Thank you so much for sharing this, you may have just saved me a miserable future if my system were to crash.
I try to read the updates they share every month with detail, but this one must have slipped through the cracks. This feels like another thing they should have been way louder about considering the problems it could cause someone who didn't know it flipped on without their interactive decision.
Ultimately being truly anonymous on the internet is pretty hard, and thus VPNs are mostly helpful for getting around region blocks for streaming services, not for obtaining more privacy.
I disagree.
There seems to constantly be two sides of the privacy discussion with public VPN options and they're both wrong on their own. It's correct that using a VPN on its own is not enough to keep you private online, fingerprinting being one example to why. However, not using a VPN but having no identifiable browser fingerprint doesn't either, since your IP is still a fingerprint too.
I like to give the following analogies:
If the goal is to be private, remember that a VPN is only one tool in a very large tool belt.
I have forks that are updated every night through a cron for these very reasons. But I didn't ever set it up for Android apps... Time to fork a whole lot more projects. sigh
Leave my recent "$20k and 80 hours of frustration for not getting parts you find out later you'll need" upgrade out of this!
Unnecessary rant: I actually just had to downgrade my 575(?) driver after spending a few days trying to troubleshoot a freezing laptop. One day I walked away when it happen and that actually gave me the logs I needed to find the Nvidia driver was freezing the machine and then spitting logs out after giving up 10 minutes later (but still keeping things frozen). Was driving me nuts, thinking my hard drive was seeing the light, even though all tests for it were passing with flying colors!
I'm hesitant to try this new version since I didn't see anything in the changelog about freeze fixes lol.
Daily on my Gentoo server, through a Cronjob every morning. It's a custom script though, so there's more than just doing an emerge update. It'll send me ntfy notifications for the update results, if there are new news items, and if there are any time config merge updates to make. A few other things as well but that's the main stuff.
Other servers, typically weekly or only manually when I ssh into them (for the ones I don't really feel the need to update frequently).
"Backfirewall_" from a little while back. A masterpiece that deserved more attention! Highly recommend to anyone here who is big on tech (especially programmers)!
The way I understood it, invasive simply meant a species that grows and spreads at an aggressive speed in an ecosystem that it did not originate from. Fire ants very much match this definition as they were introduced outside of south Africa into several ecosystems where they spread at an aggressive rate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100_of_the_World%27s_Worst_Invasive_Alien_Species has a nice list of examples of species that are simply classified as invasive. Fire ants are on the top 100 list there.
That being said, while fire ants are not invasive to South Africa technically, this can be said about all species in the world (that they're not invasive to SOMEWHERE). I didn't feel the need to say where I was located in my message since it felt redundant, and as the term invasive should be assumed to talk about how whatever it is, is invasive to somewhere else, wherever that is.
I wanted to comment on fire ants for this (which are an invasive one). Anyone who has experienced fire ants would not feel sorry for a genocide on them.
Man, we just can't win with these UI tools, I also thought Bruno was the solution. Only use it on my work machine so that's why I guess I never noticed this. Thank you for sharing, time to go back to digging for better alternatives.
I use it for my media server and have been for a long time.
Tldr: started so I could learn and understand Linux, still use it since I'm comfortable with it and it's familiar/fast for my needs.
How it started: I kept going back and forth between windows and Linux, but never truly understood Linux like I did Windows. I eventually decided that I should try to install a Linux distro from scratch and learn the entire process manually so that I could understand it at a strong level. Gentoo has some of the best, if not the best, documentation for this. After spending several days going through the entire install process to finally get that login screen and UI up and running, I had learned more about Linux in those few days than I did the previous 3 years. I wanted to keep going, so I kept it on that laptop and continued to learn and become way more efficient than even Windows.
Why I still use it, specifically for my media server: partly because I understand Gentoo more than any other distro I've used, so I'm extremely comfortable with it. But mostly because I know every little thing on my server. I never find things I don't recognize, because I installed it. I made the explicit decision to all the software I installed on my system. And I truly do feel like I'm in absolute control of the entire thing, in and out. On top of this, it's truly as high in performance as it sounds.
As I type this, my media server is running 76 docker containers (no, not 76 services), 4 of which are game servers I host 24/7 for friends, and I'm only using 32GB of memory. CPU is rarely, if ever, above 20% (12 core Ryzen). The need to upgrade is really far out there, so that just adds to my reasons to continue using it. That being said, I've never run something like a Debian media server with all the same stuff on it... It's very possible it's just as good, but I really don't know. I'm too comfortable where I am to spend time finding out lol.
Tor is definitely another option. For my personal use however, I have my entire network covered by a VPN so all outgoing traffic uses it.
I'm sure I could setup Tor to do the same, but I imagine my family and I would get blocked more heavily on sites, as well as get our bank accounts and such flagged or something.
Like many things, it obviously depends on your threat model.