Joe

Ha, mia samideano! Tre bon’!

25 or so years ago, I learnt Esperanto (my first second language) by chatting on the Internet. I’d have two windows open - one with the IRC client, and the other with a terminal and a shell script that would grep a txt file with consistent formatting. “esp esperantoVerbPrefix/” or “esp noun,” or “esp affix-” would typically return the correct result in a split second. Thanks to the simple grammar (that I had quickly memorized), I could hold conversations in near real time as a result.

I wish I could have learnt my other languages as easily.

</story time>

Anki ?

NFSv3 (udp, stateless) was always as reliable as the network infra under Linux, I found. NFSv4 made things a bit more complicated.

You don’t want any NAT / stateful connection tracking in the network path (anything that could hiccup and forget), and wired connections only for permanent storage mounts, of course.

How will running a CA limit access? eg. Do you want to do client side cert validation? That sounds like an overcomplication. Also not ideal to run a CA (have signing keys) on the proxy server.

It’s a trade off. “Free services” typically require more leg work and can come with legal or security risks. I used to have a great XBMC & torrenting setup years ago. I spent significant time customizing it and various plugins, extending scripts etc. I had fun, and took necessary precautions. Millions wouldn’t. Some are happy to pay €9/month to another evil corp for convenience (where it works for them).

Oh, they do have an plan with ads. You can’t really complain about ads if that is what you subscribed to, I guess. The price difference is €6 vs €9/month in Germany, btw.

The no browser support on phones kind of sucks though.

Disney+ has ads? I’m in Germany and I don’t see any. Where are you?

edit: removed comment about browser, as OP meant on the phone

That would be trademark infringement. Patents are much more nefarious.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/crlr8gp813ko seems to have a good explanation. In short, it’s complicated, and the IOC drew their lines.

It’s the Y chromosome that triggers them.

edit: alleged/unpublished … she failed some gender verification tests of IBA that disqualified her there, but met the IOC’s criteria. It is what it is. They might keep or change the eligibility rules in the future, and that will continue to be IOC’s decision, much as it is IBA’s.

The world economy is huge and growing, and the US economy is damn strong with a significant share of it. It also owns the world as far as raw military power and power projection goes. The US would absolutely use its huge military and economic advantages to keep its position as top dog if necessary. It is fine that the world’s economy is growing (inevitable after the devastation of ww2, which barely touched the US; also industrialization in countries like china), but it doesn’t mean the US is any weaker for it. And anyone who thinks the US won’t keep its rivals in check (no doubt leaving a trail of bloody corpses behind) has not been paying attention.

There’s a lot of people pinning their hopes on the global south and the decline of the dollar. I just don’t see it, and it seems like wishful thinking. If there were a real risk to US supremecy, we’d see serious chaos unfold, setting them (edit: not the US) back significantly. The gloves are still on just now.

The US chooses when and how to intervene. With Israel vs Iran, it was clear. With NATO, it is clear. With Ukraine, it is still wishy washy - Ukraine can’t lose, but it doesn’t need to win for the US’ strategic goal of a weakened russia to be met. One can easily argue that it helps. Russia and its allies will continue to shit stir in “minor” ways elsewhere as a result, distracting but not really hurting the US.

I don’t see a decline in US capitalism or (US-style) imperialism anytime soon. It seems extremely well positioned to continue to be the #1 world power and influencer, even if its regional political and economic influence wanes a bit. US foreign policy is that of a bully in the sandpit who breaks any toy denied to him. Domestically, from the outside it looks like an absolute shitshow, with the masses cheering with hysteric enthusiasm as they are thrown one by one to the lions.

Deemix is a good way to build up your local cache from Deezer, at which point you can serve it locally.

It will mess with artist renumeration though (which seems important to you), so you might want to find another way to compensate your favourite artists.

Dialup deathmatch FTW!

One of these years my children will discover the PS3 hidden unused in the entertainment center since they were born, and there’ll be 2mil+1. Muhaha.

In some countries private law firms chase down infringers on behalf of copyright holders. They then attempt shakedowns with the threat of legal action if you don’t pay. They have a financial interest to catch people, and moral compasses vary.

Also, mistakes can happen (you, your family, guests using your wifi, in the courts, in the ISPs, in the law firms, in the tech they are using to identify people). Shit happens.

And if (when) it happens, then you would still have to deal with it, costing you time and money.

Understand the risks and make choices to minimize them if you can.

Apparmor profiles can be applied to an executable - the profile is then (if so configured) inherited by subprocesses. In my case I have a launch script to run lutris in a safe mode. It also changes the effective gid to be matched by some iptables rules (it was easier than creating a new network namespace, which is also possible). The script then checks that the Internet is inaccessible and that reading/writing to secured paths is denied before launching lutris.

Similarly I have a “safe” script to wrap other commands with an apparmor profile that stops most writes to my homedir/reads from some secure locations, which I often use to run scripts/programs from the Internet.

My sudo also requires a password (or a special keyboard combination, thanks to a custom pam configuration).

All that said and done, I’m sure I’ll be caught off guard one day.

I run a particular online windows game in a modded offline mode under Linux in network isolation and with a restricted apparmor profile. So far so good. Logs show no attempts to break out, except for the smoke test I run to ensure the sandbox is working. This is as much because of the random mods I install as the original devs (who could ban my online account).

On Windows, a VM would indeed be safer. GPU passthrough is possible … I guess easier with Windows using an onboard GPU, then passing a discrete GPU to the VM. You’ll lose some performance with a VM regardless, but it’s easy to disable networking, back up and restore from a known good state, and burn it to the ground when needed.