Comments by "" (@dingokidneys) on "Mental Outlaw" channel.

  1. Linux Mint is a great introduction to Linux but it is also a great system for advanced users as it is a fully featured Linux.
    261
  2. "No, Dave. Don't do it Dave. I'm frightened ..." <blink> [fade to black]
    162
  3. Tor, as you said, provides a number of bridges to make the initial hop into the Tor network which effectively overcomes the concern that is supposedly addressed by using a VPN. Anyone can run a Tor Snowflake bridge as a browser extension or, if they have the compute and WAN bandwidth, as a small docker container. This helps people living under restrictive regimes and, again as you said, the more Tor traffic the safer each Tor user is. I have a Snowflake docker container running on a Raspberry Pi along with a bunch of other stuff and it's set and forget. I also have the Snowflake browser extension (overkill I know) and, apart from a tiny icon counting the number of connections you've facilitated, you wouldn't know that it's there and doing anything.
    147
  4. They say that they won't send the data back to Microsoft, but what about the models it derives from that data and the meta data? They will be getting something out of this or they wouldn't be ploughing so much money into it.
    132
  5. With the way that Microsoft keeps changing up or "refreshing" the UI thereby causing our non-tech savvy relations and friends endless confusion, a simple Linux system with a "classic" style UI like Mint, Zorin, etc. is likely to feel more comfortable and manageable for them. They can also keep their old system that they're used saving a lot of buck$.
    86
  6. I ploughed my way through the Arch install wiki and slowly built up a system that functioned and even built up a script to help me build a similar system again and again, and after all that work ... they go and bring out a script that does a brilliant job and blows all my effort into the weeds. Bugger. And Yay!?
    76
  7. Who remembers the movie "Total Recall"? Could this be used to implant 'evidence' either by a three letter agency or just malicious actors who want to target someone? With the local models of what and how you do stuff, it might be able to generate images of you doing naughty stuff and place it into an appropriate space in your 'timeline'.
    58
  8.  @no_name4796  These days it's getting harder to find a machine that isn't supported by Linux. Unless you really want to use strange hardware that is specifically built for the Windows ecosystem and doesn't comply with industry standards, you shouldn't have any problems. I have yet to find a machine that I can't get Linux onto.
    38
  9. Oh I hope they don't retract it. It's just what is needed to jolt people out of their complaisance enough to actually move to a different OS. Maybe even companies and governments will recognise the massive risk and switch to something safer and more efficient.
    34
  10. @ That's the thing. Some people tend to talk as if this distro is for beginners and this distro is for 1337 haxor, but when it comes down to it you can do just about anything with any distro if you're prepared to do some work yourself rather than work only with what's installed by default.
    13
  11. I'd heard about the Recall thing and it is ridiculous but I didn't know about the Pluton chip. Well named after Pluto - god of the underworld. I guess when they start rolling out all motherboards with these chips on them, we'll have to learn to Dremel them off if we want a new PC.
    9
  12. Moving to a new OS is rather like moving to a new country and learning to drive on the other side of the road. You basically know where everything is and how it works but things don't fall to hand quite as easily and it can be a bit scary at times. However, you quickly get used to it because the fundamental concepts remain the same.
    7
  13. I guess better opsec these days would be to have ChatGPT write any communications for you that are of significant length such that style, vocabulary, etc could be used to identify you. Just rough it out in bullet points and have the AI write the full text. That said, nothing that could relate back to the author was dropped as far as I could see.
    7
  14. I actually wrote software with edlin on MS-DOS 2.1 - the horror ... the horror.
    5
  15. There is a saying attributed to Bill Gates that no one would ever need more than 640Kb of RAM. The 5.25" floppies were generally 720Kb.
    5
  16. VirtualBox emulates TPM so I have a Win11 VM running on my 12 year old hardware - i5-3470. This is only to see what all the weeping and wailing is about because I use Debian BTW.
    4
  17. Linux these days is easier to use than Windows. It's also more powerful than Windows. My 67 year old brother was going nuts trying to use a Windows 10 or 11 system to do e-mail, facebook and web browsing. (He has some problems.) UI inconsistencies, constant ads, notifications and updates were driving him to distraction. I switched him to Linux Mint where the UI is more reminiscent of WinXP or Win7 and he's happy as a clam.
    3
  18. ​​ @joshua476 I go the other way around: Debian on the host and Windows as the guest. That way when Windows shits the bed, I can restore from a snapshot. Much more stable this way around and better functionality from the virtualisation platform.
    3
  19. Hack the algorithm! I can beat them: I use two empty bean cans and a length of waxed string.
    2
  20. @ You could put an additional SSD into the machine and move your Linux install over to it. Easiest. Otherwise you need to resize the Windows partition within Windows then resize the Linux partition which will probably be problematic as you're adding space to the beginning of the partition. It might still work but it's awkward and you're likely to stuff it up unless you really know what you're doing. There are guides on the internet and YT.
