Not OP, but it’s not a new idea. I’ve seen that suggested, even in major news coverage, for the past 20 years. For a long time, any article criticizing the TSA and its effectiveness would point out that weak point.

Seems they are officially based out of Cyprus, with a large parent (equity) company operating in multiple countries.

I’m betting at least some of those operations are in the US, although I couldn’t easily find a list to confirm. They could also have employees, such as developers, or operate data centers in the US. HQ isn’t especially meaningful in this context.

That gets complicated if they’re in the US. Technically, they only need to follow laws in places where they have a presence. But there are US courts that have ruled that operating a web service available in their jurisdiction counts. Then there’s all the stuff about interstate commerce and enforcement, lawsuits and criminal charges, etc. for a simple example, look up Media Matters and Twitter.

Conversely, if they are entirely outside of US jurisdiction, Florida can file (and win) lawsuits to their heart’s content. It only matters if they can collect or enforce an injunction, or at least enforce a block.

There are no circumstances where you live in Florida, and it would be easier to leave than to setup a VPN connection. Unless you had to build your own VPN server, and even then probably not.

A better plan long-term, sure. But not easier.

Younger me did not care about VPNs (which weren’t really a thing at the time), but I did care about finding porn. Most had some form of Adult Check or similar.

It did not stop me from finding porn elsewhere.

The law doesn’t technically ban porn. It just sets arduous requirements on distribution of porn. They can still produce it all they want, but Florida is now a difficult market to sell it in.

I expect to see a rise in European or other foreign porn sites. These will be able to safely ignore any “requirements” from Florida.

Giving these items to employees could be considered part of their compensation package, like gift cards. Those have to be appropriately recorded and taxed.

FWIW, a lot of these places now send damaged/surplus/whatever items to a salvage company, who then pays the original retailer “fire sale” prices. These items are usually auctioned off locally for a fraction of MSRP.

Same for many returned items, BTW. There’s a local auction site that runs like eBay, but it’s overwhelmingly Amazon returns.

Mixing brands is fine, assuming one of two things is true:

1. They are following the same defined standard (e.g. 802.11ax, not “mesh Wi-Fi”)

2. The proprietary feature you are looking for is contained within devices for that brand. IOW, that feature doesn’t need to interoperate with other brands.

Most mesh systems are proprietary, so everything within that must match (for the back haul connection). But you can also just setup another WAP, following the 802.11 and 802.3 standards. Similarly, your point to point devices can connect to other devices using 802.11 or .3, but not to the mesh back haul.

A 1993 Time Magazine article quotes computer scientist John Gilmore, one of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, as saying “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”[7]

That applied a whole lot more when most connections were using a phone line, and a decent size city could have hundreds of ISPs. But part of the design of a redundant mesh network is that there are tons of different paths to any destination. Cutting any of those links would simply force traffic to other routes.

The early Internet was decentralized in other ways, too. Rather than flock to corporate platforms like Facebook, people spent a lot of time on federated and independent platforms. This included Usenet, IRC, and BBSes. In the event that the feds, lawyers, etc could take one down, a dozen more could spring up overnight. There was such a small barrier to entry, and many were run by hobbyists.

It’s somewhat true today. There are countless Lemmy instances that are completely independent. Pirate Bay famously references the Hydra, and it applies to their peers as well. But these are limited in scope.

Xitter has shown us just how quickly and thoroughly a platform can collapse through hostile admins, and how slowly people will reject it.

Buggy how? What specifically is an issue? Have you ever gotten to a stable and working point? If so, what changed?

I personally only use Linux in servers. It may take a while to configure initially, but then I don’t touch it in any meaningful way for years.

I work an office job in the US. You need to find a better job. No one here is required or even expected to skip lunch. Scheduling is often difficult, so many of my colleagues put it on their calendars as reserved time/another meeting. You can’t schedule a meeting with John at noon. It doesn’t matter if it’s because he’s in another meeting or at lunch; he’s already booked.

Yes, there are many terrible employers. If you work for one, you need to leave.

Shares with all of your contacts by default. Also includes a sales pitch to each of them to sign up as well

That might even just be the “call of the void.” Throw in some very minor extras, like alcohol or a bad day at work, and it’s easy to see someone heeding that call.

