I choose not to think about it or include it in my mental threat model, the same way I choose to not worry about thermonuclear warheads.

If there’s some exploitable backdoor and Intel gets owned, we’re all boned and there’s nothing we can really do about it. I don’t have anti-ballistic-missile systems, and I also don’t have the capability to make an entire hardware/firmware/os from scratch.

So instead focus on the things you can control and are more likely to happen. Don’t plan for doomsday, plan for every day.

It’s not perfect, but the new (2019+) mazda system is very nice. It’s all controlled by buttons and dials, zero requirement to ever touch a screen. It all feels quite thoughtfully done, especially when you compare it to fords or teslas with a big dumb laggy iPad stuck to the dash.

GOAT vehicle. It’s purely functional in pristine egg form. Bulletproof drivetrain. Comfy as hell, even by today’s standards. If one ever comes up on autotrader in good condition I’m buying one.

It sort of does make sense, since it’s how trains work so well! A single locomotive can haul dozens of carriages way more efficiently than putting a single small motor on each carriage. It also has way less aerodynamic losses since the trailer is right in the slipstream for the truck!

The problem is that this also applies within a radius around a “port of entry”. So everybody that lives within about 100 miles of the coast, an airport, or a rail line that crosses a border — which is probably about 80+% of any country.

When you fly on Air Canada there’s a unmutable ad for the Alberta oil sands right after the safety announcement before takeoff. It’s surreal enough, but it’ll be so much worse when they start doing this kind of shit too.

Anecdotal… we drove through rural Ohio a few weeks ago. In several hours of travel we only saw ONE trump sign. The same place in 2016 or 2020 would have been full of them. Regardless of the impact of this, the enthusiasm is dead. There might be “maga guys” on Twitter but they’re largely disengaged in real life.

I wouldn’t put a lot of trust in Telegram. Not only is their cryptography off by default, it’s a bespoke hand-rolled non-standard algorithm that might not work as well as they say. Oh, and it’s been potentially backdoored by the FSB (Russia’s CIA) for six years.

https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/telegram-reportedly-ordered-to-share-encryption-keys-with-fsb/

It’s crazy how the US gov basically handed him a monopoly on EV charging infrastructure, something Rockefeller could have only dreamed of, and the guy throws it away less than two weeks later in some ketamine fuelled stupor. Then has to backtrack at the cost of reputation, confidence, and sentiment. Truly another great stable genius.

So basically the “conventional” generation methods use a Big Thing spinning at a specific speed to generate AC power. Solar and wind spit out DC which has to be converted to AC and also synchronize to the rest of the grid.

Hydroelectric, nuclear, coal, methane, all use a big-ass turbine at exactly 60.00 Hz to supply the grid. This is fairly easy to sync, since a change to load or supply will slightly change the physical rotation of the generators. If the load increases, it will draw down the speed of the turbines as it pulls on it harder. When the load is more than the generators can supply, or changes too quickly, it can cause a breaker to flip to prevent damage to the equipment.

With DC generators, the inverter connected to the grid works differently. It has to sense the frequency changes and react based on “external” factors. Right now there aren’t really widespread protocols to signal this type of grid conditions to solar/wind farms, so they have to be a bit more careful and preemptively disconnect to prevent damaging the inverters.

So it’s an entirely solvable problem. It just requires the industry (and ERCOT) to be proactive…

It’s unlikely but not impossible. I’ve been using PM with a custom domain for about five years now, and never thought too hard about leaving.

In an ideal world, a company like ProtonMail would be cooperatively owned by the workers and paying users, sort of like a credit union.

Pragmatically, they’ve done fine stewardship of the service for the last decade or so they’ve been around. A big part of it is that their value proposition depends on stability and trust. But it could be better.

The bastards can never take away your shell script full of arcane and unreadable curl commands parsed by incomprehensible awk scripts!

In my opinion it points to a more dangerous thing, “continuous delivery” software mindset seeping into safety critical systems.

It’s fine, good even, that web developers can push updates to “prod” in minutes. But imagine if some dork could push largely untested control system updates to your car’s ECU… it’s one thing for a website site to get a couple errors, but it’s a very bad thing if it makes your steering wheel stop working.

Unfinished products make more money, and it’s high time a consumer protection law clamped down on this.

I guess this is the next chapter in the endless middle-east war. The British & French got exactly what they wanted when they drew up those borders. It’s truly tragic how many people are going to die in the next decade because of religious and nationalistic despots and their egos.

I’ve been using Thunderbird with the OWL and TBSync plugins for exchange for years with good results. Obviously some things won’t work (teams integration, provisioned signatures, mail merge, etc) but it’s good enough that I only need proper outlook/OWA less than once a month.

Another option is “installing” the webapp as a PWA. I tried that for a bit but found notifications to be unreliable.

It’s fine. RAID is not a backup. I’ve been running simple mirrors for many years and never lost data because I have multiple backups. Focus on offsite and resilient backups, not how many drives can fail in your primary storage device.

Not sure how to do that in docker, I’ve run mine as a plain old PHP-FPM site for years and years. It might be something that can be tweaked using config files or environment variables, or might require building a custom image.

ClamAV is slow and doesn’t catch the nastiest of malware. Its entire approach is stuck in 2008. It’s better than nothing for screening emails, but for a private file store it won’t help much considering that you’ll already have the files on your system somewhere. And most importantly, it slows down file uploads 10x and increases CPU load substantially. The only good reason to use ClamAV for nextcloud is if you will be sued if you don’t!

It needs some tweaks to be snappy. The defaults are really bad.

• change database from SQLite to a proper database like MySQL or Postgres, and configure the database server to use your memory fully
• increase the PHP memory limit from the default (128M on many distros) to >1G, the more the better
• install APCu in-memory cache for PHP
• add Redis as additional cache
• turn off the antivirus extension, if installed (ClamAV is useless)
• use http/2 on Apache/nginx to increase performance with multiple connections

https://docbot.onetwoseven.one/services/nextcloud/

They’re not going to jail for you. Never assume a service provider will put themselves at risk on your behalf.

Gonna paint this on my roof to break some spy satellites