I’m not sure what the exact model is, but it’s probably from the Performa or Power Mac 5000 or 6000 series. It’s low-res so it’s hard to read, but the text next to the floppy drive says “PowerPC”, referring to the CPU family used in Macs in that era.

The screen looks like Mac OS 8. It’s so low-rest that it’s kind of hard to tell, but the menu bar at the top of the screen is clearly from Mac OS. Could be 7.5, but I’m guessing 8 since that’s what’s shown in the web browser.

I think the left screen is showing Windows. Again, super low-res, but those look like Windows 95/98’s blue window title bars and gray task bar at the bottom.

Same.

That was probably the intention. X-Files was at its height of popularity around this time (assuming 1997 by the Mac model and OS 8).

Seems insane that even after disabling all related options in the main settings GUI, there are still like two dozen things enabled in about:config.

Snapchat does not use end-to-end encryption for messages, so it doesn’t even belong in the conversation.

WhatsApp and FB Messenger are somewhat defensible choices since they at least use E2EE by default (Messenger did not until recently). However, there are a few good reasons to favor Signal:

1. It is open source. Interested parties can actually verify that Signal’s encryption claims are true. Interested parties can also audit new versions as they released.
2. Facebook/Meta, as a company, has a long history of tracking users, leaking user data, and even conducting psychological experiments on users without consent and in secret.
3. WhatsApp and Messenger only allow 6-digit PINs to secure your messages. With that PIN, you can decrypt those messages. Signal allows for longer alphanumeric passcodes.
4. Facebook makes no promises not to track your usage of Messenger or WhatsApp, only that the messages themselves are encrypted.

Additionally, you can set Android to use an ad-blocking DNS server without apps. In Settings > Network & Internet > DNS, select “Private DNS” and set the hostname to a custom server, like base.dns.mullvad.net (Mullvad’s DNS server is free to the public, does not require a VPN subscription).

The per-app controls sound neat! I might give that a try. Google killed the ability to restrict apps’ network access years ago, specifically so ads would always work. I’ve never tried a local VPN as a workaround.

I’ve never actually tried it, but I think you could use BTRFS subvolumes to multiboot without partitioning the physical space.

And then maybe even use deduplication across subvolumes?

BTRFS can work across multiple disks much like ZFS. It supports RAID 0/1/10 but I can’t tell you about performance relative to ZFS.

Just be sure you do NOT use BTRFS’s RAID5/6. It’s notoriously buggy and even the official docs warn that it is only for testing/development purposes. See https://btrfs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/btrfs-man5.html#raid56-status-and-recommended-practices

Edit: Another interesting thing to note between the two file systems is deduplication. ZFS supports automatic deduplication (although it requires a lot of memory). BTRFS supports deduplication but does not have built-in automatic dedup. You can use external tools to perform either file-level or block-level deduplication on BTRFS volumes: https://btrfs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/Deduplication.html

Good advice!

This is also available with BTRFS. Personally I am leveraging this feature via Snapper, simply because it was the default on OpenSuse and was good enough that I never bothered looking into alternatives. I’ve heard good things about Timeshift, too.

This has saved my butt a couple times. I’ll never go back to a filesystem that doesn’t support snapshots.

I really liked ZFS when I used it many years ago, but eventually I decided to move to BTRFS since it has built-in kernel support. I miss RAIDZ, though. :(

If you got a problem, reinstall and do the same stuff again, you’ll almost certainly get the same problem again

Sure, but nobody’s likely to do that. If I wiped my system now, I doubt I could get it back to exactly the same state if I tried. There are way too many moving parts. There are changes I’ve forgotten I ever applied, or only applied accidentally. And there are things I’d do differently if I had the chance to start over (like installing something via a different one of the half-dozen-or-so methods of installing packages on my distro).

For example, I have Docker installed because I once thought a problem I had might have been Podman-specific. Turned out it was not. But I never did the surgery necessary to fully excise Docker. I probably won’t bother unless and until there is a practical reason to.

They have a big IRL ad campaign in major US cities. See https://mullvad.net/en/blog/advertising-that-targets-everyone

These ads certainly aren’t the worst, but they’re still a bit misleading. Using a VPN is not going to prevent tracking in general. Your phone apps will still send GPS data to all the same places. Web sites will still use all the same cookies. Facebook is still gonna be Facebook. 🤷

That said, Mullvad does include domain-based ad and tracker blocking with their DNS server (which is free and available to the public, btw), and that’s also optional on the VPN, so it does help to a point.

(Pinging @countrypunk@slrpnk.net to avoid double-replying. )

Sure. I’m referring to the ones that run big ad campaigns, like Nord and Mullvad. They tend to overstate how a VPN can protect you, sometimes in ways that barely make sense. There is no epidemic of criminals stealing personal credit card information over insecure wi-fi, for example. The ads play into ignorance and fear.

That said, yeah, I’d rather be on a VPN when on a public wi-fi network. But I’m not really worried about someone sniffing my encrypted HTTPS traffic (which is pretty much everything nowadays; Firefox by default won’t even load unencrypted web sites).

Some VPNs allow multi-hopping, similar to Tor. I couldn’t give you an exhaustive list but most popular ones support this. Mullvad and Proton do, for example. There are also strategies to add noise into VPN traffic.

This is not a silver bullet, of course. Tor has similar problems as you describe if an adversary has visibility into enough nodes. As always, this comes down to your threat model.

On the one hand, I find the advertising of VPNs outright dishonest. On the other hand, I would trust any reputable VPN provider much more than I trust my ISP or cell carrier.

Never liked him, but I acknowledge that he had some effective economic policies during his time as mayor. He was at least competent and sane. He went completely off the rails a long time ago, though.

He’s often credited with cleaning up Times Square, which was known for prostitution back in the 80s. But honestly, he reaped what his predecessors sowed to a large degree.

He used 9/11 like his personal sword and shield. He was lucky to be in a prominent position related the biggest and least controversial issue in America. I don’t imagine he ever would have been on the national stage otherwise. He was pretty much at the natural end of his career before then.

NYC has a history of conservative mayors, which seems a bit odd since we’re so solidly liberal in federal elections. It sure doesn’t help when we get a Democrat as infantile and corrupt as our current mayor, Eric Adams. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_prosecution_of_Eric_Adams

btrfs’s RAID features are not production-ready, and at this point I doubt they ever will be. See:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Btrfs#Implemented_but_not_recommended_for_production_use

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Btrfs

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Btrfs-Warning-RAID5-RAID6

ZFS is definitely more robust.