Do not, under any circumstances, conduct any private business on it. What isn't being logged by Microsoft and shared with your employer, advertisers, various governments will be screenshot'd every n seconds. Additionally, I highly suggest, if you haven't already, to setup a separate VLAN for this device if you ever bring it home and connect it to your home network. Defender absolutely does passive sniffing and active network scanning now. It will also be collecting and logging visible SSIDs as well. Enjoy!

Except that Microsoft basically puts a gun to every users head to login with a Microsoft account which can/does backup the recovery keys.

The content produced by humans was scraped en-masse for the explicit purpose of training models which were then monetized into business products.

I struggle to reconcile that with Fair Use.

I can see if the source was EULA'd to remove all rights to what you post to things like Reddit, Stack Overflow, and if somehow those entities were contacted ahead of time and negotiated usage. You, I and the web server logs know that this was almost never the case.

This project has never been more relevant in light of the recent acceleration of enshitification over at Microslop. Might be time to donate a few bucks.

So the thing with useful quantum computers is that if they ever do make it actually work and manage to scale it up, the first thing they will do is render most modern encryption obsolete over night. My guess is that Bluffdale has a mountain of encrypted data they'd start cracking immediately.

My cynicism can't allow me to think that we'd hear about it until years after that backlog is cleared and the NSA (and now by extension Israel and Russia) have backdoored any network of interested 10 times over.

The far more likely scenario is that this like stable/cold-ish Fusion, practical graphene, CRiSPER miracle cures are still way more theory than driveable cars at this point and for next several years at least. These folks just want more money and have to keep claiming they are close to get it.

Prolific cannibal promises to review their choice in seasonings to be more tactful as they continue to feast on PC users' privacy, freedom and last scraps of digital dignity on a global scale.

I am sure that this empty promise of change has everything to do with their user empathy and absolutely nothing to do with their recent financial results which indicated how hollow their AI-slop-bullshit revenue growth was last quarter.

Nice to see the US government still supporting EVs these days.

I still think that EV rebates and tax credits would be more cost efficient and much less jarring than provoking Iran into destroying 20% of the world's oil supply... but I guess that I am too simple-minded for politics.

BitLocker provides for a recovery key. This is to allow someone to regain access to an encrypted device in the event that they lose their PIN, any one of these scenarios happen, OR when suspects do not want to cooperate with LEOs.

Find your BitLocker recovery key

If the target device is part of an enterprise and managed with EntraId/Intune this is the option. Escrowed keys.

This is like that part in Don't look up when the Jennifer Lawrence's character tells her BF to wait 6 months before she meets his mother.

Reddit is nothing but bots now and it's way past time to just let it go.

Believe it or not but some of us old farts used to learn about things by reading, researching, and using libraries, etc. Wild! Right!?

I also like FauxPilot.

faux - adj - artificial or imitation; fake.

Not to* be confused with the OSS alternative, also named fauxpilot.

Just read the paper. ArsTechnica is such a terrible source for analysis on anything remotely technical.

Ignore the idiot posting about this RAT.

If you want to secure your Linux system, use ClamAV, a local firewall like UFW or even opensnitch for a start. Also use your head when adding apps to your system. Stick to the official repos from your distro. Things like Arch's AUR, random PPAs in Ubuntu and any random github project are going to be much riskier by their very nature so act accordingly.

If you need to risky stuff, do it a VM and network that guest into a private internal network that can only exit over a companion PFSense VM that is dual homed to the regular LAN and the private internal network. Take a snapshot of the risky guest before you use it in a session and when you are done, roll back to your clean snapshot.

Store your passwords in something like Keepass(strong master password!) and then use syncthing to push copies of the database to at least one other box locally or in the cloud if you really have to.

If vibe-coding is wrecking Windows 11 and Office now ... just wait until Windows 12 sees the light of day! Ohhh boy, will that ever be some infinite-monkeys-on-typewriters-shite!

Can I have 2 billion dollars to build UNIVERSE models?

Trying to keep a Lab out of pretty much any body of water is just not gonna happen.

Blink twice if you're compromised by the Mossad! You certainly would not be alone amongst world leaders.

Raspberry Pi's are full of possibilities, even old ones. Here is what I'd do.

It was supposed to be a pi-hole but was never able to get the dns forwarding to work on my modem.

Not sure what you mean here but there is no reason that any modem or WAN box ever really needs to involved with a pi-hole. You can set the IP to use for DNS lookups on each host by hand... OR you can turn off DHCP services on the modem run that off of the PI, which then sends the IP of the PI/PiHole for DNS as part of the DHCP lease to each client.

At any rate, ideas for it:

• PiHole with encrypted DNS service out to the internet and past your ISP's snooping modem.
• a Wireguard VPN server. This would allow for things like your phone to tunnel home use your fancy pi-hole to block all ads on your phone, privately. You'd also then have access to anything else hosted on your home network like Music/Movies/etc. Setup a samba share for that stuff somewhere. This raspberry pi can also pass your VPN client traffic back out to the internet if you setup (ip forwarding)[https://rob-ferguson.me/how-to-use-your-rpi-as-a-router/]. It's an old pi, so it won't be faster than 100Mbps, but for a phone/tablet that is likely fine.
• as a motion-activated camera or some other temperature monitoring box. You can setup a cronjob to archive the videos or send the collected temp readings to some database backend and use Grafana for a visualization front-end.
• setup a netflow collector/forwarder for your LAN using fprobe. If you network is flat and I guessing that it is, as long as you have a single network switch for both your wired and wireless clients (and a single subnet aka 192.168.0.x for all) then you can monitor the whole broadcast domain with one box. You can send/forward the captured netflow to something like Security Onion and really start to understand what's happening on your network. : )

There are so many more ideas like weather stations, news feeds, little web services for whatever.

I would look at these things first.

1. Try another DE, something like XFCE. See if the problem persists. Sometimes swapping compositors or display managers can help too.
2. Run memtest. Failing memory can definitely cause lock-ups.
3. Lastly I'd look at graphics drivers. If you're running Nvidia, switch from nouveau to the proprietary driver or vice-versa and see if that helps.

Assuming that:

• your Linux Laptop uses wlan0 for its wireless connection and your home network uses 192.168.1.x for IP space.

On the Linux laptop:

• as root or with sudo -- enable IP forwarding and load the change with sysctl -p.

sudo sysctl net.ipv4.ip_forward=1 ## updated edit thanks to folks pointing out my typo.
sudo sysctl -p

• if you have ufw installed and running -- setup a NAT masquerading rule for any hosts forwarding IPv4 traffic to it.
  add this line to /etc/ufw/before.rules file right after the "*nat" line

:POSTROUTING ACCEPT [0:0]

-A POSTROUTING -s 192.168.1.1/24 -o wlan0 -j MASQUERADE

On the mac:

• set your IP address manually to be on the same LAN as the Linux laptop, but for the gateway address... point that at the IP for the Linux Laptop.