It doesn’t actually contribute to the discussion.

Depends. What are you planning on using a VPN for?

That’s not a meaningful comparison because it splits Ubuntu by version but all of Arch is a single category. We’d need to roll up the Ubuntu users for it to be apples to apples.

If you’re in the position that the NSA is in your system trying to bypass SELinux, you have much bigger problems.

Besides, in that case, having it disabled is going to make it easier for them anyway.

Someone is going back over their contributions, right?

Right?

Debian and Fedora have ports, though not all packages are available, and you’ll probably be doing a lot of porting if you want anything else.

But this bit from the uConsole R-01 product page might be relevant to you:

uConsole R-01 is a highly experimental model and requires some experience with Linux systems & FOSS. We strongly recommend all beginners choose other models.

swapoff, reformat, swapon?

Also make sure the drive isn’t dying.

I’m not sure there’s a good adhesive that will accomplish this. What’s the shape of the earbud? Could a piece of heatshrink on the outside accomplish it?

Even at big companies, devs get flexibility because they need to run a bunch of random stuff that can look sketchy to security software.

Sometimes it can’t connect to the server (which is a completely stupid necessity).

That’s where it does the voice processing. The only processing it does on-device is the wake word and taking commands. Actually figuring out what you mean is done in The Cloud. Doing that on-device would not only make the devices significantly more expensive, but they would also rapidly become outdated.

The rest of your complaints are valid and I’ve experienced them all myself to boot.

Overkill and overpriced. If you’re on Windows, bitlocker is enough. If you’re on Linux, LUKS is enough.

I’ve used Apricorn drives at previous jobs. They’re cool and very much fit for purpose, but I’d have a hard time justifying the significant price premium when software is nearly as good, free, and works with any drive.

It wouldn’t be significantly different from any other access method.

yet

Mounting or unmounting a filesystem won’t make a difference for drive longevity.

If you want to keep your backups secure, you want to keep them offline, so if you get ransomware it doesn’t encrypt your backup too. (Or if you just mistype a command and target the wrong device, folder, etc.)

But drive motor starts and stops are when the most failures occur. So the ultimate question isn’t how to make a drive last longer, it’s how you plan to handle it when the failure inevitably occurs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(chatbot)

Sounds like a weak argument. They’re not going to be inclined to operate a local ML system just for one or two people.

I would see if you can get a quote for locally-hosted transcription software you can run on your own, like Dragon Medical. Maybe reach out to your IT department to see if they already have a working relationship with Nuance for that software. If they’re willing to get you started, you can probably just use that for dictation and nobody will notice or care.

What, exactly, are your privacy concerns about this?

That’s not busy work. Busy work, as explained in the article, is work that doesn’t really accomplish anything, like re-folding towels that have already been folded. Or as I’ve had to do before, sweep a perfectly spotless sidewalk. Data validation is valid work.

How confident do you need to be? I don’t think I’ve seen any convincing evidence of any firmware spying in PC components.

Well, except the NSA’s Clipper chip, but I don’t think that really ever got implemented.

Long story short, I can’t use multiple monitor RDP because I have different resolution monitors and they are stacked 2x2 instead of all in a row.

Did you try setting them up as one big display across all four, instead of four little ones? I think that’s something you can do.

Does the multi-mon RDP thing work from a Windows client too? I’d be surprised if it did, Windows’ multi-monitor support is fairly lacking in my experience too.