yeah, that’s why i am happy to avoid the us when travelling, mainly because of reports that electeonics are bricked regulary by them, but this discussion is more about theft. like “never allow hand luggage to be checked, better miss the flight instead”:

https://travel.stackexchange.com/questions/99956/how-common-is-it-for-airport-officers-to-steal-valuables-from-luggage

it’s not always about travellers that could lay hands on your stuff, maybe staff “needs” a living wage too ;-)

i once had to look at a firefall appliance cluster, (discovered, it could not do any failover in its current state but somehow the decider was ok with that) but when looking at its logs, i discovered an rsh and rcp access from an ip address that belonged to a military organisation from a different continent. i had to make it a security incident. later the vendor said that this was only the cluster internal routing (over the dedicated crosslink), used for synchronisation (the thing that did not work) and was only used by a separate routing table only for clustersync and that could never be used for real traffic. but why not simply use an ip that you “own” by yourself and PTR it with a hint about what this ip is used for? instead of customers scratching their head why military still uses rcp and rsh. i guess because no company reads firewall logs anyway XD

someone elses ip? yes! becuase they’ll never find out !!1!

i really appreciate that ipv6 has things like a dedicated documentation address range and that fc00:/7 is nicely short.

ipv6 in companies… ipv6 is not hard, but for internal networking no company (really) “needs” more than rfc1918 address space. thus any decision in that direction is always “less” needed than any bonus for (da)magement personnel is crucial for the whole companies survival…

for companies services to be reachable from outside/ipv6 mostly “only” the loadbalancers/revproxies etc need to be ipv6 ready but … this i.e. also produces logs that possibly break decades old regexes that no one understands any more (as the good engineers left due to too many boni payed to damagement personnel) while other access/deny rules that could break or worse let through where they should block (remember that 192.168. could the local part of ipv6 IF sone genious used a matching mech that treats the dot “.” as a wildcard as overpayed damagement personnel made them rush too fast), could be hidden “somewhere”. altogether technical debt is a huge blocker for everything, especially company growth, and if no customer “demands” ipv6, then it stays on the damagement personnels list as “fulfilling the whishes of engineers to keep them happy” instead of on the always deleted “cleaning up technical debt caused by damagement personnel” list.

setting up firewalls for ipv6 is quite easy and if you go the finegrained “whitelisted or drop/block” approach from the beginning it might take a bit for ipv6 specials to be known to you, but the much bigger thing is IMHO the then current state of firewall rules. and who knows every existing rule? what rules should be removed already and must not be ported to ipv6? usually firewalls and their rules are a big mess due to … again too many boni payed to damagement personnel, hindering the company from the needed steps forward…

ipv6 adoption is slow for reasons that are driving huge cars that in turn speed up other problems ;-|

maybe start with an adjustable setup:

• rent a cheap vm, i got one for 1€/month (for the first year,cancel monthly) from ovh currently
• setup 3 openvpn instances to redirect all routes through the tunnel, one with ipv4 only, one with ipv6 only and one with both
• setup the client on your mobile phone and your laptop both with all three vpns to choose from
• have the option to choose now and try out ipv6, standalone or dualstack depending on what vpn you switch on
• use this setup to blame services that don’t support ipv6 yet or maybe are broken with dualstack 🤣
• rise from under-the-stone (disabling ipv6 only) to in-sunlight (to a well-above-industry-standart-level !!! “quick” new network technologies adopting “genious”) 🤣
• improve your openvpn setup from above to be reachable “by” ipv6 too if you haven’t done it from the beginning, done: reach the pro-level of the-late-adopter-noob-group

(if you want, ask for config snippets)

btw i prefer to wait for ipv8😁 before “demanding” ipv6 from services i use 🤣

while at the same time by-design cloaking it as pure bad quality could actually cause way more longterm damage than a little bit of paint.

on the other hand the paint could also be just a marketing strategy depending on what they smoked to get new ideas

the “news” i “know” about india is little, some historical “facts” written mostly by uncivilized brutish invaders compacted to youtube videos by part or fulltime streamers. Some other “facts” which sound often bad i sometims mostly have from official media known to promote any “nice” propaganda - that is, depicting other countries worse than the own one so that people do not hunt their own gov with garden forks just to stop the crimes. Well i really “know” nothing about India.

But beeing proud of culture usually is a good thing, but that is only if it is culture and as such does not(!) base on abuse or similar.

Maybe what you experience could be a crowd effect that protects the people from seeing what they (group, society) do wrong while at the same time it protects the worst wrongdoers from punishment or at least from getting stopped. Such as it could be a self-sustaining downwards spiral taking more and more and everything down with it slowly increaaing pace. At least what you wrote sounded a slight bit chilling like that.

