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Father of boy killed by school shooter asks for harshest penalty | School shooter Ethan Crumbley to be sentenced for Oxford, Michigan

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He killed four of his classmates and wounded seven others. 15 years old is old enough to know how terrible the impact of his actions would be. There is certainly more that we as a society could have done to help him with his mental illness, but that does not erase his agency and make him not responsible for his crimes. He has more than earned his punishment.

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How do I wipe a modern SSD to prevent data recovery?

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No. Modern SSDs are quite sophisticated in how they handle wear leveling and are, for the most part, black boxes.

SSDs maintain a mapping of logical blocks (what your OS sees) to physical blocks (where the data is physically stored on the flash chips). For instance, when your computer writes to the logical block address 100, the SSD might map that to a physical block address of 200 (this is a very simplified). If you overwrite logical block address 100 again, the SSD might write to physical block address 300 and remap it, while not touching the data at physical block address 200. This let's you avoid wearing out a particular part of the flash memory and instead spread the load out. It also means that someone could potentially rip the flash chips off the SSD, read them directly, and see data you thought was overwritten.

You can't just overwrite the entire SSD either because most SSDs overprovision, e.g. physically have more storage than they report. This is for wear leveling and increased life span of the SSD. If you overwrite the entire SSD, there may be physical flash that was not being overwritten. You can try overwriting the drive multiple times, but because SSDs are black boxes, you can't be 100% sure how it handles wear leveling and that all the data was actually overwritten.

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Introducing Raspberry Pi 5

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USB 2 is 480 Mb/s, not 480 MB/s. 480 Mb/s is 60 MB/s, so the 500 MB/s from PCIe 2.0 x1 is quite a bit faster and is about the limit of what a SATA 3 interface could do. Also, sequential throughput isn't nearly as important as most people think. Random IO, which NVMe drives excel at, will make a far more noticeable impact on real world performance.

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does buying on a shady key shop website benefit the developers over piracy?

It can be. Some of those keys might just taking advantage of regional pricing to buy keys in cheaper markets and resell them elsewhere, but some of them are purchased using stolen credit cards. Those actually cost the devs money from chargeback fees once the actually owner of the credit cards finds the fraudulent transactions. It's hard to say how many of them are from stolen credit cards, and key-resellers try to stop it, but it still happens. This was back in 2019, but the Factorio devs had a couple blog posts talking about G2A:

Blog post saying G2A is worse than piracy

Follow up blog post where G2A reimburses them (at very bottom)

linux

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Systemd timer unit

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the timer has no idea if it was triggered during last boot. It only has the context of "this" boot, so it will do it right after a reboot and set a timer to start the service again after a week of uptime.

This is not correct. Persistent=true saves the last time the timer was run on disk. From the systemd.timer man page:

Takes a boolean argument. If true, the time when the service unit was last triggered is stored on disk. When the timer is activated, the service unit is triggered immediately if it would have been triggered at least once during the time when the timer was inactive.

OP needs to remove Requires=backup.service from the [Unit] section so it stops running it when it start the timer on boot.

linux

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Best practices in mounting NAS shares?

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Well, for one, it's network attached storage. If it's not present in the network for one reason or another, guess what, your OS doesn't boot... or it errors during boot, depending on how the kernel was compiled and what switches your bootloader sends to the kernel during boot.

Just use nofail in the fstab.

Second, this is an easy way for malware to spread, especially if it's set to run after user logon.

If your fileshare is accessible to you, it is also accessible to malware running as your user. Mounting the share via a filemanager doesn't change this.

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Please recommend your cheaper, reliable SSDs 2TB+ (4TB ideal)

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  • SLC -> Single-Level Cell, i.e. 1 bit per cell
  • MLC -> Multi-Level Cell, i.e. 2 bits per cell
  • TLC -> Triple-Level Cell, i.e. 3 bits per cell
  • QLC -> Quad-Level Cell, i.e. 4 bits per cell

The more bits per cell you store, the more dense and therefore cheaper your flash chips can be for a give capacity. The downside is that it is slower and less reliable since you have to be able to write and read exponentially more voltage states per cell, e.g. 2 states for SLC, 4 states for MLC, 8 states for TLC, etc.

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Framework’s new desktop is mini ITX

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I pre-ordered the 128GB SKU in the second wave. Soldered RAM doesn't matter to me if I am already maxing out what the platform is capable of. If I can dynamically configure the memory allocation between the CPU and GPU, this will be an extremely potent little AI workstation. I'll be able to cancel the pre-order of things aren't what I expect, and it isn't much of a loss for me ($100 refundable deposit).

I do agree that this branching away from Framework's roots, but I am still very happy that they are doing interesting things. I've always thought that what Minisforum has been doing with their SFF workstations has awesome, so I'm glad to see other companies wading into the same space.

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Friday Facts #398 - Fulgora

I feel like lightning rods are going to be needed on this planet to protect your factory, but you will also be able to use them to generate electricity. The alien ruins are also interesting. I wonder if they will be required for research on this planet, as in you need to explore a little and find/fix an alien research building, or deconstruct them for artifacts. I also wonder what kinds of enemies you might find here? Ancient, self-replicating robots defending their long-gone masters from foreign invaders you?