Spyke

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Stop children using VPNs to watch porn, ministers told

Do the government ministers understand that setting up your own VPN is literally a 5 minute operation.

Hire a droplet VM, pre-installed with a server OS. Log in with provided credentials. sudo apt install docker Copy/paste a docker compose file that sets up a wg-easy container. Create a peer. Take a picture of the provided QR code. Connect to the server via a wireguard app. Done.

Are they going to ban VMs?

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What was the incident in your school?

A kid in our high school went on national news and said he could procure weed in the school in less than 3 minutes. He then proved it. Made national headlines and became a big topic in parliament.

Of course they went looking for the stoner, found him, and then asked him to source the source of what made him stoned. Kinda self-explanatory but the news didn’t seem to think so.

Oh, and in primary school, I think I was “the incident”. I hacked the schools computer network and made all PCs boot into a message that read “Teachers are dumb”. It really wasn’t very sophisticated, at all, but shut the computers down for a week while they had “experts” in to clean them up.

When I told the expert that having the PCs optionally boot from floppy and this allowed me full access to all the PCs, including the control server through which they distributed autoexec.bat updates to them all … well he sold me like I was some kind of sophisticated wiz-kid that needed containment. I got a life time ban from the computer labs. The kid that squeeled on was ostracised by everyone else (I had made up with him quite quickly, I knew I shouldn’t have told him and sort of blamed myself).

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*Permanently Deleted*

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I’ve got four kids. I work 50-60 hour weeks. I travel for work. I’ve got a lawn. Yes I’ve got a fucking robot mower. One of the best buys I ever did. Anything that buys me 1.5hrs a week is worth its weight in gold.

Maybe you’re just not the target market for robot mowers.

Also, a hedgehog shredder?!

We’ve got a garden full of hedgehogs. See one at least twice a week. I run the mower during the day, twice a week. If it bumps into the smallest thing it stops. I’ve literally never ever seen a hedgehog come to harm. Do you know how these contraptions actually work?

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One in five Britons would consider voting for a new left-wing party, rising to one in three young people and Labour voters

Until we move away from FPTP, new parties are as much a risk as they are a boon.

And then, yes, big parties change when little parties threaten them (UKIP vs Tory, classic example) but wouldn’t it just be so much easier if you knew your vote wouldn’t be wasted and you could express your opinion freely in the voting booth and expect to see results in parliament?

It’s no wonder people feel disconnected from politics in the UK.

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Green MP spots banned cluster bombs at London arms fair

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Cluster munitions has a clear definition. It acquired a clear definition when the treaty was drafted. Cluster munitions release a … cluster (group) of smaller munitions that themselves explode on impact:

conventional munition that is designed to disperse or release explosive submunitions each weighing less than 20 kilograms, and includes those explosive submunitions. Submunition is a conventional munition that in order to perform its task is dispersed or released by a cluster munition and is designed to function by detonating an explosive charge prior to, on or after impact.”

Fragmentation munitions break apart and the fragments cause death and destruction.

If someone claims that she’s seen cluster munitions that were outlawed, she’s claiming to have seen cluster munitions that were outlawed, not fragmentation munitions. We may not like either, I certainly don’t, but one type is out of use in signatory countries and another type is not.

The picture she’s used it’s actually not even munitions, it’s fuzes, ie the thing that makes munitions detonate.

And in full detail, cluster munitions are still “legal” in signatory countries, provided the submunitions self-detonate after a time. The Oslo treaty was designed to prevent civilians, children especially, picking up unexploded submunitions. It wasn’t designed to prevent death and destruction in a military target.

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The UK’s Online Safety Act is a licence for censorship – and the rest of the world is following suit

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FWIW, Denmark has had this digital infrastructure in the last 10 years and it’s been the foundation of a huge transformation in terms of how people interact with the government services.

It’s also extremely privacy preserving and while Denmark is actually moving forward with an age proving infrastructure like Britain, it’s designed with zero knowledge proofs so literally no-one knows where you have proved your age.

I don’t have a problem with the infrastructure. I have a problem with how Britain designs and uses the infrastructure.

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Green MP spots banned cluster bombs at London arms fair

She may have seen cluster munitions at the fare.

