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Joined 2 months ago
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Cake day: December 17th, 2025

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  • Because every single foreign government hacks every other foreign government every single chance they get. If I get any say in the matter I’d rather keep my list of enemies as small as possible(aka only the US government). Most rational people would agree with that. At least you have some say in accountability for the US government, in theory at least.

    I feel like every time this topic comes up people forget all of this and also forget that China’s energy, automotive, literally every industry in China is controlled by PRC/CCP, 100%. Even the US/China joint ventures have to follow rules laid out by the PRC/CCP.


  • The logistics accolade that you mention here is wartime logistics. That is ability to get the bullets and bandages to the places and people that need them all in a timely manner. The US is good at this because we have bases and transport logistics everywhere.

    Military supply chain logistics(multiple sources for stuff, supposedly US companies…) is absolutely a consideration as well but this concept has been hallowed out over time. What used to be locally sourced materials and manufacturing by American companies is now much more dependent on overseas labor/materials. These ‘American’ companies might have corporate offices here and the c-levels, marketing/sales teams live here but all of the actual product is sourced/made in Mexico, Canada, China, India, Vietnam, etc. There are definitely specific industries like aerospace that still make a lot of stuff here but that is a small fraction of the larger whole.



  • 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.


  • Everyone seems to have thought that is was a great idea to let pretty much every core manufacturing competency die in the US over the last 30 years or so. How’s that working out for us now?

    The blame is at least as old as Reagan, really accelerated with Clinton (NAFTA, China entering the WTO) and only got worse from there.

    As much as I hate to admit it, tariffs are the answer. I also think that it’s important to understand that Trump’s tariffs exist only for extortion and bribes that benefit him personally. Tariffs can be used to encourage domestic production of goods and services that are clearly not something that we want to depend on other countries for merely for the sake of enriching the same circle of already rich assholes in perpetuity. Rich assholes would just have to keep resorting to pumping up immigration to suppress wages for these domestic goods, like they have always done for hundreds of years at this point.








  • 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.








  • 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!


  • 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.