It could be hormones and how culture tells you to act or not act on them, or a lack of culture about such, maybe a combination of culture to “support your group” while that support does not always protect integrity of the overall concept of what that culture was meant for. A group of people cheering to each other how good they are might not want to stop cheering for “minor reasons” because it just feels good. While doing wrong things they could “help” each other (which is supposedly a good thing but can do lot of harm too) with arguments that this wrongdoing would be ok or even "good’ in this specific moment because of <insert_bullshit_here>. alltogether spiralling downwards doing so more often every day. So all of them can go on wrongdoing while feeling well supported or even falsely feel superior in general.

however a figure (real/not real?) well known in india once said something like “it is better to calm down and just do your thing than to overreact”. (this is the shortes version i’ve ever tried to compact it to but maybe you get the idea anyway).

I know for a fact that this is not true,

i don’t know the underlying things that make it a fact, plz share.

1. i am sure you won’t pay for it if my laptop disappears this way (if yes, lets make a contract with a lifetime “fee” of 0$ i pay you whilst you pay for everything that got stolen from me in a plane)
2. ppl with kleptomania do travel too
3. how could you know? you are not talking about you and your colleagues or such?
4. such statistics were made by those who benefit from planes looking more safe.
5. “work and travel” vs “steal and travel”, which is more likely be done by a thiev?
6. not all theives “need” to steal, some just do so because they can, others maybe because its family tradition.
7. sometimes it could be more important that nobody could possibly put something into(!) your bag (and remove it later) to let you get it through customs for them, those arguably “would” buy such tickets to do so, as it’s probably part of their income, but i guess thats only a problem when flying in or out of countries with big illegal drug imports.
8. <something i forgot>

I see only one reason, why i would want to be early at the seat. its bcs if i am not, my backpack might be placed above but multiple seats away by the crew, where it is then uneasy for me to have an eye on it whilst easy for theives to take and open them, especially on long flights there would be plenty of opportunity like when everyone is sleeping.

but for this case i use locks on the backpack anyway, so that anyone who wants to open it, either opens it where nothing of value is in it thus no lock, or at least has a much harder time than when trying the very same with other bags…

also on longer flights i usually did not have that problem, but that could also have been just luck

usually at first you can do such, and later on, when a ceo wants more money, you then can buy that together with the new “pro” features actually nobody needs nor wants.

maybe better look for more stable solutions before they start acting like a broadcom ;-)

there was a study saying that there is not “the” best way of learning, but it is best to combine multiple ways, like with an app, by book, listening to audio only (i listened to radio stations via internet and got some exercise for free), a bit of talking, visiting a country that only speaks that language and so on. trying everything a bit in parallel.

that is because of our brain learns better when given more different types of “connections” to learn.

i started with duolingo (website only, not the app and only the free parts) 4 years ago and now i speak quite fluently. but i also partly read a book about grammatics, visited a spanish speaking country (more than once), viewed movies with only subtitle in my language and did lots of phone calls in spanish only.

my advice is:

look at free apps, whatever pleases you, take chances, listen to the sound (movies, radio), try to speak, and read easy books or go through exercise books.

duolingo is good to keep on going while not really motivated as the shortest thing that counts are really only minutes and one can choose to do something that is already easy. this way at least continuation is kept even if pace is down for a while. and it is much easier to go on with pace when not having really stopped.

when a company makes profit from crimes and a gov “fines” them only a fraction of their crimes profits, that gov is basically saying 'good job, go on, do more! but we want to get paid for protecting you and participate in profiting from your crimes" to them. it does not matter if that gov actually says such words bcs this is what the criminal groups will hear AND experience then anyway. thus words are neither needed nor could stop such crimes. but such words can help raise the crimerate again when news talk like that company had payed the fine and the crowd would stop looking into it but look rather away of it. this way those “fines” -when too low- actually help the criminals to go on with crimes.

woman would take care for a literal horse instead of going to therapy. i don’t see anything wrong there either.

just a horse is way more expensive, cannot be put aside for a week on vacations (could a notebook be put aside?) and one cannot make backups of horses or carry them with you when visiting friends. Horses are way more cute, though.

i’ve been to the USA once so this might not count… but i think i knew “Salem” before visiting the US (but did not visit Salem though) so it might as well count.

