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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 16th, 2023

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  • How close are these surrounding towns? What’s the population, particularly for the demographics you would appeal to?

    Often, it’s not worthwhile to bring your favorite culture to your home. Just go to the culture where it already exists. Often, these quiet, boring places are populated by people that WANT to live in a place that’s quiet and boring. It doesn’t make much sense for anyone to move there if they don’t.



  • “Hackers” (rather, malicious actors) rarely look to take down IT resources as their goal. Instead, they want to access it for their own purposes. The closest example would be ransomware, where it gets taken down as part of the threat/punishment. But if the victim pays, their resources must be restored.

    Plus, I would be surprised if Crowd Strike doesn’t have any protections on its own files. I also expect there will be additional verification checks (hash/etc) on their updates going forward.


  • Licensing and activation are separate, and only loosely related. If you are at anything resembling a large org, they don’t even use the HWID or OEM key- they will be using an internal KMS server.

    It really sounds like you have way more permissions than you should have on a work device. You should’ve hit a wall even attempting to install Win11 (I can confirm that my work blocks this very effectively). I also question why you would want to do that at all. I’m also not sure you needed to do anything to activate- I believe 10 and 11 use the exact same HWID/keys/etc



  • Your description isn’t very clear on what exactly you have, or what you need.

    It sounds like you have wired NICs in both server and laptop, which will be physically close to each other, but your only connection to the Internet will be WiFi that you don’t control. How accurate is that?

    Next question is how do you want them to connect to each other? You can do a P2P wired connection, which is more complicated but fully isolates your traffic. It also means that, unless each device has a separate connection and an appropriate routing config, it won’t be online to the Internet (unless you set up some form of connection sharing). You can also connect them to a router that has no Internet. Simpler than the above, but the same limitations.

    You could easily and cheaply get a USB Wi-Fi NIC. The major downside is that all traffic will be going across the wireless connection, both ways. This makes it slow and unreliable.

    You can also connect them to a modified router configured as a wireless bridge. DD-WRT and others can be configured in a different way than usual. The wireless router will provide wired LAN ports to your local network, but then use the wireless connection to connect to an upstream WiFi.

    None of this has anything to do with Linux, BTW. Once you choose a path, you should be able to implement it in whatever OS (or multiple OSes) you would like. None of it is new or special. You might get more options if you post in the Homelab, Data Hoarder, or Self Hosted communities.



  • Unless you’re on a self-hosted VPN (defeating the whole purpose), it’s not especially hard to identify VPN connections. All of the common ones are known, and many use IP ranges and reverse lookups that clearly identify the VPN/seedbox provider.

    It’s a bit harder when you are connected to one that resolves to a residential-looking hostname. But again, unless it’s truly unique (defeating the purpose), simply sorting users by IP will reveal almost all of them.

    Some trackers used to do this to weed out people with multiple accounts. Some of the big ones still actively detect and block (or punish) anyone connecting to their website with a VPN (torrent traffic is still generally allowed, though)


  • TorrentLeech has open registration several times per year. Keep an eye on Opentrackers.org for any of these. Note that some are open, while others are open application. The latter means you must meet certain criteria to be accepted. Typically this is proof of your stats on other trackers, but sometimes it’s exclusively for refugees from one that failed.

    Keep in mind that you will not ever find open registrations on an established, reputable tracker. They don’t need more users. They only recruit from lesser, more accessible trackers. You will need to start on these to establish yourself. There are plenty of guides on this, with most starting on RED or MAM.

    If you aren’t on any of these, it’s not because they’re too hard to get into- it’s because you don’t want to put in the effort. Which is exactly what private trackers want to avoid.

    Also, smaller doesn’t always mean bad. TorrentDB was a rising star, with regular open invites, right up until its collapse. Even the giants like PTP started from nothing. Getting in early is a perfectly viable strategy, especially if you help grow it.


  • To anyone else reading this, there’s something you should know:

    Memory errors don’t always mean the memory itself (hardware RAM stick) is bad. It can also be a power issue (bad PSU, incorrect voltage set in the UEFI), compatibility, defective memory controller (CPU or motherboard), and more.