But that picture shows an 84 mm combined impact/time fuze for a M-84 Carl Gustav recoilless rifle round and an 81 mm fuze tip for a 81 mm mortar round. The timed fuze is quite nasty - you set it for distance (by flight time) with a view to have it detonate above or to the side of infantry under cover.

Neither if these are cluster munitions, however. I’ve used both back in my army days.

So if that picture is her proof she’s at best misguided.

I can’t wait to get downvoted for facts.

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The AI company Perplexity is complaining their bots can't bypass Cloudflare's firewall

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They’re not. They’re using this as an excuse to become paid gatekeepers of the internet as we know it. All that’s happening is that Cloudflare is using this to menuever into position where they can say “nice traffic you’ve got there - would be a shame if something happened to it”.

AI companies are crap.

What Cloudflare is doing here is also crap.

And we’re cheering it on.

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Forråd

Dansker i U.K. her, så ved ikke om det gælder.

Jeg er ikke prepper. Bryder mig ikke om udtrykket.

Jeg er dog forberedt til en krise. Det er rettidig omhu. Det største sted folk tager fejl, i mine øjne, i forhold til at være kriseforberedt, er at de tænker på nogle kritiske ting og glemmer alle andre kritiske ting.

Jeg har med fordel skiftet mit åsyn på forberedelse, så jeg nu tænker “dage”. Hvor mange dage kan vi klare os hvis der opstår en forsyningskrise?

Jeg forbereder mig ikke på zombies, eller total nedbrydelse af vores samfund.

Men vi er klar til 10 dage, ca. 10 dage uden vand, 10 dage uden elektricitet. 10 dage uden madforsyning. 10 dage uden gas-varme (ingen fjernevarme her i U.K.; her bruges der udelukkende gas - 95% - og varmepumper - 5%). Nogle ting kan holde længere, men jeg sætter mit fokus på 10 dage og sikrer mig at vi har det vi skal bruge, af alle kategorier.

Vi er 6 i familien. Vi har tørfoder, vi har vand, vi har batteri, solceller og benzin-drevet top-up generator, vi har gas og campingkøkken, et lager af sorte affaldssække til at sætte i toilettet, presenninger, nødradio, lommelygter, medicinlager osv.

Min store fortrydelse er at jeg købte en benzin generator, i stedet for en gas generator. Gas kan holde sig for evigt, næsten, men selv med konserveringsmidler skal mit benzin lager (det lyder lidt størrere end det er, jeg har to tanke og samlet 20L) udskiftes hvert andet år. Det går nok, jeg iblander det i bilens sammen med nyt benzin men det er lidt træls at skulle stå og bakse med det.

Hvis vi skulle forøge antallet af dage vi er forberedt til så bliver det væsentligt sværere. Efter 10 dage er dem der ikke har forberedt sig ved at blive desperate og så skal man til at tænke på, at ikke alle opfører sig ordentligt når de bliver sultne og tørstige. Men min formodning er at samfundet vedbliver og det derfor kun er en kortere periode, vi skal være klar på.

Samfundsnedbrud er næsten umuligt at forberede sig på IMHO. Så skal man have bug-out shelters, frø, jord, jagtmidler, og meget mere viden end jeg har i forhold til at reparere og lave nyt osv. Vi har et konkret problem at min kone skal bruge noget specifik medicin (thyroxin) resten af hendes liv og det er meget svært at fremstille og dosere (man skal tørre fåre-skjoldbruskkirtler, pulverisere det og så gætte sig frem til dosering). Vi har et roterende nødlager af medicinen men det holder ikke så længe så det er begrænset hvor stort det kan være.

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Building my first NAS: Assistance on part selection please

You’re not using a CPU that most distributions support for hardware transcoding. You either need to use an Intel CPU with QuickSync or stick a discrete nvidia card in the box. The Intel route is often easiest here, and I say this as a die hard AMD fan.

Are you intent on building your own box?

I’m only asking because TerraMaster does the F6-424 (or F4-424) series which has 6 bays (or 4), a decent CPU (1235U) with hardware transcoding support, space for two 4x4 NVME m.2 SSDs, which runs silently and will just work as an appliance, even though it is a full PC. You can then install unraid or truenas on it, or heck bareback Linux and do it yourself. There are decent alternatives to putting something together yourself.

Regarding disks Seagate EXOS are often cheaper than IronWolfs and have higher MTBF than even the Pro. Don’t ask me why they’re lower cost, for more bang.