there’s a backdoor built right into bitlocker in the form of ‘recovery keys’–and for most users, microsoft knows what they are.

the closed-source version of the internet.

even the crappy old bobcat-based (slow af amd apu) laptops i have here run with lid closed (they run piholes and what-not).

in the uk, the ingredients list for mcd french fries is literally potatoes, oils (rapeseed, sunflower), dextrose (when needed–i.e. early crops that are low in naturally-occurring sugars). salt added after cooking. source

very much different than what they use in the u.s., which introduces multiple allergens. source

and they’ve used magicband wristband trackers and rfid ticket cards for over a decade.

if these age checks ask female users to pan the camera down towards their chests, that’s gonna be a problem. a big giant huge problem.

it took over an hour and three tries to download updates to firefox and thunderbird on a system configured to use mozilla’s ppa (thunderbird is not included in mozilla’s new deb and rpm repos)

perhaps the many, many people who are trying to update and secure their existing systems or install new software or packages on them? the many others wanting to upgrade or install a new ubuntu? perhaps anyone who maintains or uses a ppa archive or other launchpad resource? there are millions of people outside of your sphere that are affected by this ongoing incident.

it’s a part of macrium reflect version 8. it’s what mounts backup images within windows to browse and recover files from. you should still be able to boot off a reflect rescue usb to do those tasks.

macrium doesn’t do perpetual licenses anymore, and they EOL’d all reflect versions sold that way. it’s all subscriptions now (according to a neighbor that uses it… he was strong-armed into upgrading to a sub from his version 8.x)–even for that previous version which they still sell (relabeled ‘ltsc’) as a subscription.

agreed. shady af.

that local server still has to get the data from somewhere.

i’m not even recommending 8gb laptops to most users anymore… especially not ones with soldered ram that are stuck with only that.

it won’t. ubuntu’s announcement pertains to the extra demands of gnome, their flagship release, and it’s default configuration.

mint doesn’t ship a gnome spin, and cinnamon, mate and xfce are lighter-weight… and mint is not dependent upon snaps, nor is it even configured oob with snap support enabled.

latest Gnome desktop, modern web browsers, and typical multitasking workflows

so use a lighter-weight de (xfce, lxqt, budgie), and don’t go crazy with brower tabs or open applications, and you’ll be ok… like you’re probably already doing now if you’ve got a ‘marginal’ pc.

that’s probably per ‘household’ not ‘per line’ or ‘per person’.

i’ve still got an ‘emachines’ here. granted, nothing inside is original anymore, except the optical with the curved silver bezel. has an am3 board in it now (originally a barton core on nvidia chipset). i keep it around because it has ide ports… and yes, i do use those. had to dig it out twice in the last month.

that’s a different thing. chromium edge has always had the ‘load at startup’ option (enabled by default, of course)… to make ‘loading’ it when you do run it, ‘faster’.

this new innovation will launch the actual browser window, too.

I only had 360kbit/s for a while

they still sell dsl that slow here… and of course the telephone company charges those people even more than they do in town for 20-60mbit dsl or 100-1000mbit fiber.

there’s a few projects for running windows in a container… winboat and winapps are a couple that come to mind. dunno if they’re ready for ‘prime time’ yet. interesting concept, though.

western digital was the parent, they bought sandisk in 2016.

last year they spun-off the flash storage business back into a new entity (also) named sandisk, leaving western digital (‘wd’) with only the traditional hdd business.

the spin-off also included wd’s previous sd card line as well as their popular computer ssd products (which are being re-branded by the ‘new’ company).