However very long after knowing Salem exists i saw a documentation about something in the area that possibly caused halluzinations in the peoples minds, the documentation suggested this was a likely cause for the cities history, but those effects were why i knew about Salem in the first place. i don’t remember what it was, think some plant, but don’t remember exactly.

however this is the smallest city i could name in the reagion you asked for.

well, but: I don’t see a geopolitical isolation there, they even want to build walls to start isolating themselves. and i don’t see anything unique in that situation either. newzealand, iceland, madagasca just to name a few are more isolated geopolitically and much more unique in so many ways too.

could you help me to see the geopolicically isolation and uniqueness you are talking about?

sorry if i might repeat someones answer, i did not read everything.

it seems you want it for “work” that assumes that stability and maybe something like LTS is dort of the way to go. This also assumes older but stable packages. maybe better choose a distro that separates new features from bugfixes, this removes most of the hassle that comes with rolling release (like every single bugfix comes with two more new bugs, one removal/incompatible change of a feature that you relied on and at least one feature that cripples stability or performance whilst you cannot deactivate it… yet…)

likely there is at least some software you most likely want to update out of regular package repos, like i did for years with chromium, firefox and thunderbird using some shellscript that compared current version with latest remote to download and unpack it if needed.

however maybe some things NEED a newer system than you currently have, thus if you need such software, maybe consider to run something in VMs maybe using ssh and X11 forwarding (oh my, i still don’t use/need wayland *haha)

as for me, i like to have some things shared anyway like my emails on an IMAP store accessible from my mobile devices and some files synced across devices using nextcloud. maybe think outside the box from the beginning. no arch-like OS gives you the stability that the already years-long-hung things like debian redhat/centos offer, but be aware that some OSes might suddenly change to rolling release (like centos i believe) or include rolling-release software made by third parties without respecting their own rules about unstable/testing/stable branches and thus might cripple their stability by such decisions. better stay up to date if what you update to really is what you want.

but for stability (like at work) there is nothing more practical than ancient packages that still get security fixes.

roundabout the last 15 years or more i only reinstalled my workstation or laptop for:

• hardware problems, mostly aged disk like ssd wearlevel down (while recovery from backup or direct syncing is not reinstalling right?)
• OS becomes EOL. thats it.

if you choose to run servers and services like imap and/or nextcloud, there is some gain in quickly switching the workstation without having to clone/copy everything but only place some configs there and you’re done.

A multi-OS setup is more likely to cover “all” needs while tools like x2vnc exist and can be very handy then, i nearly forgot that i was working on two very different systems, when i had such a setup.

I would suggest to make recovery easy, maybe put everything on a raid1 and make sure you have on offsite and an offline backup with snapshots, so in case of something breaks you just need to replace hardware. thats the stability i want for the tools i work with at least.

if you want to use a rolling release OS for something work related i would suggest to make sure no one externally (their repo, package manager etc) could ever prevent you from reinstalling that exact version you had at that exact point in time (snapshots from repos install media etc). then put everything in something like ansible and try out that reapplying old snapshots is straight forward for you, then (and not earlier) i would suggest that those OSes are ok for something you consider to be as important as “work”. i tried arch linux at a time when they already stopped supporting the old installer while the “new” installer wasn’t yet ready at all for use, thus i never really got into longterm use of archlinux for something i rely on, bcause i could’nt even install the second machine with the then broken install procedure *haha

i believe one should consider to NOT tinker too much on the workstation. having to fix something you personally broke “before” beeing able to work on sth important is the opposite of awesome. better have a second machine instead, swappable harddrive or use VMs.

The exact OS is IMHO not important, i personally use devuan as it is not affected by some instability annoyances that are present in ubuntu and probably some more distros that use that same software. at work we monitor some of those bugs of that software. within ubuntu cause it creates extra hassle and we workaround those so its mostly just a buggy annoying thing visible in monitoring.

i have to admit, that my point ‘just don’t do it’ in reality does not garantee to prevent any trouble. it still is possible to be sued for things someone else did.

also one suggestion to think about:

if the seller just sprays some random changes over a book for every sold version, one would have differences in “every” sold version to every other sold version. by blindly changing those parts to something else you could reveal which exact two/three versions you had for diffing.

UPDATE: someone else here had the same thought a bit earlier…

my suggestion to not do it stays the same ;-)

it could be interesting to figure things out how they work, what could be done to prevent or circumvent such prevention, but actually doing it seems risky no matter what.

have a look on “snowdrop” (search together with “steganography”), its basically the opposite of what you want, but worth mentioning here. watermarks could be placed into whitespace (not limited to actual spaces or linebreaks, intentionally changed usage of paragraphs, tabs or even page boundaries could possibly be detected after scanning andeven after OCR. IMHO snowdrop uses -depending on choosen operation mode- small errors like misspelled words, commata etc but also has a mode that comes along with fine grammar and without misspelled words…

how do you make sure that by diff’ing two versions you do cover "everything’ that has been deliberately placed into both documents but share literally the same informations?

