You’re not just voting for politicians, but judges, sheriffs, school board members & many others. Often, you’re choosing the lesser of 2 evils and rarely will you match policy-for-policy with your best candidate, but in what other way do you have to express your opinions?

I research all candidates on my locality’s ballot and bring notes on who I plan to vote for. I sometimes can vote absentee, which is even better.

As I’ve found in many elections, I’m the minority. That’s ok because I believe that when the polls are close, it can pull the candidates closer to my views as they try to appeal to the groups that may give them a few more votes.

How do you decide what’s for Terraform and what’s for Ansible?

I haven’t heard about the terrible longevity. They even top the consumer reports list for EVs. What sorts of longevity issues are there?

I had to scroll way too far down the pageto find this (i trynot to duplicateanother’s comments). At the core of some of thescummy advertisements is profiling, enhanced by privacy violations. Remove the abikity to track you around the internet and IRL and advertisements become less obtrusive.

The other side of the coin is that it costs so little to add adverts to a web page, so why not collect a little cash to help offset your hosting costs? Remove the profiling and Google & friends don’t have a leg to stand on, so then when you visit a cooking blog you see ads for kitchen utensils. No biggie. Looking for auto repair articles? Check out this awesome wrench! At least you now don’t go to show your mom some wedding venue you’re thinking about renting alongside an ad for ED meds from the dark market.

Similar to others, I do this but the reverse direction. I have a Pi with HDD at a friend’s house. On a timer, it wakes up at 3am, boots to a VPN and initiates an rsync (pull) with it’s twin Pi at my place. When the sync is done, it powers down or the timer cuts power at 9am.

Other than clock drift due to power outages, I’ve had no issues.

I have a directory that i can put scripts into and the remote Pi will execute anything in this directory after the sync and before the shutdown. Logs from the rsync or scripts are pushed back to a different directory on the local Pi.

A pretty good read. I’ve made many of these mistakes myself and learned from every one of them. We spend so much time hardening our home labs from the bad guys, I wonder if we should instead focus on hardening from ourselves.

Of course, the answer is both.

Thanks for posting the contents of the image. This is especially important for folks using a screen reader and the source content is behind a paywall or login link.

I mail a lot of gmail users. Is there a plugin to filter all my outgoing email to inject 0-width Unicode or replace all chars with a visibly equivalent character to prevent LLM training on my data, as I am not a GMail user?

This just means that it’s not about protecting citizens or vulnerable individuals. The fact that the law won’t say the true reason likely means that the real reason is unpopular or at a minimum something that nobody can get behind.

I saw something in The Oatmeal line ago about pairing abstract ideas with concrete ones. IIRC, the example was to tie Bald Eagle extinction to Twinkies (in the US, presumably) such that if bald eagles go extinct, so do Twinkies. It’d be useful to pair the right to privacy with another right, such as the right to free speech (in the US, for example). That way, if these types of laws pass, so would free speech, something that most people seem to value.

I thought Debian didn’t include firmware and other binaries by default. I remember having a separate firmware CD for installs on weird RAID controllers. Did that change?

Consumer reports recently added a privacy rating to their car ratings. I glanced at it a little last year. I think it rated if you could opt out and the reach of the sharing.

I do have to say that I’m generally disappointed with the discussion on this topic every tine it comes up. The majority of responses go contrast to the question. “Don’t buy a car” or “fix up a junker” are generally not helpful if you’ve already decided that your top priority is to have a newer car. Another thread actually recommended to move to another country where you could walk everywhere. Seriously.

Most often a car purchase is a complex decision making process where you need to weigh multiple, often conflicting priorities where privacy is only one aspect. I get the impression that if people followed the advice of the majority of these comments, they’d be living in a tent off grid, hunting for food to stay alive, but living their privacy dream.

My SO calls this diarrhea of the mouth. It’s quite the affliction.

I understand your point, but there have been some successes in bringing these issues to light: City committee rejects Smart Street Lights surveillance policy in San…

There are others as well, I can’t find them now in the sea of articles. There are also large oranizations that can help to get a community organized.

I think the key is to tone down the message a bit to bring the “normies” into the conversation. Talk about a waste of tax dollars, talk about why you should care about privacy when you have nothing to hide. Talk about how these devices are misused and abused for personal gain and rarely assist in bringing criminals to accountability.

Most people don’t care about privacy but may care if their tax dollars are squandered or if their daughter had a stalker.

There are individual solutions, but of limited success. The most effective method is policy change and the most effective way to change policy is with a collection of people.

Form a concerned community member group, grow the group, approach local politicians and city council members, requesting change.

Check out the deflock and EFF web sites for inspiration.

This is the hardest but most effective method. I was able to change a speed limit in the neighborhood and close a road that was being abused as a traffic light bypass by bringing concerned community members together.

Perhaps I’ve been naieve.

This reminds me that I need alerts monitoring set up. ; -)