I missed out on Scouts myself. The issue with pedophiles in the Scouts goes back a lot further than 2020. The scoutmaster in my local area was convicted in the 80’s and that put my parents off the whole thing. Really, any organization which puts people in a position of power over kids is going to have to deal with that problem. When my own kids were old enough, we gave Cub Scouts a go. They seemed to have reasonable protocols in place to avoid putting kids in danger, but neither child took to it anyway. We also didn’t mesh well with the “No really, we don’t push religion. But let’s all pray to yahweh” vibe. Also, the Scouts seemed truly talented at making camping and hiking not enjoyable.

We had our kids give it a shot because we really did feel that there are some good life lessons to be learned in the scouts. And it also gave the kids more opportunities to make friends and socialize. But, in the end it wasn’t for us. I wouldn’t begrudge someone who enjoys it and wants to do it though.

That has been tried before, in the US. It ended somewhat poorly for the unions, though long term it did drive change. Ultimately, unless your goal is a violent insurrection, being armed really only helps to protect you from other violent militias. That can be important when the government can’t or won’t prevent their activities (see the KKK and Pinkertons) but if they have full government backing, or the government just outright uses the military, you’re now in the thick of an armed rebellion. More often than not, those are a bad plan.,

Assuming it’s free. I’d take the Tesla, as it’s likely to have a better resale value than the unknown brand. Take the Tesla, sell it and use the money to buy a decent car.

So, classic “do more with less”. But with a side of “let’s enshitify our products”.

I just find it abit ironic this is supposed to be the greatest thing since sliced bread even tho I’ve read multiple times Steam has bloatware and Spyware on it

Links?
Sure, it has the Steam Store on it, if that’s what you’re getting at. And it boots directly to Big Picture Mode. But that seems a bit of a stretch to call “bloatware and spyware”. There’s actually a bit of an irony in this claim, as SteamDeck suffers the same issues with Anti-Cheat software all of Linux does. Much of that stemming from an inability to stick the anti-cheat in kernel mode and keep the user out of it.
And Valve is so committed to locking you into SteamOS that they publish a helpful page with drivers and information for installing Windows. And on that point, Valve cares so much about lock-in that they are using open-source drivers. Also, Proton is open source and they keep pushing fixes back up to the parent WINE project. Indeed, these are the actions of monsters. (/s for the truly stupid)

it was created by two former Microsoft employees

Ok and? Active Microsoft employees have contributed to Linux. Hell, Microsoft has an active Linux distribution of their own, Azure Linux. And they aren’t above submitting code to the Linux kernel. It also turns out that Microsoft has a long history of hiring talented developers. Seriously, go check out Dave Plumer’s channel, the guy is wicked smart. Some stay there, some move on. Just because they worked at MS, doesn’t mean they are now irrevocably evil.

and has DRM

Yup, that’s built into Steam. We can debate the issue of “should DRM exist at all” but that’s largely mental masturbation. Part of the reason digital delivery took off was that publishers felt comfortable enough that piracy wasn’t going to eat their lunch. While I do agree with Gabe Newell that piracy is often an access and delivery issue, many publishers don’t and we’d still be buying boxed copies at physical stores without DRM backing those sales. If you hate it that much, use GoG instead. It’s a great option and it runs on the SteamDeck.

they used Linux as operating system does nobody see any irony in this ??

Linux is fucking everywhere. Seriously, the only place it lags behind is on the desktop. Linux has won in the cloud. It won so decisively that Microsoft spun up Azure Linux to deal with that. Half the internet infrastructure (routers, switches, embedded devices) which allowed you to post your drivel likely runs on Linux. Linux is on everything from physical door controllers to kiosk displays. Even NASA is getting in on the Linux game. Using Linux is kinda the default choice anymore. Valve choosing Linux was fantastic, as it pushed open the gaming market away from Microsoft’s stranglehold. What they have done with Proton is nothing short of a miracle. It’s let us gamers have some hope to escape the Window ecosystem for something far better. The only “irony” here is the irony lump between your ears. I’d suggest never getting near an MRI machine.

