I had a super fast but small SSD and didn't know what to do with it, so I was playing with caching slow spinning LVM drives. It worked pretty good, but I got interrupted and came back a few weeks later to upgrade the OS. I forgot about the caching LVM, updated the packages in preparation for the OS upgrade, then rebooted. The LVM cache modules weren't in the initfs image and it didn't boot.

I should know better. I used to roll my own kernels since Slackware 1.0. I've had build initfs images for performance tweaks. Ugh!

Where's my rescue disk?

Here's the "Privacy First" pitch: whatever is going on with all of the problems of the internet, all of these problems are made worse by commercial surveillance.

If something like this were implemented in US federal law, what could the downsides be? Like California Proposition 65, the "cookie law" didn't stop tracking, it just made more pop ups. Would this do the same thing?

I got hung up on contractions this morning regarding the word "you've". Normally, I'd say "you've got a problem", which expands to "you have got a problem", which isn't wrong, but I normally wouldn't say. Not contracting, I'd say "you have a problem", so then should I just say "you've a problem"? That sounds weird in my head. Is this just a US English problem?

US Senator Edward Markey (D-Mass.) is one of the more technologically engaged of our elected lawmakers. And like many technologically engaged Ars Technica readers, he does not like what he sees in terms of automakers' approach to data privacy. On Friday, Sen. Markey wrote to 14 car companies with a variety of questions about data privacy policies, urging them to do better.

The EFF has a white paper with a proposal to address various online 'harms' systemically.

From the executive summary, "whatever online harms you want to alleviate, you can do it better, with a broader impact, if you do privacy first."

Slashdot also has a pretty good summary if the white paper is too long for you to read.

I haven't seen this posted yet here, but anybody self-hosting OwnCloud in a containerized environment may be exposing sensitive environment variables to the public internet. There may be other implications as well.

This is a long article about the US CFPB creating a new rule that may help protect your financial data. The interesting stuff is near the end where it sounds like they're putting your financial data back in your hands:

The Bureau will force banks to "share data at the person’s direction with other companies offering better products."

the businesses you connect to your account data will be "prohibited from misusing or wrongfully monetizing the sensitive personal financial data."

I'm not very knowledgeable in this area so I'm wondering what your read is on it.

I was out walking around and "popping" quests on StreetComplete. I was wondering what the consensus is on the question "Who is allowed to park here?" In this case, it's an ungated parking lot next to a commercial/industrial warehouse with many companies occupying the same space. A few of the parking spots had a sign indicating "reserved for XYZ customers", but most did not. This is not a city-owned parking lot. What's the right answer?

What started you down the path to privacy? Was it a particular event, article, podcast or something else?

I understand the intent, but feel that there are so many other loopholes that put much worse weapons on the street than a printer. Besides, my prints can barely sustain normal use, much less a bullet being fired from them. I would think that this is more of a risk to the person holding the gun than who it's pointing at.

Is there any decent iPod management software for linux available? I have a 6th generation iPod that I use only for music and it's really the last thing that I keep my windows partition around for. The more I use linux, the more unintuitive iTunes feels. I had tried GTKPod in the past and one other, but they didn't support the 6th gen iPods. I'd be happy with just a CLI copy type command!

Is anybody using only IPv6 in their home lab? I keep running into weird problems where some services use only IPv6 and are "invisible" to everyone (I'm looking at you, Java!) I end up disabling IPv6 to force everything to the same protocol, but I started wondering, "why not disable IPv4 instead?" I'd have half as many firewall rules, routes and configurations. What are the risks?