When you do eventually switch, I’d recommend getting your own domain and using an email address at that domain, so that your email address becomes independent of your email provider. It will make it easier to switch again in future should you need to, because you can keep the same email address and use it with a new provider.

The concern about using Chromium-based browsers is just that, if they become utterly dominant, Google gains de facto control of all web standards.

Don’t you have to install that? I thought Ubuntu came with vi and nano.

A laptop should easily handle a database of 60,000 rows. I run much bigger databases on my own laptop for development purposes.

He wasn’t worth the trouble.

I bumped into the CEO again about 10 years later at a funeral. He was thoroughly obnoxious and spent the time making fun of the deceased (a colleague of ours) and taunting my friend about how many hours he had tricked him into working for free. Then he bragged about his current business and its success. Really one of the most awful people I’ve ever met.

That wasn’t the first deceased colleague of ours he had disrespected. We had a very skilled but very obedient guy working on our team - call him Jim - whose brother (also an colleague) was terminally ill in hospital. These brothers were good guys and popular with all their colleagues. One day Jim got the message that his brother had taken a turn for the worse and might not have much longer, so he asked his manager if he could take the afternoon off to visit his brother. Word came down from Mr. CEO: no, Jim was needed in the office so could not have the afternoon off. Being a loyal employee, Jim stayed. His brother died that evening and he didn’t get to say goodbye. I left the company soon after that.

Miserable as this all was, it was a good lesson in just how self-centred and self-important some people are. This CEO is now very wealthy and still goes through life convinced he’s a success and we’re all losers who don’t know how to do life like he does. He’ll probably never figure out the truth.

I’ve never had a boss who didn’t do this. Promise, set timeline and price, get contracts signed, then come to the development team to ask whether it’s possible to do by Wednesday. Many years ago I had a boss who promised a major client that we’d provide an entire online advertising network to rival Google Ads, and gave us 4 days to design, develop and deliver it. Then when it wasn’t ready he threw one of the developers under the bus in a meeting with the customer. He actually used the words, “This is Dave’s fault.” Dave was professional and didn’t argue. Good look for a CEO. I’m sure he thought he had won. The project went nowhere because all the execs had different ideas about what it was supposed to do, and the dev team was oddly unmotivated to help them out.

There are more privacy-respecting forks of Firefox. Might be time to move to one of those. Librewolf springs to mind.

But they are dependent on the continued existence of Firefox, so it’s still concerning when Mozilla alienates their users.

I don’t think you can call landlines from it though.

I only used Skype for one thing: cheap calls from Canada to international landlines with no time limit and without having to pay a monthly subscription. Can anyone recommend a good alternative? A lot of the options out there look a bit scammy.

Smart to stop at 5pm. I keep thinking “I’m almost there - just another 15 minutes” until way too late.

The ethical route, ie “white hat”, is to contact the owners about the exploit with a fixed period disclosure. Ie, “fix this in 30-90 days, or we will publish our method”.

I’m not sure that is the ethical route when you’re talking about disrupting the operations of a Nazi-led government.

Anyone who leaves a message in full view to announce they’ve accessed the system isn’t the real danger. If whoever this is could get in, so can the real experts from China, Russia, North Korea, etc. There’s no way Musk’s DOGE people, in their destructive haste, have taken any care over security. It’s even likely his team of punchable kids put in their own backdoors, thinking they were being clever. If and when foreign adversaries find their way in through those, they’re not putting up an announcement.

Not all of these mini PCs have a wifi card in them even if they have the antennas for it. You might start by opening it to check whether the wifi antennas are connected, or whether you need to add a WiFi card.

I think OPNsense would do what you’re looking for. I use it on a mini PC as my router, and it’s great, but I have not used it for WiFi (I run a separate access point). The limitation is WiFi hardware support. You will need to make sure your mini PC’s WiFi card has a driver in FreeBSD. Intel hardware is often a better bet than Realtek etc.

https://docs.opnsense.org/manual/how-tos/interface_wireless_internal.html

He’s wealthy though.

Ah, but those “intelligent” people cannot be very intelligent if they are not billionaires. After all, the AI companies know exactly how to assess intelligence:

Microsoft and OpenAI have a very specific, internal definition of artificial general intelligence (AGI) based on the startup’s profits, according to a new report from The Information. … The two companies reportedly signed an agreement last year stating OpenAI has only achieved AGI when it develops AI systems that can generate at least $100 billion in profits. That’s far from the rigorous technical and philosophical definition of AGI many expect. (Source)

They do have categories, via the menu at the top:

https://openalternative.co/categories

Your taxes, straight into the pockets of Sam Altman and Larry Ellison.

Large chunks of the EU are hurtling rightwards too, unfortunately.

Even if you’re right, why bring this up in every single thread? What’s it contributing?