Building off of this, the PDF standard supports all sorts of craziness. It can have embedded math and logic similar to excel files, to the point there’s templates available for banks which will automatically calculate entire loans (including weird ones like balloon mortgages and variable interest rate stuff) without leaving Adobe Reader, and the recent Doom PDF and Linux PDF projects exploit the fact that pdfs support embedded javascript.

There’s also an actual market for enterprise PDF templates like the banking ones I described with automatic calculations and whatnot. So some people literally make their living selling PDFs to businesses that businesses actually use

I used it briefly in a class around 2015ish. It worked about as well as any Adobe software does, but honestly it was really difficult to use and quite frankly it probably would take just as long to learn the HTML and CSS skills necessary to make a decent website as it would to learn how to make one in Dreamweaver

I ran my crappy lawmower on crappy gas I filled up 2-3 years ago, and I’ve never done any maintenance on it. I can tell it’s not happy but also I’m sure this $100 lawnmower is a lot simpler than any road vehicle made in the last 50 years

10 miles is about 1 hour’s bike ride or 2-3 hours of walking. There’s a reason rural America has a town every 20 miles or so, that’s about half a day’s travel by foot, or one can feasibly go to the next town, do something that takes a while and return back by horse or bike within a day

Oh I saw something where they demonstrated there’s zero security to BIMI, so it’s just a B2B scam to invent a new thing to charge their business customers for. I’ll see if I can find it

Edit: so on a quick skim Google’s fix was literally to require valid DKIM to use BIMI so BIMI is still pretty useless as a security tool, but probably can be effective at getting organizations to actually setup proper email security

Truth is, he wasn’t trying to. Vance wanted to show off his zombie Jesus costume, but it turned out to be a killer costume!

(I just wanted to throw something in that isn’t the same jokes everyone else is making)

Unfortunately this seems to be exactly the case for learning all of the weird quirks is that you just have to experience them as they happen. Fortunately most windows admin career paths include a period in an MSP where you’ll see lots of cursed configs exposing lots of edgecases, but basically keep your eyes and ears open and try to learn on your feet

The worst part is it’s inconsistent! Sometimes it likes / sometimes it needs to be \ and every once in a while it needs to be /

I tried Habitica, which at least when I tried it had a free tier or was free. But I found for me it just led to me trying to game it like I do video games (so it was too good at gamifying) and not actually making progress on the things I wanted to make progress on

Blocking VPNs isn’t really possible. You can block known IP ranges but ultimately there’s so many ways to encapsulate and encrypt traffic that no solution is 100%. I have specifically worked at places in which those in management positions are interested in sniffing DNS queries to “see what people are up to on company time” and those happened to also be the employers that were doing sketchy things that may or may not have been legal

I’ve seen a grand total of one influencer make a good argument for a VPN and that was Alan Fisher saying “have you observed your work skirting regulations that they shouldn’t be? Are you potentially reviewing legal materials on your work’s WiFi that your place of work might prefer you didn’t know about? To help avoid retaliation, you might need a VPN such as one from today’s sponsor…”

More like they operate a tollroad to the playground and are concerned about why there’s so many trucks of wood chips costing them much more to maintain the road to the playground. And OP freely admitted they’re taking truckloads of woodchips from the playground.

Except the analogy also doesn’t work because ultimately piracy isn’t taking, it’s just copying and sharing copies. There isn’t really a good analogy without directly describing digital distribution and piracy. Maybe an analogy involving a solar farm and a transmission company? Except that gets into technical details that are just as technical as just explaining it as it is

We are swiftly reaching a time where boycotting companies run by people you disagree with will negatively impact your ability to function. Consider abandoning this type of purchasing in the future.

Oh no please don’t boycott! The current boycotts are actually costing companies money and we can’t have people learning that boycotts can actually work!

When I was a pre-teen I asked my mom about it because I’d been playing The Sims 2 and figured out that your sims can woohoo or they can try for baby, and both look like the same thing. And of course 1 sim day after the lullaby jingle plays upon woohooing the female sim enters the first trimester, and 3 sim days later you have a new baby sim in the family. She was very factual about it all, but didn’t bother to talk at all about anything other than explaining vaginal sex. I had to piece the rest together from what I learned at school.

Fortunately I had fairly decent sex ed, except it was painfully boring and felt no different talking about human reproduction than when in highschool biology we talked about how plants reproduce (complete with extremely vague heavily photocopier-burned diagrams of anatomy that look almost entirely unlike what it’s depicting which we had to label) but they at least discussed condoms and birth control pills, and even demonstrated a condom on a wooden phalis when I was in high school so that’s a lot more than I’m sure some kids get

For my own kids, my oldest is 5 and has already asked. I’ve left it extremely scientific because she’s way too young for a proper talk in just explaining that a male secretes sperm that fertilizes an egg which eventually forms a baby. She wanted more detail but I had to leave that at “when you’re older”. I’ll probably have to give an updated talk when she’s 7 or 8 to make sure she knows about periods and maybe I’ll then go into more detail so she can be armed with knowledge should any boys take an interest in her (and statistically many boys have watched porn by age 10 which is terrifying)

Sounds like you’re after the 100 year aged cheddar. That was like $400 a pound and sold in quarter pound cuts when I last saw it. