Is it really a matter of, I’m gonna have to buy a whole bunch more HDDs to copy everything over to, encrypt, copy it all back? What’s the best (Linux) software for a mass copy task like that to be sure it works correctly?

Yes. If budget isn’t an issue then I would even recommend a whole new rig for the process, and here’s why: there are several Linux distros now that have the option, upon install, to do whole disk encryption where you have to enter your passphrase to get the computer to do anything at all. This is probably the safest, easiest solution available to you. You now have a brand new computer that’s never not been encrypted to copy stuff to. RAM and drives will hurt, but I think most modern processors have cryptographic instructions built in, so it may not take a large processor at all.

The downsides are that it’s a bad time from an economic standpoint to be doing stuff like that, and that you’re eating a large amount of technical stuff all at the same time. If you don’t get it right then you might lose all your stuff.

For me it would mostly be my desktop and my nas.

I’m gonna have to buy a whole bunch more HDDs

Depending on when you started storing data and how long it’s been since you touched your current solution, it might be just a few larger hard drives: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-2025/

Go ahead and add up how much storage you’ll need and decide if you’re doing any kind of RAID. I recommend at least a mirrored RAID.

Give us a hint about what RAID you have on the NAS? How much storage used/available?

I agree with your sentiment, and that the world should work like your hypothetical.

how could they possibly ever know

Lawyers doing lawyer stuff. As to why, you said it:

I made mega money and they found out

We’d have to have real lawyers weigh in, but for the most part I think unless you found an undiscovered market then they won’t care. Programming isn’t unique in the respect that the tools you need to do world-changing work aren’t that different between what you might have at home versus a well funded computer science research lab, but you’re much more likely to stumble into a marketable app than you are a quicker FFT.

I don’t get how anyone could EVER enforce a law or agreement or rule that says something I wrote at home on my device on my time is theirs.

Check your employment terms. I’d wager the first step of that is seeing if you have a paper copy. I know I don’t for all the places I’ve worked or acquisitions I’ve been through.

Something like an ALCU or Second Amendment Foundation that focused on nothing but that would be a nice-to-have. I think it overall destroys creativity in the industry.

It’s depressing to be wasted pointless effort in a bureaucratic corporate nightmare.

And depending on the details of your employment, if you code for fun, on your own time, at home, using your own equipment, the company still owns it.

There’s literally nothing for detectors to go on anymore.

It’s harder for users as well. Even youtubers I’ve followed for a while have started using the recipe of having a ridculous thumbnail such as “WHY YOU SHOULD NEVER BUY THIS” with an arrow pointing to something. After a couple of times of catching me because I own one of the things the arrow is pointing to (and then watching a 10:01 long video not talking about the item in question) I decided not to fall for it. I noticed that discovery of a new channel got hard. They’re all following the recipe now since I guess youtube mandates it, so it’s the same bas relief thumbnails that seem like they pose a question and a video that doesn’t answer it. We’ll end up with a new Betteridge’s Law and the resource youtube once was is lost forever and we’ll stand around making dumb faces thinking how we’re all getting ripped off…

you don’t know anything about me

That’s why you can’t be trusted.

Install gnome-tweaks. It’ll be under “Accessories” or you can search for it in their activities travesty. There are some gnome-shell-extension-X things to install as well before you head into the tweaks program. They all used to be part of gnome-tweaks and now they’re not. If I recall a helpful web lookup occurs when you’re messing with that stuff and tells you what package to install.

gnome can be rough until you tailor it to your usage or if you’re in an austere environment with no internet. I think all those settings can be changed via editing dconf directly, but I don’t know how, and at this point in my life I don’t really feel like trying to hack a user experience provided to me into usefulness (no root, admin doesn’t want to use linux at all so he sets up the minimal least risky thing he can and won’t change it). gnome’s interpretation of “minimal” is pretty painful.

I use LXQT when I can. I’ll get around to trying modern KDE at some point.

You can customize gnome pretty far. The code to have normal human minimize/maximize/close buttons is all still there, and the window bar is there as well. You just have to know which programs to pull from dnf that know what registry dconf settings to adjust. I have yet to find a use case for nautilus between Dolphin (KDE) and using a terminal.

So to sweep all of the water systems in the country in advance isn’t doable in any time frame?

IR isn’t an acronym I’m familiar with.

So are we just kind of admitting that there exists no way to expose any networked device to the internet securely?

It’s done all the time. It’s not a product you can buy, though, it’s a process. There’s probably a good “go by” for how to start the process for citywide infrastructure, but it’s just one more document for people to ignore.

If budget weren’t an issue, how many clones of your teams would it take to do that for all the water systems in the US in five years?

What are the odds that the average muncipality understands the security implications of just existing on the internet these days?

