Thanks Cpt. Obvious.

I have not read that book, but seeing as the right is on the rise also here in Europe, it might be worth checking it out.

It is soo easy to forget about just how much identifying metadata you leave on the internet just by reading stuff.

You know the cookie banners you see? Those that claim to let you opt out from being tracked by advertisers?

Yeah, those are just the overt tracking mechanism, tracking pixels are far far more insidious.

Lets backtrack a bit, back when Facebook started getting big, companies started embedded Like buttons on their webpages, cool right? You could just click the Like button and it would help you post a link to your Facebook feed to the page you were visiting.

Seems fine, right? What’s the issue?

It would be fine if the image of the Like button was stored on the local web server hosting the rest of the site.

But it isn’t.

It is stored on Facebook’s servers, it is stored in a way that every single Like button has their own ID, so every time you load up your favourite website about abandoned radiation experiment sites it makes your browser send a request to Facebook’s servers as well and depending on how the request is sent they can at minimum log that your IP address loaded the Like button with the ID number X, the ID number X is tied to the specific webpage you visited.

Then you go and do some research on impotense and how to cure it, the pages you read all have Like buttons as above, but with their own ID numbers, Facebook now knows at a minimum that you are a man who is interested in science, technology, society and modern history, you may also suffer from impotense.

Well, you keep browsing the web and read local news, well the Like button is also there, and with the ID number Facebook can add an area of interest to your profile.

It keeps going like this, but with one huge important change, people are starting getting warey of the Like buttons and Facebook in general, so they simply remove the button, while introducing the tracking pixel, a 1px*1px transparent picture, it works like how the Like button loads, and keeps generating data for Facebook.

Facebook is not alone in this, I just used them as an example.

You can read more here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spy_pixel

This is also not even getting into browser fingerprinting.

Are you talking about split tunneling?

Because last I heard it was considered bad as it was haibg a hard time deciding what traffic to tunnel and what traffic to not

That depends on your usecase.

I have setup servers where I mounted extra drives on /srv/nfs

When/If I switch to Linux I will probably mount my secondary drives to folders like

/home/stoy/videos

/home/stoy/music

/home/stoy/photos

/home/stoy/documents

/home/stoy/games

The ~/games will probably be an LVM since it contains little critical data and may absolutely need to be expanded to span several drives, though I would also be able to reduce the size of it and remove a drive from the LVM if needed.

I’d make a simple conky config to keep track of the drive space used

I’d just keep using the default automount spot for automounting drives.

There will be a lot of strangers in the stairwell in my apartment building.

If the place was actually called “Temptation Mart”, I would be very suspicious, a Temptation usually means that if you fall for it, something bad will happen.

That is a new way of putting it that I have not heard before, I like it, it doesn’t answer my questions as much as defecting them. It forces me to realize thsybit doesn’t matter.

That’s fair.

I was about to add that option, but forgot about it.

I guess what makes me annoyed about it is that we know that the big bang happened, but we don’t know what triggered it or what was before.

The one thing that still remains unclear with regards to science and god is the big bang.

The way I have heard it explained is that before the big bang there was nothing.

Which to my mind becomes:

First there was nothing, which exploded

This does not make sense to me, how can nothing explode?

So there are three categories of answer to this question:

A. There was something before the big bang which exploded, though this offeres not explanation of how the thing that exploded came into existance, I have heard theories about how the universe is cyclical and how it will eventually collapse into a new big bang, but that doesn’t answer the queation about the first big bang.

B. God exists and triggered the big bang, that means that the god entity exists outside of our universe.

C. We are just a highly advanced simulator, the big bang was the the program starting our simulation.

As someone who is mostly agnostic, those who belive that absence of evidence equals evidence of absence belong in psychotherapy.

There is zero evidence either way, the best we can say is that we don’t know.

But did you lock the garage?

Glad to hear that, you take care!

Fantastic! I hope you have a great day!

Excellent, have a lovely day!

Good!

I don’t have a hairdryer. With 6mm hair that is not needed

Yeah, they clearly forgot headphones.

Experts say that hurt their feelings

I an not even American and even I am pissed at that dumb ruling.

And what is even more annoying is that I read that what is considered an official act is not clear, so a court will need to decide if an act was official or not, and that court will be the SCOTUS.

So they could easily decide that acts Biden performed was not official, but the same acts performed by Trump was official, and invent some crap about context being different in som complex way, so with this ruling they have moved the power from the POTUS to the SCOTUS while POTUS stays the fall guy.

I am glad I have a car this time around, living through Covid and only using public transport was not brilliant, despite living in a suburb of Stockholm where we have excellent public transport.

What exactly did companies gain from making Linux distros switch over to systemd?

If anything, the switch ment a loss of productivity as their staff needed to relearn stuff, not to mention loss of technical knowledge as there would be others who simply would not accept the change and leave the company when the change happened.

This means increased costs, either due to retraining, or due to needing to hire new staff which is expensive.

Meanwhile, I can’t see anything that would mean that companies would earn or even save enough money to make it worth the effort of making distros implement systemd.

Ok so doing it for direct gain seems to be out, but you mention “corpo sabotage of opensource”, I can’t really see that either, a developer won’t move a successful Linux project to Windows, AIX, Solaris, Darwin or HP-UX just because of a move to systemd.

So even indirect gain seems to be out, so “corpo sabotage” doesn’t really seem plausible.

But, I may be wrong, please, tell us how exactly a move to systemd has benefited companies enough that it would make the effort and expense to make a distro move to sytemd, let alone a majority of distros, worth it.