For me if Christmas eve is a Monday we usually get the whole Monday off, if it’s later in the week we only get a half day. We get from Christmas eve 12 noon to January 1 off normally

ISP around me had policies like “we can provide Usenet except for the binaries trees”

Gen X here. I agree torrents are for legit uses only

Usenet is the best for piracy

Removed by mod

I think in 2001 I was making a Linux from scratch system having not gotten enough from red hat and Debian with home configured and compiled kernels

Fun times and no, nothing like the commercial home operating systems back then

A hundred more on a thousand dollar device sounds exactly like the 10% duty we pay on things we import

I used to really like an apple turnover. Warm, with cream

I occasionally accidentally open the fandom page for a game on Chrome with no ad block (which I keep around for Google apps) and it’s unusable. Go there on Firefox with ublock origin and it’s fine

And there’s worse sites than that

Download sites for things like Minecraft mods have several competing “download” buttons without ad block

It’s nuts people might accept these, let alone want them

Whole reimplementations have survived. IBM BIOS was the only original BIOS for PCs. Phoenix Technologies had a team read the source code for IBM BIOS (it was published in the user manual for troubleshooting) and wrote a specification for it which a different team wrote software from, making IBM compatible machines possible

I don’t know what law an emulator could be killed under, unless a license holder breached the user license as part of the development

It just was not much different to 98 and had less good UI

keyboard layout resets

Most people don’t care as they only have one layout. You and me are odd. I usually set my preferred layout as default

It’s going to annoy me. I keep the task bar on the bottom on my machine and on the side for remote/virtual machines

I wouldn’t, but only because I enjoy writing, even for email

I have a friend who’s a new PM (in scaled agile). He isn’t up on expectation management.

We have a process where we request data from another agency which takes “from 7 seconds to 12 days”

And of course he tells people that. And of course they hear “7 seconds”

I have told him that if the SLA is 12 days, say “less than 12 days”

You can keep secrets from the future. Future decryption won’t help government see what you did in the now, the logs don’t store the encrypted payload, only the end points and the user/ip

Your ISP sees the connection to news.usenetserver.com and if they cared could get a court order to get your data from them. They can compel you to release your username and password.

You also need to protect yourself against future law and enforcement

I know that government prosecutions for fraud against government use IP addresses

The IP address identifies the company or home the fraud was done from, the account the money went to identifies the individual

If breaking the law and able to afford to make it difficult for prosecutors, it’s probably best to make it difficult for the prosecutors, we may have an activist pro copyright holder government in future and logs are forever (or 5 years)

It seems trivial for the US government to tie data into TOR to data out. If you’re hiding things that government is willing to spend effort seeking, it’s not safe.

Is your home machine, your phone, better protected than the VPN servers? I bet you’re not as good at IT security as the IT security staff VPN companies hire

If your threat model includes nation state actors, you’re best off not using networked computers

As much as people hate Musk, Tesla is unusual in that they allow you to opt out of all connectivity. Get no updates, send no video, audio, or data to the company