“No, their platform doesn’t support any real secure protocols and won’t route over a VPN, it needs to be on the same subnet as the devices. […]”

They won’t know that much. They don’t understand that their job isn’t running a water department, it’s running the computers that maintain the water department and that includes security. For someone familiar with computer security it’s easy to recognize negligence, but until the law sees it as criminal negligence nothing’s going to change.

Small town municipal water departments aren’t going to be able to afford the guy holding the shield against international state actors.

OK, I’m curious first about the data requirements.

If people are posting just to stir up shit then that would be something that would have to be handled at the community level or at the individual level. If we don’t agree with someone’s opinion then just ignore that person. If people are coming around trying to stir up violence that’s a different story. The bar is lower than ever for firing up a lemmy instance if people are into that kind of thing.

Link to the nazi bar story. If anyone has a better place to link to please let me know:

• https://www.upworthy.com/bartender-explains-why-he-swiftly-kicks-nazis-out-of-his-punk-bar-even-if-theyre-not-bothering-anyone/

Who knows. I’m just curious about the data storage requirements.

Edit: Uhh, maybe there should be a group doing annual backups of lemmy.

I’m sure there are a bunch of people who are a lot more knowledgeable about it, but it might be as simple firing up your own instances and just federating. By not allowing people to post you’d just be in readonly mode and would get passed all the posts, maybe. With every other kind of archive process like this the images/videos/audio are the long pole. A full 100% backup of “what did everyone see back then” is out of reach; even youtube (or especially youtube) goes back and edits old videos for newer compression or a change in copyright rules.

My only real thought on it right now is an annual back up is waaaaaay too slow. I’d want to see more about what the ActivityPub stream looks like. I’d want to hear from an owner of an instance about how quickly their storage requirements go, and I’m now curious about whether there’s any evidence of anyone else such as Three Letter Agencies already backing it all up.

They do A/B testing where they put one feature in front of some folks and a different feature in front of others so they can gather data about what people will and won’t tolerate. Between that and the massive tracking they do with IP addresses for people going around account bans, and there’s no real way to know if they were targeting you through cookies/IP, or if you just fell into different groups.

I don’t think they put a lot of thought into what’ll that do for some of the subreddits that are for desperate people looking for advice since two people back to back won’t get the same advice. There’s no way to swap notes, no reddit-of-record, and now all that good advice (and some of it was good) is locked away. It warms my cold dead heart to see their stock tank because they don’t deserve the best of their users.

They’re likely on the hook to prove to their investors that usage statistics are real people and not bots. All the changes they’ve made do that as well as “keep people safe” or whatever.

A lot of people “confided” in reddit in the past by making an anonymous account to ask a question about something they didn’t feel comfortable asking in real life due to social consequences, legal consequences, or perhaps mortal consequences depending on what was asked and what country the asker was in. Those people should consider that reddit could’ve sold them out.

With the new no VPN/must login rules people should consider that selling them out is reddit’s business model. Posting on the privacy subreddit is hypocracy at this point. Would a question about the privacy of reddit itself stay up on r/privacy?

Lemmy is ready for those people I believe. They just can’t be told about it via reddit.

Then here’s the bright side: in any emergency you wouldn’t have to cut up your car and fashion it into a sextant to know where you are!

Joking aside, I don’t understand why they wouldn’t fix something like that. I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that it’s working fine for them for data gathering purposes:

• https://www.cnbc.com/2014/01/09/ford-we-can-use-gps-to-track-your-car-movements.html

I guess I don’t understand what design decisions led to a clock that can’t be adjusted manually by a user, and won’t update from a working GPS receiver. They’re the experts.

Other sources like wikipedia/youtube have GPS covered better than I can explain it, but here’s something maybe a little different:

• https://www.rfwireless-world.com/terminology/gps-nmea-sentences
• https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-mini-gps-pa1010d-module/overview

Thank you for your input.

No problem. Hope I helped.

I do have a followup question. Will the car’s navigation/display work? As in does it know your position? If you’re able to have it give your directions then that’s enough for a “yes.” The reason why I ask is if that’s the case, then the GPS system is working, handing data off to the infotainment system saying “here’s your position and the time of day,” and your infotainment system is saying “thanks for that position but the time is for suckers.”

Not to rub salt in the wound, but the GPS signals are hitting the car’s GPS antenna unless you’ve disconnected that wire, pulled the fuse to the receiver, or only drive inside hardened RF shielded bunkers. When I was futzing with a little GPS breadboard module the time is what I looked for first, because if you’ve got that time signal from GPS then you know the thing is working. (PEDANTIC EDIT: The signals will hit the antenna if you’re outside unless you’ve shielded them somehow, even if you disconnect the wire.)

You could use GPS signals to synchronize clocks across the entire planet to within a microsecond while your car could be used to prop a stick up to make a sundial.

I’m going to wager there’s something else going on there. If you have a working GPS receiver, a working display (you said you did), a working “clock” that counts seconds and can give something time-like to the display to show (seems like you do), then a switch might be flipped in software and you have a data point about why GNU does what they do.