I don’t think the word Reich, without further context, is by itself suspect in German. It just a generic word for realm, and is not bound to any specific political system. Even their parliament building is still called the Reichstag. In German it’s also common to refer to modern day monarchies as Königreich. Even the Belgian constitution, where German is one of the three official languages, refers to the country as das Königreich. And there are even two whole countries that have it in their German name: Österreich and Frankreich.
Where it becomes suspect is when inexplicably the German word is used in the English language in a certain context by certain politicians with certain ideas, as it is here.
If it’s just two PC’s and no video, it’s easy. There are plenty of cheap USB hubs in the €20-€30 range with a toggle switch.
I have a good experience with a ugreen branded switch that I got from Amazon. I bought it to toggle between my PC and work laptop when I started to work from home during covid.
Multilib packages aren’t installed by default just by enabling the multilib repo, so yes you need to find the lib32 libraries your application needs and install them by hand.
in early 2000’s, internet access was extremely fucking expensive, so most software was peer-to-peer shared, not even by torrent, but on CD’s or floppys, or local neighborhood ad-hoc and internal ISP networks
Uh no. I was there. In 1995 or 1996, I may have still used a shareware CD-ROM, or some less-legal compilation CD-ROM, but in the 2000s the most common way to install software by far was to download it over the internet.
And there was no access control whatsoever. A literal spyware with full access to your system, that only puts a purple fucking gorilla on your screen, that runs around and does absolutely fucking nothing? Sign me the fuck in. If your virus did something even something remotely useful, like show weather and currency rates, then you could rest assured that it would infect every single computer in the country.
I think the point of the post is that back then people were warned against installing bonzi buddy and such, and we were told to install software only from trustworthy sources. Spyware software rightfully flagged such software as malware too. Nowadays, there are appstores full of banal apps which harvest much more personal information about you than bonzi buddy ever did and we’re not batting an eye about it, and even though we have “Access control” we just happily click accept when our calculator wants to read our emails, and we’ve accepted it as a normal way of doing things.
It’s like those websites and applications that ask you:
<span style="color:#323232;">Hey do you want to turn on this bullshit feature?
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">[Yes] [Ask me again later]
</span>
True that. Hadn’t thought of that as it’s not my typical VPN use case.
I’m not sure what a VPN provider could do about that though, they don’t control the operating system’s networking stack. If the user or an outside process that the user decides to trust (i.e. a dhcp server) adds its own network routes, the OS will follow it and route traffic outside of the tunnel.
The defenses I see against it are:
Run the VPN and everything that needs to go through the VPN in a virtualized, non-bridged environment so it’s unaffected by the routing table.
Put a NAT-ing device in between your computer and the network you want to use
Modify the DHCP client so that option 121 is rejected
Edit: thinking about it some more, on Linux at least the VPN client could add some iptables rules that block traffic going through any other interface than the tunnel device (i.e. if it’s not through tun0 or wg0, drop it). Network routes can’t bypass iptables rules, so that should work. It will have the side effect that the VPN connection will appear not to work if someone is using the option 121 trick though, but at least you would know something funny was happening.
Oh and don’t forget to take backups of your /home. Thats good practice for every desktop environment.
The config files of the major desktop environments have become a mess though. Plasma absolutely shits files all over ~/.config and /.local/share where they sit mingled together with the config files of all your other applications and most of it is thoroughly undocumented. I’ve been in the situation where I wanted to restore a previous state of my Plasma desktop from my backups or just start with a clean default desktop and there is just no straightforward way to do that, short of nuking all your configurations.
Doing a quick find query in my current home directory, there are 57 directories and 79 config files that have either plasma or kde in the name, and that doesn’t even include all the /.config/* files belonging to plasma or kde components that don’t have it in their name explicitly (e.g. dolphinrc, katerc, kwinrc, powerdevilrc, bluedevilglobalrc , …)
It was much simpler in the old days when you just had something like a ~/.fvwmrc file that was easy to backup and restore, even early kde used to store everything together in a ~/.kde directory.
apt purge nano is one of the first things I do on a new Debian installation. Much easier to remember than having to use update-alternatives, select-editor and the $EDITOR variable to convince the likes of vigr,vipw, visudo,crontab -e,… that I really want to use vim as my primary editor.