Windows doesn’t have sudo (not yet, at least) and privileges work a bit different as even as an administrator, you may not have full rights.

To overcome that obstacle, you’d need to run a shell as an administrator (hold CTRL+Shift, then use the start menu entry or right-click it and select run as administrator).

Next obstacle: We have a separate drive for each partition, but no root folder.

If we assume we’re running on a laptop or PC with a single drive and a single partition*, then it’s just

In cmd.exe:

del /F /S C:\

In Powershell:

Remove-Item -Recurse -Force -Path C:\

When you want to delete all (mounted) partitions/drives, you need to iterate over them. (Note that’s from the top of my head, didn’t check the script if it works).

In cmd.exe:

REM Not gonna do that, I'm no masochist

In Powershell:

Get-PSDrive -PSProvider FileSystem | Foreach-Object {
    Remove-Item -Recurse -Force -Path "$($_.Name):\"
}

Done. Mounting additional partitions before that is left as an exercise for the reader.

*note that even a standard installation of windows creates 3 partitions. One for the bootloader, one for the recovery system and then the system drive. Only the latter is mounted and will be deleted by this. The other two will still be intact.

My newest vps runs with Caddy. Works like a charm. The downside was, that I didn’t think of the automatic certificate deployment when I set everything up and it wouldn’t come up a first when I only wanted to connect locally to it, as it tried to get a certificate but the challenge failed because I hadn’t the firewall open yet. But besides that it was very smooth so far.

Amazon Deep Glacier is a lot cheaper for storage (but expensive for retrieval).

I use Archive Storage in Oracle Cloud S3 for my dr backups which is their equivalent of AWS deep glacier archive. It’s quite cheap, no restore fees, inbound traffic is free and outbound traffic is only paid, when you’re using more than 10TB per month. (Also first 10 GB of S3 storage is free)

Remember <marquee>? And maybe add some dancing hamsters?

Remember that JS file that rendered a text besides your mouse pointer and when you moved your mouse, the text would follow it letter by letter?

No, it’s not „always up“.

There are three main ways how Google, Bing,… can track you:

1. When you’re doing a search while being logged in, it’s probably you
2. If you’re not logged in, they can set a cookie to recognize you on your next visit (although they may not be able to link this to you, your email address,… but that’s not needed). They may mix your searches with those of the other users of your PC, when those are using the same PC, browser and account (e.g. if you have a family PC with a single windows/Linux account that everyone uses)
3. Even if you’re not logged in and don’t accept / delete your cookies, they still see your IP. Depending on your ISP you might have the same Ip for a long time or you might have it rotated regularly. Now they could only track the searches of your household (assuming everyone isn’t logging in and deleting cookies immediately)

With Searxng, they can only do the last variant. But assuming you use a “real” server in the internet (and not one at home), it will likely have the same IP for its lifetime. And if you’re using it alone, that’s the only thing they need to identify you and track your searches. The more other people use your instance, the less useful this kind of tracking gets. Too much noise to identify a single person.

Having your own instance can be bad for privacy, as all your searches come from your IP (hosted at home) or the same IP (hosted on a server). They might not be traced to you personally, but you might still get personalized results or your search may still be tracked, depending on how they track you.

That’s circumvented when using it with some or better many other people. But then, you need to trust the admin of that instance.

Self-hosted is easy if you know a bit about servers. You need a domain pointing to a server. If it’s the only thing hosted on that server and you have set up docker on it, you can just follow their instructions here to get it running in less than 5 minutes (assuming you run the default config and don’t customize all of the settings for a while): https://github.com/searxng/searxng-docker?tab=readme-ov-file#how-to-use-it

Hmmmm I didn’t know that, every comment that I read, didn’t mention this fact. I’m running my own Searxng instance and Meta engines can be quite powerful, especially when you can adjust them a bit and filter out what you consider “spam” results (e.g. pinterest)

I’d pay for independent, non meta, ad-free search.

Haven’t tested it yet, but have seen it mentioned several times here on Lemmy:

https://kagi.com/

I was wondering the same, but I didn’t find any information on how it builds the search index. I guess it takes quite a while until it’s usable. Also, it might be very dependent on the speed if the internet connection and also the available storage.

Ransomware in Windows:
You need to allow macros to read this job application

Ransomware in Linux:
You need to run chmod +x application.ods.sh to read this job application

And if they don’t update it soon, you might want to reconsider your choice of instance.

The advisory went up about 4h ago. About 3h ago, my instance admin sent out an announcement that the patch had been applied. That was before I even heard about the issue.

Nice work :)

Or you can host your own instance quite easily. If you want just a new instance, pick one from the list above. Everyone who intends to run a public instance can enter it there and you’re sure, that this person intends that instance to be public.

CMG’s website addresses this with a section that starts “We know what you are thinking…”

“Is this legal? YES- it is totally legal for phones and devices to listen to you. That’s because consumers usually give consent when accepting terms and conditions of software updates or app downloads,” the website says.

Well, yes, but actually no. No idea how this might play out in other parts of the world than the US. But in most places, you’d usually need consent of all parties, that are involved. If my neighbor were to install an (infected) app like this, then carries his phone around and talks to me, I did not consent and it would be illegal to record me, even if he were not tricked into consenting, but did knowingly accept it. Worse yet, in the last scenario, he might be on the hook for legal consequences, too…

Besides that legal minefield, I thinks it’s a bluff. The tech is either way less accurate than they claim, or quite ressource intensive by either eating through your data plan on a mobile phone or draining your battery. My bet is on a PR stunt.

These are just screenshots of the data privacy section from the Apple AppStore of each of the apps. Afaik those are mandatory & self reported by the devs of the app.

Something, something up and down and up and down and …

“I’m using netBSD btw…”

Nah, I’m currently trying to fix a PC that is so borked, that not even a clean install.wim can fix. According to some sources, there are some packages missing in current installation medias, that are not needed for the installation, but you cannot repair a borked install, if those are affected. This seems to be the case since at least somewhen in 2021, from which I found the earliest reports. Oh… and they aren’t in the online image as well. So if those break, you can only do a clean install.

My vicious cycle: Oh no I did ssh into localhost again. Fuck, let’s do some damage control and disable SSH access to my desktop.

Two days later: ugh, I don’t want to change rooms, I want to do this on my laptop and sit in the living room, but need something from my desktop. Why did I think it was a good idea to disable SSH access…

Then repeat.

Thanks!