There is a hidden gotcha for people who avoid using a Microsoft account to log in to a personal Windows machine.

It has become common for a new laptop to be supplied with bitlocker disk encryption enabled, without the user being aware.

If you log on using a Microsoft Account then the bitlocker key gets stored in the account. Microsoft can give the key to police or feds when they seize a laptop. If Windows stops booting for some reason, or the key gets erased from the TPM which is not uncommon, then to take the drive out of the computer and retrieve your files you need the key and you can get it from the Microsoft account.

If someone jumps through the hoops to avoid using a Microsoft account then later they can find they can't take the disk/ssd out and read it by connecting it to another computer. If the computer stops booting, they did not save the bitlocker key because they did not know the drive was encrypted and did not have an up to date backup then, oh no, they have permanently lost their files.

If Windows gets as far as reading the bitlocker key from the TPM chip (which happens before user log in), then sometimes it is possible to solder wires to the I2C bus, record the data with a hardware logic analyzer and spend a week customizing some software from github to extract the bitlocker key. If someone takes their personal windows laptop to a local computer shop or IT department then they almost certainly are not capable of that. Some models of laptop, intended for business, have a BIOS option to erase the TPM if opening of the laptop case is detected.

There is a security choice between:

1) Bitocker encryption and MS account: If my laptop gets lost or stolen then whoever has it will find it very difficult to access my files but Microsoft can prevent me logging in to my own computer, if I don't have access to the email I used for the Microsoft account or the Microsoft account password then I may loose my files later.

2) No disk encryption. Someone who steals or finds my laptop can access my files.

3) Bitlocker and windows login with an MS account. If you don't have backups and you didn't save the bitlocker key then you may be screwed later.

I hate Microsoft trying to force me to use a Microsoft account on a personal Windows laptop and I hate the boobytrap of bitlocker that you did not know was in use even more.

Thanks for your questions, Freenet caches data but it isn’t meant to be a long-term storage network. It’s better to think of it as a communication system. Data persists as long as at least one node remains subscribed to it. If nobody subscribes (including the author), it will eventually disappear from the network. So yes, if only your node subscribes then the data will only exist there and won’t be available when your machine is offline. But if other nodes subscribe it will be replicated automatically and remain available even if your node goes offline.

Not from 2023, the linked video is from last month. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Splitting hairs, I know...But your message sparked the question' if not a civil servant, what are they. But they are indeed: Spads are a specific kind of political adviser first introduced in 1964. They are appointed as temporary civil servants and work in government. According to https://www.instituteforgovern...

Where are mod points when you need them. This post nails it

So are humans... probably. "Predictive processing" is one of the leading theories of brain function:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictive_coding

Kind of like when Apple created an inferior imitation of FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) and called it ALAC (Apple Lossless Audio Codec).

Perhaps Mullvad Browser, which is a fork of firefox.

It is privacy-focused and they seem to be putting enough resources into it to keep up with security patches for issues with firefox.

32 cents per?!! I wanted to ask what the price of gas was if it costs more, but I dunno now, my chin is busted and hurting from hitting the floor so hard.

I live over on the east cost and here electricity is 8 cents per kWh.
Gas hovers around $3/gl, usually is about $30-35 to fill up, which is about every 1.5-2 weeks for me.

It sounds like an EV would be stupid cheap to charge at home if not for the small detail I do not currently have power to my garage. Something I've been meaning to look into the cost to have run but haven't gotten around to it yet.

On some Dell tower PC's from around 2008, the notification was that at the next boot, the BIOS firmware showed a message saying something like "A single bit memory error was detected and corrected, press F1 to continue."

I have some sticks of RAM (in a box of junk somewhere) that caused the message on the hottest days of the year.

FWIW, he had several opportunities to voice a denial in court, and did not do so.

Another, where it you can see a guy get in and pilot it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

You have to search for the katakana version of ARCHAX (which I would post here but... Unicode) for best results.

Sorry, but no. You do not get do redefine copyright violation as theft. They are two totally different things.

Copyright had the moral high ground when it balanced the needs of creators and the common good. It not longer does, so naturally many people do not feel morally compelled to obey an unjust law.

From here it looks like this affects any slashdot user with a space in their username.

I just tried clicking through tot he profiles of a dozen slashdot users with spaces in their usernames and they all say "The user you requested does not exist".