxious for a chance to kill a person and get away with it under the excuse of defense.

Palestine has a right to exist.

I fucking guarantee that Linus Torvalds DOES believe in cryptography. Stop calling cryptocurrency “crypto”, because “crypto” is short for cryptography, not cryptocurrency.

Why is the antivirus software detecting my Cortex-M3 binaries as dangerous to an amd64 computer? Happens on Windows 7 through Windows 10, across 3 different employers.

And how do I submit my builds to Virus Total if they’re getting deleted as soon as they come out of the linker?

Themselves. It’s a civil war. The military in Burma/Myanmar has been out of control for many decades. Currently, the military controls the country, after overthrowing the 2020 democratically elected government.

People there are probably avoiding conscription not because they fear the danger of war, but because they disagree with the military’s position, and don’t want to have to kill peaceful protesters.

Why does the article call the people held by Israel “prisoners”, but the people held by Palestine “hostages”?

I agree with this sentiment. Steam notably falls into the third category, while otherwise being pretty good.

But I’m quite disgusted now seeing an image of a Yubikey for the first time. I’ve heard so many good things about them that it’s a major disappointment to see now that they use that awful noncomplaint shape of USB plug.

There are two very important reasons for the metal shield around USB plugs: 1. For ESD protection, and 2. to hold the receptacle’s tongue in place and prevent it from bending away and losing contact. Every USB device I’ve owned that was a flat plug (like this Yubikey image in this post) has within a month deformed the USB receptacle it’s plugged into to the point that the device no longer works in that port. Compliant USB devices still work in that port’s deformed receptacle, because they have a correct metal shield that bends the tongue back into the correct position.

Haha. I sent them an opt-out notice by email, and it bounced!

They are using Google email servers for discord .com and Google has apparently shadowbanned me. It gives an error message saying “The account [my email address] is disabled.” but I have never created a Google or Gmail account, and my email address is on a domain not associated with Google at all.

So I’ve completed my obligation to opt-out. Discord will have no record of it, but I have the email server logs to prove I sent it.

If, in the future, anyone needs to sue Discord and forgot to opt-out, feel free to use this same excuse.

Heat is now probably present in the Sun, NASA says.

This looks like the kind of game I’d love to play, if it wasn’t Windows-only.

I thought the trailer music was kinda funny, a bit too dramatic for the gameplay which looked more technical.

Microsoft has enforced mandatory digital signatures for drivers, and getting a digital signing key from Microsoft costs a ton of money. So, presumably they do care.

In contrast, consider nProtect GameGuard, the anti-cheat system in Helldivers 2. It is a rootkit, and runs in the kernel. Why does Microsoft permit this? Shouldn’t this be blocked? It must be using either an exploit like the article, or a properly signed driver. Either way, Microsoft could fix it – by patching the exploit, or revoking the signing key.

The fact that Microsoft hasn’t done anything about malicious anticheat rootkits is a sign that they really don’t care. They just want their payment.

Using a VPN (like Tailscale or Netbird) will make setup very easy, but probably a bit slower, because they probably connect through the VPN service’s infrastructure.

My recommended approach would be to use a directly connected VPN, like OpenVPN, that just has two nodes on it – your VPS, and your home server. This will bypass the potentially slow infrastructure of a commercial VPN service. Then, use iptables rules to have the VPS forward the relevant connections (TCP port 80/443 for the web apps, TCP/UDP port 25565 for Minecraft, etc.) to the home server’s OpenVPN IP address.

My second recommended approach would be to use a program like openbsd-inetd on your VPS to forward all relevant connections to your real IP address. Then, open those ports on your home connection, but only for the VPS’s IP address. If some random person tries to portscan you, they will see closed ports.

How would me joining a union help with the Amazon problem? My pay and benefits (and my coworkers’ pay and benefits, to the extent of my knowledge) are very good, so we don’t currently need a union. My job is completely unrelated to Amazon, and my employer isn’t a customer of Amazon or its competitors.

I’m not going to stop complaining about Amazon.

Nobody’s saying to host it on-premises. The SaaSS article is advocating running software that you control on servers that you control. That’s it. The server is likely in a datacenter, and its hardware could be owned by the datacenter, the customer, or someone else. It could be a virtualized host.

The SaaSS article is about software and services, not hardware.

According to the repo, it builds fine on Linux. They just don’t distribute a binary for it.

https://github.com/intel/openvino-plugins-ai-audacity/issues/27