    OP almost certainly has a bad stick, but it’s worthwhile for anyone building a PC to run a slew of stress tests and diagnostics before using it for anything that matters.


  • What do you mean by “last”? I know it’s a common term, but when you dig deeper, you’ll see why it doesn’t really make sense. For this discussion, I’m assuming you mean “How long until I need to buy a newer model?”

    First, consider the reasons you might have for buying a newer model. The first is hardware failure. Second is obsolescence - the device cannot keep up with newer needs, such as speed, capacity, or interface. The third is insecurity/unsupported from the vendor.

    The last one is easy enough to check from a vendor’s product lifecycle page. I’ll assume this isn’t what you’re concerned about. Up next is obsolescence. Obviously it meets your needs today, but only you can predict your future needs. Maybe it’s fine for a single 1080p* stream today, and that’s all you use it for. It will continue to serve that purpose forever. But if your household grows and suddenly you need 3x 4k streams, it might not keep up. Or maybe you’ll only need that single 1080p stream for the next 20 years. Maybe you’ll hit drive capacity limits, or maybe you won’t. We can’t answer any of that for you.

    That leaves hardware failure. But electronics don’t wear out (mechanical drives do, to an extent, but you asked about the NAS). They don’t really have an expected life span in the same way as a car battery or an appliance. Instead, they have a failure rate. XX% fail in a given time frame. Even if we assume a bathtub curve (which is a very bold assumption), the point where failures climb is going to be very unclear. The odds are actually very good that it will keep working well beyond that.

    Also of note, very few electronics fail before they are obsolete.

    *Technically it’s about bitrate, but let’s just ignore that detail for simplicity. We’ll assume that 4k uses 4x as much space as 1080p

    TL;DR: It could fail at any moment from the day it was manufactured, or it could outlast all of us. Prepare for that scenario with a decent backup strategy, but don’t actually replace it until needed.






  • First, a massive amount of content is removed. You won’t find a lot of popular, unencrypted content these days on usenet. It’s all encrypted and obfuscated now to avoid the bots

    Speaking of bots, I don’t think you realize how much of this process is automated, or how wide of a net is being used. The media corporations all have enormous collected libraries of material. It gets posted constantly to all sorts of places. This includes public torrents, public usenet, YouTube, PornHub (yes, really, even for non-porn), Facebook, TikTok, Tumblr, GNUtella, DDL sites…

    The list goes on and on. Each one gets scanned for millions of potentially infringing items, often daily. No actual people are doing those steps.

    Now, throw in things like private torrents, encrypted usenet posts, invite-only DDL, listings that use ‘3’ instead ‘e’ or those other character subscriptions… These require actual humans to process. Humans that cost money, and a considerable amount of it. As a business, you have to show a return on investment. Fighting piracy, even at its theoretical best, doesn’t increase revenues by a lot.

    You mention revenue and breaking even, but you left out an important detail. Your time is free. They don’t have to pay $10/month, they have to pay $10/month + $20/hour for someone to deal with it. And most pirates of that level will just find another method.




  • Can I ask if you’re a woman? The reason I bring that up is how completely dismissive multiple people are of your symptoms. Many women report having that specific reaction, but few men do.

    Even if it is “just a pinched nerve”, that’s not a small, ignorable issue. It needs proper medical treatment, or you can suffer greatly from it. Not just from nerve damage, but from whatever is causing the pinch.

    I won’t speak to what actual medical condition you might have, but your doctors should be helping you dig into that. You can research potential conditions to discuss with them. An engaged patient might spur them into action. It also helps to give them some ideas if you have something more rare (or not presenting in a common way)

    You also probably need to find new doctors. You mentioned that your PCP is on your side, which is a good start. Ask them for more recommendations, particularly for the reason that you are feeling ignored. Also, don’t dismiss the ones that are actually doing tests- I know it’s frustrating that they aren’t finding anything, but they are at least ruling out possibilities. At 21, you really should not have chronic/debilitating illness without a real diagnosis.

    (Side note: back surgery is more invasive and life-changing than you would think. Please don’t take that option lightly)