These days with UEFI it’s much less likely to break things. Worse case though you just boot from a LIVE USB boot, chroot in and rerun grub/your bootloader installer. Often even if windows puts its own bootloader first, you can choose your bootloader from the bios boot menu and just rerun the bootloader installer.

It used to be a lot worse.

20 years into the trump dynasty dictatorship, they will still be saying “thanks Biden” to every financial inconvenience.

The GDPR penalties are pretty serious for any reasonably large entity operating within Europe. I think when they’re actually pushed with a proper GDPR request, they will mostly comply.

And it’s risky to try to use that data. If someone, sometime in the future can prove their data was used after a confirmed GDPR request, it could be bad for them. And frankly, the number of actual GDPR requests is small enough that it’s not worth their while for such a small part of the sheer cascade of data they have.

Yes, for everyone else I don’t doubt they don’t actually delete anything.

This is actually a very big difference with the USA and the UK (and possibly most of Europe, not sure though). We generally store eggs outside of the fridge. On a shelf or in a pantry/cupboard for example.

Slimey’s back!

I wouldn’t even bother replying to comments from hexbear mk II. I just automatically assume troll.

I said elsewhere, I hope this is just some way to track changes over time per user.

But they need to take an anonymous hash of some non changing data or create an install id that is used for this and nothing else (e.g it identifies a unique user but not the person or hardware behind the user).

Too much identifying info is just pushed around like we shouldn’t care, it’s become a real problem.

The way I read it, the developer wanted opt-out but it’s likely it will be opt-in. I’m find with opt-in and vehemently against opt-out for telemetry.

I would prefer the information was statistical only. Rather than hostname (making the assumption they only want hostname to be able to somehow separate the data to follow changes over time), a much better idea would be some kind of hash based on information unlikely to change, but enough information that it would be unlikely possible to brute-force the original data out of the hash. So all they know is, this data came from the same machine, but cannot ID the machine. Maybe some kind of unique but otherwise untrackable unique ID is created at install time and ONLY used for this purpose and no other.

Yeah, my only concern here was if it was opt-out. That’d be bad.

Now I completely understand the developer on this. This is useful info to have to help decide future changes/features and general direction, but balancing the right to privacy means this kind of data provision should ALWAYS be opt-in. Microsoft, you hearing me here?

Yeah, it’s not really new. In the movie Falling Down from 1993 (weird, I thought it was late 80s) has the whole scene where he’s complaining about the difference between the advert and what you’re served in a fast food place (well also that they wouldn’t serve breakfast because it was like a couple of minutes late and almost certainly had some still hot breakfast around, but that’s another story).

It’s been this way for a long time, all over the world. I’d be amazed if this turned into a world changing case after all this time.

I think it had its uses in the past, specifically if it had the memory backup to prevent full array rebuilds and cached data loss on power failure.

Also at the height of raid controller use (I would say 90s and 2000s) there probably was some compute savings by shifting the work to a dedicated controller.

In modern day, completely agree.

I’m sure I’ve seen paid software that will detect and read data from several popular hardware controllers. Maybe there’s something free that can do the same.

For the future, I’d say that with modern copy on write filesystems, so long as you don’t mind the long rebuild on power failures, software raid is fine for most people.

I found this, which seems to be someone trying to do something similar with a drive array built with an Intel raid controller

https://blog.bramp.net/post/2021/09/12/recovering-a-raid-5-intel-storage-matrix-on-linux-without-the-hardware/

Note, they are using drive images, you should be too.

The OP made clear it was a controller failure or entire system (I read hardware here) failure. Which does complicate things somewhat.

When I made a new linux install I chose Arch. I think for me the reasoning is thus. While I have a LOT of experience with unborking server linux installs, with desktop it’s just a pain to deal with. I previously used Manjaro which, while very easy to install, does obfuscate a lot of what happens behind the scenes. When it goes wrong, personally I found it harder to fix.

With Arch, beyond enough to give me a terminal and basic gnu tools, I’ve chosen what I install from then on. I think that means when things go wrong there’s a much higher chance I’ll know what it is and how to solve it.

Time will tell if this plan works out or not though :P

I mean, if they knew where you usually shop online, probably not. I generally get the popup when either:

1: Shopping somewhere for the first time
2: Certain businesses (presumably those that are more often targeted for fraud I guess?)

I bet if they tried to use a different delivery address (and the shop passed that on) it should (I think at least) trigger a security check.

In shops especially with contactless it’s very unlikely to be stopped though. But I think the bank needs to eat the contactless losses if I remember right. I do recall there’s a maximum number of contactless payments you can make in a given time before it forces chip and pin though.

Yeah, I was going to say. Not pension, but I put money into two different blended portfolios (I didn’t choose the contents, just the two choices from a list). I started it in Feb 2021 and the overall gain has been over 35%. I have no idea what the pension fund put their money into there, but it seems like some bad choices.

OP should check the options they have.

Yes, came to say the same. It’s very easy to get a voip number in most countries. But many places that want to use it for ID purposes (finance etc including paypal) will know the voip allocations and block them.

I would very much agree here. I’ve (admittedly mostly server side) been using linux for around 30 years now. But I’m still dual booting on my desktop. There’s just a few things that will still only work in Linux, and also if I break things I can go to windows if I need to do something “right now”

Dual boot gives you the option of, if you have the time trying to make something work in linux. But, if you don’t have the time, just boot to windows and do it.

How I do things, is I have drives that are shared between both OS (I use btrfs since there is a windows driver and, so far (around 3 years) I’ve had no corruption problems. But you can share ntfs too and a boot drive for both. But, it’s not a requirement.

Also yes, it is quite easy to break a linux install. It’s not really because Linux is bad. It’s just because you have so much choice in which drivers to use, which desktop environment (and even the components that make it up) that it’s easy to accidentally select some combination that doesn’t work and you end up with only a console to fix things from.

I like that the OP is choosing Mint. I’ve not used Mint, but from all I’ve seen it looks a real good option for someone starting into Linux from no experience.

/mnt/shared/Development or E:\Development depending on which operating system is running.

Not in home mainly because I use the same directory in windows and Linux.

Yeah, but that’s just because “nobody wants to work”