Actually, that was the point where you should hit Shift+Run/Stop, which would abort the tape load you might have inadvertently started.

Second thing to try was Run/Stop+Restore (and you had to hit Restore hard because it was designed to prevent accidental closure), to warm-reset the machine.

Then you restart.

. . . Unless, that is, you had one of the defective machines (there were, admittedly, a hell of a lot of them -- I went through 6 before I found one that worked worth a damn), the first step above should have gotten you out of that.

You need to use a deniable encryption system for this, then. Rubberhose comes immediately to mind, but it is no longer maintained.

Essentially, what it does is enable you to store several file systems in the same disk volume, which will have had its contents randomized in the formatting process. What blocks of the disk are used for each file system is not known until the key is provided. For that matter -- and this is the deniable part -- what file systems even exist is not knowable without having all of the keys.

So, they ask for a key, you give them one. They ask you for "the rest of the keys" you give them a few more, but there is no way to prove, one way or the other, that all of the keys have or have not been provided.

Get your whole life indexed by Google with this one weird trick! You won't believe what happens next!

Personally, I'd really rather have a competitive marketplace, where I could take it into my own hands and say, "If you won't provide me what I need, I will go to your competitors." In the current environment, they will just say, "What competitors?"

Since we don't have a competitive marketplace, we get regulation instead. This upsets some people. I am not one of them.

And then they become very different things understood by different people in completely different ways.

Here's a perfect example:

a = a * 2

Now, getting past the substitute of * for X as an indicator of a multiplication operation, most CS-types will interpret this as a command to double the value of a while a math-type would instead view this as a statement of fact (within the scope of the problem) and infer from this (probably without even thinking about it) that a is zero because no other value satisfies the formula.

When I started playing with computers at an age of nine or ten, (this would have been an Apple ][ back in 1980), my Mom saw me key in a statement that said A = A + 1 and immediately objected, insisting that you could not do that . . . and she isn't even good at math.

So yes, I agree, it is a related, but different, kind of thinking, and should be a separate subject.

Here, have a magnet link.

Or perhaps, "Quis audiet ipsos auditores"?

It sounds like it is the Ken Thompson problem of trusting trust once again rearing its head.

You could do what I have done. I am in the US, and this costs me about USD 8-9 per month on average, and I don't know what hoops you may have to jump through, but this should work in theory:

Sigh up for Amazon Web Services (AWS) and get yourself an EC2 instance. Use the AMI for OpenVPN-AS. Configure it to use TCP/443, which will make your traffic look like any other HTTPS traffic.

On the billing details, (again, this is USD, not AUD), I spent about $100 to get a three-year reservation on a t1.micro instance to run this, which includes a permanent public IP address (they call that an Elastic IP). I then get billed for about $6/month (the 8-9 figure has the $100 amortized over three years), but keep in mind that this also includes some S3 usage on my part, so in practice, it could (and probably will) be less.

Also, the first year of one server, assuming it is a t1.micro running Linux with under 10 GB of disk, is free.

I use this to keep my traffic away from the prying eyes and through the nanny-proxy of the public WiFi that I use.

Well, you don't really known when the ransomware was installed. You could have a perfectly sane backup policy, and still be left with no backup that doesn't contain the ransomware, if the criminals are patient enough for all of your backups to age out.

At the same time, they can only go back so far, because student records stored in increasingly old backups will be increasingly stale.

You will get no argument from me, but I also believe very strongly in attacking problems on as many fronts as you can manage.

If the NSA does not already have access to Cisco's obfuscated address system, then they are not doing their job.

Perhaps, but I believe it is incumbent upon us as American citizens to make their job as difficult as possible. The more steps they have to take to get at our information, the better. The ultimate aim should be to make their data collection so difficult that they have to ration their efforts.

Renewables are coming online now. They have a carbon footprint but it shrinks as the energy used in their production is amortized over their useful lifetime.

This is actually a very big concession for the renewable energy advocates to make, and the reason I say this is that carbon-fueled devices have a portion of their carbon footprint tied up in construction costs as well, and, as with renewables, that portion of the footprint is amortized over useful life.

An alternative that might not leave too bad of a taste in anybody's mouth would be to create a system of grants and loans to spur the formation of competitors in the local loop market.

Another option might be to separate the local loop from the IP space. This would get us to a position similar to what existed in the dialup days, in that we could choose from a wide range of ISPs. The only reason that model died was that the existing local loops were, at their very best, limited to ~53 kbit/sec, which is 2-3 orders of magnitude too slow for today's world.

I'd ask where you would have it go, exactly, but I don't expect responses from ACs

As for where it did go, radio goes everywhere. It's a powerfully expressive medium with a low cost to be a listener.

Now, the cost of transmitting . . . that's another matter. I've been an activist in this area since the 90's, and one of the things that such activism has run is the opening up of low-power FM slots across the country. These slots are strictly reserved for community-run, short-range stations.

If anything, radio needs a bit more regulation with respect to concentration of ownership. Right now, a company called "I heart radio" controls what is, in my opinion, too much spectrum. Lest you think I only pick on commercial, though, there is also, in my area, an NPR station that, by itself, is simulcasting from no fewer than 27 separate stations in upstate New York, Vermont and Massachusetts, all from one central location in Albany. This type of coverage would be better served by a single, medium to large AM station.