I’d use a Kill-a-Watt or similar to check how much power it uses, before deciding whether it’s worth installing anything on it. Also check how much noise it makes, unless you have a separate room for servers. Enterprise servers aren’t always a good fit for home use.

The thing about this one is no one seems sure of the source (it appears to be from multiple sources, including infostealer malware and phishing attacks), so you don’t know which passwords to change. To be safe you’d have to do all of them.

Some password managers (e.g. Bitwarden) offer an automatic check for whether your actual passwords have been seen in these hack databases, which is a bit more practical than changing hundreds of passwords just in case.

And of course don’t reuse passwords. If you have access to an email masking service you can not only use a different password for every site, but also a different email address. Then hackers can’t even easily connect that it’s your account on different sites.

A password manager is still a good idea, but you have to not use a hacked one. So only download from official sites and repositories. Run everything you download through VirusTotal and your machine’s antivirus if you have one. If it’s a Windows installer check it is properly signed (Windows should warn you if not). Otherwise (or in addition) check installer signatures with GPG. If there’s no signature, check the SHA256 OR SHA512 hash against the one published on the official site. Never follow a link in an email, but always go directly to the official website instead. Be especially careful with these precautions when downloading something critical like a password manager.

Doing these things will at least reduce your risk of installing compromised software.

Presumably once YouTube finishes rolling out age verification, all these age restricted videos will require logging in to view them and anonymous front end appd will be locked out.

Mint or Fedora would be my first choices. I use OpenSUSE Tumbleweed for my own computers but I think those others are better for people new to Linux. In my experience Fedora does a good job of combining up-to-dateness and stability. Mint is less up to date, but close enough to Ubuntu and Debian that loads of the help materials out there will apply to it.

Your title still says “Kagy” instead of “Kagi”.

You can talk horsepower and dogpower all day, but I won’t really understand until you convert it to bananapower, for scale.

Sometimes companies gradually reduce the usefulness of the free product to incentivize people to pay. They may do this.

I think legally this suggestion makes you a pirate, a thief, a terrorist and a mass murderer.

The best possible scenario is that they’re just using it to entice people to pay for a premium subscription and will leave it that way. But the chances are that once they’ve pulled enough people in with the offer of free software, they’ll alter the deal.

So they’re planning to hook people in with freebies then boil the frogs a little slower.

Github Copilot is somewhat useful for programming (or it feels useful when it cranks out some boring and routine code to my specs - not sure it actually saves me time though because I always review it all), but of course Microsoft have given a range of products all the same name for maximum confusion, as they do. The Copilot in Windows may be rubbish for all I know. I haven’t ever felt the need to press the button.

It’s like gambling the entire US economy on Clippy.

Affinity has been the best alternative to some of the key Adobe tools for a while now, and it was a one-off payment of about $200 for the whole suite, which was good value. Now it’s “free” I’m just a bit worried. Sure, it’s not exactly a subscription but where are they going?

It seems reasonable for now: you can use all the tools except the AI stuff for free, so it’s still (I assume) as full-featured as the last Serif version of Affinity was. And if the AI stuff is not done locally, then that costs them money to run so fair enough that they charge something. But we don’t know what Canva plans to do with Affinity. Will the tools be gradually hollowed out while more and more features go behind a paywall? Will they start filling the desktop software with ads? What will they do when they judge that they have poached enough of Adobe’s users? Will they brick your software if you close your Canva account? I don’t entirely trust them.

Everyone expresses this frustration with Linux, but I’ve used it alongside Windows for years and it’s Windows that has caused me by far the most headaches. I think many people would be pleasantly surprised by pretty much any mainstream Linux distro.

Do you even have a general computing license, citizen? Have you even been through the vetting process?

Or just sending them takedown requests that Google acts on by default.

We could see back in the 1980s that corporations were becoming more powerful than governments. And that power imbalance has only continued to become more extreme since then.

I’ve allowed anyone to make “cameos” using my face. (You don’t have to do this: You can choose settings that make your likeness private, or open to just your friends — but I figured, why not? …)

Maybe because of this shit? A learning experience, I guess.