Drop it in investments and work for another year. The extra year of work is so that I can get the investments to move to long term capital gains tax rates. With that sorted, I can now retire. Even a simple index fund often returns an average around 7%. So that’s ~$350,000/year. Pull $200,000 and leave $150,000 for growth. Exact numbers will fluctuate, but it will be close. I’m going to get taxed at something like 12.5%, or about $25,000 leaving me $175,000 to live on. This isn’t monthly vacations in Tahiti money, but it’s a pretty comfortable living, if I’m not stupid and wasteful. If I really want to stretch things out, I can always move to a lower cost of living country. Though that often carries personal risk with it, and I don’t know if I’d want that extra stress. Numbers would also change based on how that original $5mil got taxed. If it’s something like a lottery win, it would shave the numbers down a good bit by taxes.

So, this?

Saturday, the last time I took my car out on the road. However, the point is taken, we specifically wanted one of the nicer colors for our car. The dealer was a bit unhappy with us, as we walked into the dealership and said, “we want this vehicle, at this trim level,. in this color.” Ultimately, we got the car we wanted at one trim level higher, in the color we wanted. We were already paying ~$60k for the vehicle, the extra $2k to go up a trim level was a small enough jump that we decided to take the car, rather than wait longer for special order. And, if I’m fully honest, I’m actually glad we got the higher trim level. Some of the extra features were very nice to have.

Had we wanted white, we could have driven off the lot with a vehicle the same day. But ya, fuck dull colors. Sure, I recall reading that the dull colors have better resell value, but that’s not something I worry about. We use a car as a tool, not an investment. We’ve already paid the car off and we plan to drive it into the ground. And I’d much rather have the car I want to drive, rather than min/max a couple thousand out of it at some far distant date, maybe.

Other humans.
Seriously, we are a social animal for a reason. We have always existed in packs and are actually shit at surviving alone. We can do it for short stints and even some longer periods, but the work involved in gathering food and water, preparing meals, maintaining shelter, clothes, tools and everything else is immense. And then there is the whole issue of defense. We have archeological evidence of violent death going well back into the paleolithic era. You’re going to face packs of other people who want your stuff. No matter how good you think you are, you’re going to get overrun if you are alone. Your best defense is your own tribe.

So ya, if I’m alone in the woods when a nuclear apocalypse happens, I’m going to do my level best to find and integrate into some sort of larger social structure while there are hopefully enough not terrible people around to be able to survive the attempt.

the thing is in the video tutorial he’s using password only(no tpm) and it still requires you to create a recovery key

Never watched the video, so I’m just answering for the general case. Even with just a password, the recovery key serves a similar function. It’s a fail-safe if the primary protector is lost. It’s entirely possible that the password being setup will be given to a user and IT will still need a way in, if that password gets lost/changed.

on Linux with luks, it never asked for me to save a recovery key.

Ok, and? Yup, LUKS uses different defaults. Don’t get too caught up on “Linux does it this way”. Both ways have valid reasons and the Microsoft developers and LUKS developers picked different defaults. If you want, you can create a recovery.key file on LUKS. If you are using TPM as your primary protector, I’d actually recommend you follow Microsoft’s lead on this. If that TPM chip (or the motherboard it’s attached to) dies, you’re kinda fucked. If you are using a password, this is less of an issue. assuming you have that password stored safely somewhere not on that system.

It’s a design decision and one which is probably about right for many situations. TPM chips are not perfect, and there are a lot of situations which can cause them to fail or the hardware around them can fail (e.g. the motherboard). With the end result being that the data would be rendered unreadable. So a recovery key is a trade-off between confidentiality and accessibility.

