The bar chart might be more useful if they weighted the source with its number of users. Facebook isn’t 7 times more hateful than Telegram. It has around 3.5 times as many users - but also the two are used very differently. I use Telegram, but only as a free messaging platform for automated alerts.

Then there’s the algorithms, which tend to feed you what you engage with and from those connections you’ve made on it. The exception recently is X which has a very strong political bias and has turned into something that pushes hate very strongly.

Fair play - it’s good that there’s choice and if it works for you, great. I also totally get the fun of building something yourself.

The local storage is a big one if you don’t have a nas or home server on the network. Although, if you’re linked into the *arrs then I would think most people already do. It’s nice when new episodes just turn up automagically in Jellyfin.

I tried Kodi before but I found the commercialisation of it very jarring. Jellyfin is entirely free - your fifth point might give it extra credit for that. The Jellyfin app doesn’t (afaik) feed any info to anyone, but you do need to load it from the Amazon fire menu, so you can’t entirely skip their advertising. It is the only thing I use the fire stick for, and the price is cheap compared to anything else - it cost £25 and works on any TV. Being a dongle, there’s no noise either.

Why not? It’s a computer that displays tv? At 4k, 5.1 audio, that’s not too shabby, no?

I made a PC specifically for streaming video back before sticks were a thing, but it was expensive, noisy and not very good in comparison and I don’t miss it. What about a stick is inferior to what you’re talking about? Genuine question - educate me, please. What software, what hardware, why choose it over something else?

A Mitsubishi Colt I bought from a guy in a scrapyard for £50 because my Allegro had just been stolen and I needed something quick to get to work. He told me it had an MOT and to come back the next day to pick it up (in the days before it was online) He wasn’t there. It was the rustiest POS ever - bits kept falling off, you could see the road in several places through the floor. Engine was good but that was the only thing. In a lifetime of exercising Bangernomics, that was the stand out terrible car.

Most I’ve lost on a car was a more recent Shogun. Bought for £7,500, cost £2000 in repairs then had a lot more pending. Sold for £1400 in less than a year.

Using the native Jellyfin app available for Amazon’s fire tv stick.

Not really suitable for a Home Theatre PC

Not sure where you got that idea, but it’s absolutely what I use it for. That I can also watch content from multiple sources as well is part of the appeal. Plus no constant upsell like Kodi and Emby.

Scuse the cut and paste, but this is something I recently thought quite hard about and blogged, so stealing my own content:

What to back up? This is a core question to ask when you start planning. I think it’s quite simply answered by asking the secondary question: “Can I get the data again?” Don’t back up stuff you downloaded from the public internet unless it’s particularly rare. No TV, no Movies, no software installers. Don’t hoard data you can replace. Do back up stuff you’ve personally created and that doesn’t exist elsewhere, or stuff that would cause you a lot of effort or upset if it wasn’t available. Letters you’ve written, pictures you’ve taken, code you authored, configurations and systems that took you a lot of time to set up and fine tune.

If you want to be able to restore a full system, that’s something else and generally dealt best with imaging – I’m talking about individual file backups here!

Backup Scenario Multiple household computers. Home linux servers. Many services running natively and in docker. A couple of windows computers.

Daily backups Once a day, automate backups of your important files.

On my linux machines, that’s things like some directories like /etc, /root, /docker-data, some shared files.

On my windows machines, then that’s some mapping data, word documents, pictures, geocaching files, generated backups and so on.

You work out the files and get an idea of how much space you need to set aside.

Then, with automated methods, have these files copied or zipped up to a common directory on an always-available server. Let’s call that /backup.

These should be versioned, so that older ones get expired automatically. You can do that with bash scripts, or automated backup software (I use backup-manager for local machines, and backuppc or robocopy for windows ones)

How many copies you keep depends on your preferences – 3 is a sound number, but choose what you want and what disk space you have. More than 1 is a good idea since you may not notice the next day if something is missing or broken.

Monthly Backups – Make them Offline if possible

I puzzled a long time over the best way to do offline backups. For years I would manually copy the contents of /backup to large HDDs once a month. That took an hour or two for a few terabytes.

Now, I attach an external USB hard drive to my server, with a smart power socket controlled by Home Assistant.

This means it’s “cold storage”. The computer can’t access it unless the switch is turned on – something no ransomware knows about. But I can write a script that turns on the power, waits a minute for it to spin up, then mounts the drive and copies the data. When it’s finished, it’ll then unmount the drive and turn off the switch, and lastly, email me to say “Oi, change the drives, human”.

Once I get that email, I open my safe (fireproof and in a different physical building) and take out the oldest of three usb Caddies. Swap that with the one on the server and put that away. Classic Grandfather/Father/Son backups.

Once a year, I change the oldest of those caddies to “Annual backup, 2024” and buy a new one. That way no monthly drive will be older than three years, and I have a (probably still viable) backup by year.