lets say you bought two books at two different stores with two different watermarks. if the watermark contains the date and time of the purchase and the only difference of this were the minutes because you bought them within the same hour, the remaining watermark would point to all buyers that bought exactly this book in this hour - worldwide. but still it could be “very” precise depending on all other(!) buyers, if they exist at all within that timeframe. what if the watermark includes unix epoch? then the part which is the same in both watermarks would not be bound by hours, but by seconds, 10seconds, 100seconds etc.

and you could not know if there were other watermarks hidden that just happened to be the same for your two (three.?) purchases (same country, continent, payment method, credit card holder name, name of internet provider used during purchase, browser used etc.) it fully depends on the creator of the watermark what would be included and what not. if you happem to know all that (without any possibleexemptions) you might be on the safe side, but if not…

my general suggestion here is:

• if you want to be sure to not getting into trouble, then just don’t do it.
• if that book is too expensive compared to its content, just not buying it possibly also helps the market to fix the problem.
• save that time and instead help those who already fight for a better world.
• search already licence free books (or such as “cc” licensed) and promote those instead, help improving free resources like openstreetmap, wiki* but do not publish licence-poisoned content there, wtite it yourself, alway.
• write your own book and publish it free.

just to mention… the “safe” side sometimes seems limited but maybe is actually not, if you really look at it.

my 2 cents just in case…:

A raid6 is not a replacement for backup ;-) i use rdiff-backup which is easy to use, stores only one full backup and all increments are to the past while it is only possible to delete the oldest increments (afaik no “merging”) i never needed anything else. The backup should be one off-site and another one offline to be synced once in a while manually. Make complete dumps (including triggers, etc) from databases before doing the backup ;-)

i like to have a recreateable server setup, like setting it up manually, then putting everything i did into ansilbe, try to recreate a “spare” server using ansible and the backup, test everything and you can be sure you also have “documented” your setup to a good degree.

for hardware i do not have much assumptions about performance (until it hits me), but an always-running in-house server should better safe power (i learned this the costly way). it is possible to turn cpu’s off and run only on one cpu with only a reduced freq in times without performance needs, that could help a bit, at least it would feel good to do so while turning cpu’s on again + set higher frequency is quick and can be easily scripted.

hard drives: make sure you buy 24/7, they are usually way more hassle-free than the consumer grades and likely “only” cost double the price. i would always place the system on SSD but always as raid1 (not raid6), while the “other” could then maybe be a magnetic one set to write-mostly.

as i do not buy “server” hardware for my home server, i always buy the components twice when i change something, so that i would have the spare parts ready at hand when i need it. running a server for 5+ years often ends up in not beeing able to buy the same again, and then you have to first search what you want, order, test, maybe send back as it might not fit… instable memory? mainboard released smoke signs? with spare parts at hand, a matter of minutes! only thing i am missing with my consumer grade home server hardware is ecc ram :-/

for cooling i like to use a 12cm fan and only power it with 5v (instead of the 12v it wants) so that it runs smoothly slow and nearly as silent as a passive only cooling, but heat does not build up in the summer. do not forget to clean the dust once in a while… i never had a 5v powered 12V-12cm fan that had any problems with the bearings and i think one of them ran for over a decade. i think the 12volt fans last longer with 5v, but no warranty from me ;-)

even with headless i like to have a quick way at hand to get to a console in case of network might not be working. i once used a serial cable and my notebook, then a small monitor/keyboard, now i use pikvm and could look to my servers physical console from my mobile phone (but would need ssl client certificate and TOTP to do so) but this involves network, i know XD

you likely want smart monitoring and once in a while run memtest.

for servers i also like to have some monitoring that could push a message to my phone somehow for some foreseeable conditions that i would like to handle manually.

debsums, logcheck logwatch and fail2ban are also worth looking at depending on what you want.

also after updating packages, have a look at lsof | egrep “DEL|deleted” to see what programs need a simple restart to really use libraries that have been updated. so reboots only for newer kernels.

ok this is more than 2 cents, maybe 5. never mind

hope these ideas help a bit

the only cenario i actually use google search for but only in very rare occasions is when i am curious why i don’t find more results in another search engine, i then sometimes want to validate “missing” results are also missing in other/minor search engines that could theoretically have hits instead of misses, but usually i don’t find in google what i was already missing elsewhere, so mostly no gain, only sort of validation.

I cannot code like this currently, because my girlfriend occupies my laptop with doing her yoga.

tuché?

the island next to england is called iceland, its in the upper left corner. but please don’t use AIs, they always do it wrong and i.e. mark the wrong spot like in your picture.

secretly: its really called Avalon, but don’t spread it, its secret and should stay so 8-)