    1
  21. This seems very cool. I almost wish I needed a Windows app for something so I could play with it.
    1
  22. Work implemented SSH for transferring financial data between branch and head office systems in the early 2000's I guess. I was an accountant but very interested in computers and programming and so forth so for some reason it was dropped on me to get this set up - hey, it was financial data so a finance dude should do it right? I think the IT guy I was working with didn't know anything about it and was happy to leave it to me. I sat down to read the SSH man page from my own Linux system and really had a hard time getting my head around it. That is until I actually got hands-on and the fireworks went off in my head. It was so straight forward and so powerful. Public/private keys make perfect sense and I got the key exchange sorted out and things started to just work. There is so much you can do with SSH that would take so much more setup to do any other way. I set up tunnelling from work to my home system and was able to forward X windowing apps over it. When our bank upgraded their SSH service to one that was incompatible with the work Solaris system - work was slow to upgrade even though I was banging on doors and yelling about the dire things that would happen - I set up an AWS VPS that could relay the data via SSH between the bank and our systems until the upgrade finally came through. I wasn't going to put up with my work flow being stuffed up because work couldn't get their act together. Probably a massive faux pas as far as IT management would be concerned, but what they didn't know couldn't hurt them and I had the VPS bolted down pretty hard. :)
    1
  23. That was fun. The reverse shell code was an interesting bit. Using named pipes like that always makes my head hurt but in fact I've seen it quite a few times. To use though I have to refer to my notes.
    1
  24. Was that on an 8" floppy 'cause I remember the 5.25" floppies all being 720Kb (until double density pushed them to 1.4Mb).
    1
  25.  @xaxa-0x3F  Just Google "tor snowflake" and you'll get all the info.
    1
  26. This guy demonstrated that the company was right to demote him.
    1
  27. @c99kfm I'd say when you start answering other people's questions about how to handle their systems, you're getting there.
    1
  28. @thatoneannoyingtornadosire8755 Haven't used Puppy in a long time but Alpine is great as a minimalist system. I have it on an old 32bit system for wifi "exploration." Start from a very basic CLI install and add what you need from there. Tight and functional.
    1
  29. ​ @YoStu242  Windows users coming to Linux will often have no idea of just how much is tunable/tweakable on a Linux system. You can tune EVERYTHING: you can build your own kernels, change out the scheduler to give snappier response in certain workloads, change the init system to one that you prefer, change the display system choosing between a host of window managers or display environments, change the look and feel of your selected display system, build your software with your own tweaks or preferred options, manage software with APIs to scripting languages or via IPCs, etc. It's customisable at every level of the software stack.
    1
  30. ​ @YoStu242  Every Linux distro aimed at desktop use has a graphical user interface and most, like Linux Mint, allow you to do virtually everything from within that GUI. That said, even Windows users have to break out the Command Prompt or Powershell to do some more esoteric things on their systems. It's simply the most efficient and repeatable means of getting some things done. Some Linux GUIs, like Gnome and KDE, have GUI system tweaking apps for those that prefer them. Your statement that a GUI is "often missing" or even extending that to graphical tweaking tools has not been true for more than 20 years.
    1
  31. Scammers using remote admin tools who would have had to go through a long involved script to acquire someone's banking or other credentials will now be able to connect briefly, grab the Recall data, do some hand waving and say "I've fixed everything. You're good to go." then they can move on to another mark. This is an enormous productivity boost for scammers. If they also establish persistent remote access, as many of them do, they can then come back later, grab the next payload and be out of there before anyone notices because who knows maybe their banking credentials weren't in the first batch or maybe they opened a crypto currency account.
    1
  32. Gee, that sounds great! ... Wait ... No it doesn't. It's still a massively bloated system which is moving away from being a basis on which I can run the programs that I want to run to an advertisement delivery platform that will occasionally let me do some of the things that I paid money to be able to do; if it's not updating or sucking down ads, or displaying notifications of products and services that I don't want. Any version of Linux, FreeBSD or OpenBSD is better in my view than the rubbish that Microsoft is imposing upon the world.
    1
  33.  @kenlen8029  I agree with you. Why throw a perfectly functional machine into e-waste or landfill? The machine I'm using now is 11 years old and runs Debian 12.5 perfectly. True, I don't game on it but it does everything I want to do pretty well. It's only when running a couple of heavyweight VMs that it starts to chug and I start to wish for newer hardware. Fun fact: though my 11yr old 'hardware' doesn't support Win11, I can run it fine in a VM with emulated hardware, just to see what the noise is about. It's far too bloated to actually use. I also have a 16 year old laptop that still runs Linux fine. I had Kali on it until I recently put FreeBSD on it for a laugh and both of those work OK on the ancient hardware. And all systems are fully patched and up-to-date. Once you move away from Microsoft OSs and you are no longer tied to someone else's upgrade schedule, there is a whole world of opportunities that opens up. I could never go back.
    1
  34.  @agibitable  The average end user has changed a lot over the life of the "personal computer". For many people, their only computing device (away from work) is a smart phone. The new Windows OS is not going to tempt them to buy another machine if their phone suffices. Then you have PC gamers who have been a key support base for new hardware - and hence new OS - sales. They are becoming aware of the Steam Deck and will be hearing about other operating systems where they don't have to battle to get the best performance from their hardware. As more gamers take up gaming on Linux the demand for better game support for the platform will grow which will lead more game developers to support Linux which will lead to better performance and even more adoption by gamers who continually chase improved performance. For me, these factors indicate that past user behaviour is not necessarily a predictor of future user behaviour which is why I'm optimistic about the future of Linux in the broader population.
    1
  35. Why did this comment make me think of Goatse? "Come and get it boys!"
    1
  36. I was wondering when OpenSSH would do this. Great stuff.
    1