BTW – I use USB3 HDD caddies (and do test for speed – they vary hugely) because I keep a fair bit of data. But you can also use one of the large capacity USB Thumbdrives or MicroSD cards for this. It doesn’t really matter how slowly it writes, since you’ll be asleep when it’s backing up. But you do really want it to be reasonably fast to read data from, and also large enough for your data – the above system gets considerably less simple if you need multiple disks.

Error Check: Of course with automated systems, you need additional automated systems to ensure they’re working! When you complete a backup, touch a file to give you a timestamp of when it was done – online and offline. I find using “tree” to catalogue the files is worthwhile too, so you know what’s on there.

Lastly – test your backups. Once or twice a year, pick a backup at random and ensure you can copy and unpack the files. Ensure they are what you expect and free from errors.

More recently, this behaviour is known as “driving engagement”

Came here to say that. It actually predates common internet usage - Fidonet was a much bigger thing through the 80s and early 90s than emails, and BBS forums used it to distribute messages.

Properly quote only what you are replying to. Quote a line, reply to it. Repeat on multiple points.

Then wait a few days for a reply, of course, unless they were dialling into the same BBS.

Now we have boards like this that do a pretty good job about displaying context and quoting is less needed.

yes please

Microsoft was forced by regulators overseas to allow ring 0 third party software as part of antitrust proceedings.

Interesting - I wasn’t aware of that. Gave me a few minutes of interesting googling, thanks.

Looks like some people don’t agree that is an excuse.

Also worth remembering is that Crowdstrike stopped RHEL 9 machines booting in a vaguely similar update to their falcon service a few months earlier, so it’s not something that is exclusive to Windows. That also needed manual intervention to get vms booting. (I dealt with that one too - but it’s easier to roll back to the previous kernel with Linux and we had fewer machines that were running falcon) Not surprisingly, there was a very similar blame game played them.

If my work were to remote wipe, I have assumed that would only affect the (second) user profile which has those apps, and not the main user account.

My understanding is that these tools offer a factory reset, so they would wipe everything. After all - if the phone is stolen, you wouldn’t want to just wipe one profile and leave data within another.

You should get a second phone for work related things

Slight correction: OP’s employer should get him a second device if they require him to access work email away from his office during work hours.

Don’t.

Two reasons:

Many employers require you to install phone-management software as part of the data loss mitigation/data exfiltration requirements - and those requirements might be set by their insurers.

This gives them the ability to remotely lock or wipe your phone at any time - useful to them because they remove company data if you lose your phone, or you leave the company, or are suspended for any reason. Obviously that’ll also lose any personal data on the phone, but that’s your problem, not theirs. They can also monitor its location and similar things.

That’s obviously a reason why you should never, ever, use a work-issued device for personal use - besides it being against their acceptable use policy. If your employer requires you to check email then they are required to issue you the means to do so. They cannot insist that you use any personal devices for that.

It’s bad for your mental health.

Keep work to work hours. Keep work devices for work. Keep personal hours and devices for your personal use.

This physical separation requires a little discipline but, having been on all sides of this barrier (employer, employee, suffering with poor mental health, and currently, in good mental health) - I know this to be the only way to achieve a health balance.

Cylance was comparable several years ago. But, as you say, Blackberry bought it. Development effectively stopped at that moment. Reported bugs were going un-triaged and the software stopped moving forwards and AV software that isn’t constantly adapting becomes a security risk in itself. The two are not comparable now - CS has a lot of extra features, especially in attack monitoring and analysis.

We were Cylance customers, and we changed to Crowdstrike when our contract expired. It was the right choice at the time, as was our decision to choose Cylance before them. Turns out we have pretty crappy luck.

They have a shitload of big contracts with a great many companies across the world. Money keeps coming in.

Legal actions take time. Years. Sometimes decades.

The software, when it isn’t bricking computers, is actually pretty good.

This could equally have been caused by any other software running at ring 0. That’s most antivirus software and most drivers. Drivers caused BSODs all the time - the difference here is only one of scale and timing. And, as it turns out, some pretty terrible quality control, test processes and release scheduling - and that is likely to be the focus of many of the legal actions.

Your reference to a hacker is spurious - deliberate vs accidental is a major distinction. As is cause and effect - Microsoft can be seen as equally to blame for allowing software to run at ring 0 and allowing this to happen.

Nice ditty.

What reason do you suggest why “his or her” would be preferable to “their” in this context?

Regional dialect, fluidity of language, variety - even habit.

“It’s grammatically incorrect” argument doesn’t hold much water

Oh, I do respectfully disagree with that, especially when you cite medieval English but reference an American language dictionary as your source.

I could just as viably give “his or hers” as equally valid as “theirs”, because it is. We’re not newspaper headline writers, nobody penalises us if we use a few more characters for any reason. And you could switch back and forth between them both for variety.

The best English literature doesn’t follow the basis of most convenient or shortest. Sometimes there are other reasons to choose a word of phrase.

The plot of Romeo and Juliet could be rewritten in a paragraph but probably wouldn’t have had the same impact.

Surely y’all have monitoring and alerts for excessive cpu load already?

Especially during the transition from 2 to 3. Let’s hope that’s all behind us.