The design of the recovery key itself is also fairly good as a backup protector goes. The key is long and complex enough that brute forcing it is hard enough and would require long enough that it is functionally impossible. If your concern is that the recovery key could leak, the easy answer is “don’t write it down”. You could simply choose not to store it and while it would be a theoretical attack on the confidentiality of your data, practically it’s a non-issue. But, for those folks who feel that having an unlock code written down somewhere is an acceptable risk while mitigating the risk of the TPM breaking and rendering the disk unreadable, it’s a good solution. And I can personally attest to the usefulness in a corporate environment. People do dumb things with laptops all the time. And no matter how much we might tell people to use the network/cloud storage which is off the system and backed up regularly, there is always a parade of people whose system just died and contains the only copy of important project data.

It’s important to remember that security is a long series of compromises between confidentiality, integrity and accessibility. All three are important. And you have to find the spot in the nexus of those factors which works for your situation.

What ads are you trying to remove?
For a browser, I use FireFox mobile with the uBlock Origin and NoScript extensions. Those two eliminate most ads while browsing, though NoScript does require extra effort to allow some pages to function.
For games and other apps, I try to stick to stuff which doesn’t have ads. This usually means paying for the stuff you use or sticking to pure open-source solutions. However, I still have some apps which have ads. For that there I use PiHole as a DNS at home, which eliminates most of them.

I could probably do more to avoid the few ads I do see, but at some point I just accept that advertisement is an inevitable consequence of our economy and just move on with life.

Ya, it was fairly big news a couple months ago. MS was apparently dicking around the researcher (NightmareEclipse) who uncovered it and he went nuclear and dropped that one along with a few others in rapid succession.

The YellowKey Vulnerability was an engineered backdoor for the CIA/FBI/NSA.

surely you can’t profile criminals based on a film franchise with significant mass appeal. Talk about painting with a large brush.

If everyone is guilty of something, it makes yanking them off the street easier to justify to a news media asleep at the switch.

It’s down to your expectations and practice. We learn to read most Latin based languages left to right. Japanese et al. are learned in a top to bottom order; so, that’s what you’ve gotten used to. Were you to get enough practice, you could learn to read Latin based languages the same way. It would just take time and effort.

Not surprising. Web search from the Start Menu was always a bad idea.

Hell, I’ve had to deal with users getting their systems compromised because of this idiocy. User typed ‘ms teams’ in the start menu, clicked on the first link and ended up at an attacker’s page which mimicked the official Teams download page. User clicked “Download”, received the trojaned .msi file and ran it.

Sure, there’s some blame to go around in that case (and we finally got some default configuration changes out of it), but the fact that Microslop’s greed led to a malvertising link showing up in a user’s Start Menu is indicative of everything wrong with Windows 11.

I have trouble feeling sympathy for any company which didn’t greet the Broadcom buyout of VMWare with a firm plan to migrate. Expecting anything other than “abusive conduct” out of Broadcom is like expecting to jump in the ocean and not get wet.

Sadly, a reluctance to install patches isn’t unique to Windows administration. I worked at a site with a well functioning Satellite infrastructure and support contracts with Red Hat. And we (InfoSec) were still chasing down admins to get their shit patched. Thankfully, we had NAC and authorization to disconnect systems that feel out of compliance. Most departments got with the program pretty quick when they ignored the "please patch all critical vulnerabilities in three days’ email and ended up with a “you are out of compliance and have been disconnected” email.

And Docker had made the whole Linux situation even worse. So many devs love to spin up containers, basically disable any sort of firewall, don’t bother with IP filtering. Oh and let’s just use passwords for ssh. Also, who needs logs? It’s a container, right. So, let’s disable all logging and not forward those anywhere. Then they promptly forget about the container until we run a vuln scan and find it’s got half a dozen RCE vulns and have to run them down and ask why the fuck it’s still running.

Linux is a much better base to build on. But bad security hygiene is still rife and still really bad for security.

Then they transfered a file to /tmp/exp which was linux kernel CVE-2026-43500, nicknamed ‘Dirty Frag’, an RxRPC local privilege escalation. I had not patched these internal servers that nobody should have access to against this.

Lessons Learned #1:
Install your patches.
“But I have a firewall!”
That is not a sufficient control.
Install.
Your.
Fucking.
Patches!