You can’t broadly say that for a brand, especially one as diverse as HP. Some are very easy, mostly the enterprise models. Many are borderline impossible. Without knowing the model, it’s impossible to say. It could require removing the motherboard, or special tools to open the case.

The answer is actually pretty simple. They all used to, at some point. But then they started having bad experiences, and there were clear trends. Now, because of classical conditioning, they avoid those experiences. Is the filter perfect? No, of course not. But it’s good enough.

TL;DR: Bad men start by talking the same way you do.

Unless women have taken a very sharp turn towards hookups, or polygamy, that’s only a partial explanation. The desirable men are still taken, just as before.

I presume your younger colleagues are all men, and of the segment that does poorly with women. Try asking women about their perspectives on the matter. I promise you’ll get a different answer.

It’s become clear that you and the manager are not compatible. It may or may not be a reflection on either of you, but it’s definitely not a good fit either way.

The best way to resolve a bad fit like this is to separate the pieces. Since they are the manager, that typically leaves it to you as the employee.

This isn’t even a bad thing, necessarily. Switching jobs brings uncertainty and fear, but also opportunity. Not only do you have a chance to get into a situation more to your liking, you can branch out into new areas. These jumps also usually bring a pay bump, although that depends on how patient you can be and how hard you can negotiate.

There’s a quote that has stuck with me for a while, and I encourage you to take it to heart.

“All of the best things in life come when you’re out of your comfort zone, and everything worth doing is scary at first”

You’re scared of the unknown, and understandably so. But it also doesn’t sound like you’ve even looked into it. I can promise you don’t currently have the only job that would work for you. It’s also very unlikely that you have the best one. You probably don’t even have the best one you could have by Xmas.

Go explore. The future is rosier than you think, if only you let it happen.

You basically described the PageRank system, but at an article level. I suppose it’s theoretically possible with LLM tools, but not an easy task. It also has a pretty big gap of how to define a source as trustworthy.

But it might be doable on a simpler level - if you were to ask the AI if an article’s claims match other sources, you might at least find the outliers.

Thank you for the extra context. It’s relieving to know you don’t just have a bunch of USB “backup” drives connected.

To break this down to its simplest elements, you basically have a bunch of small DASes connected to a USB host controller. The rest could be achieved using another interface, such as SATA, SAS, or others. USB has certain compromises that you really don’t want happening to a member of a RAID, which is why you’re getting warnings from people about data loss. SATA/SAS don’t have this issue.

You should not have to replace the cable ever, especially if it does not move. Combined with the counterfeit card, it sounds like you had a bad parts supplier. But yes, parts can sometimes fail, and replacements on SAS are inconvenient. You also (probably) have to find a way to cool the card, which might be an ugly solution.

I eventually went with a proper server DAS (EMC ktn-stl3, IIRC), connected via external SAS cable. It works like a charm, although it is extremely loud and sucks down 250w @ idle. I don’t blame anyone for refusing this as a solution.

I wrote, rewrote, and eventually deleted large sections of this response as I thought through it. It really seems like your main reason for going USB is that specific enclosure. There should really be an equivalent with SAS/SATA connectors, but I can’t find one. DAS enclosures pretty much suck, and cooling is a big part of it.

So, when it all comes down to it, you would need a DAS with good, quiet airflow, and SATA connectors. Presumably this enclosure would also need to be self-powered. It would need either 4 bays to match what you have, or 16 to cover everything you would need. This is a simple idea, and all of the pieces already exist in other products.

But I’ve never seen it all combined. It seems the data hoarder community jumps from internal bays (I’ve seen up to 15 in a reasonable consumer config) straight to rackmount server gear.

Your setup isn’t terrible, but it isn’t what it could/should be. All things being equal, you really should switch the drives over to SATA/SAS. But that depends on finding a good DAS first. If you ever find one, I’d be thrilled to switch to it as well.

You currently have 16 disks connected via USB, in a ZFS array?

I highly recommend reimagining your path forward. Define your needs (sounds like a high-capacity storage server to me), define your constraints (e.g. cost), then develop a solution to best meet them.

Even if you are trying to build one on the cheap with a high Wife Acceptance Factor, there are better ways to do so than attaching 16+ USB disks to a thin client.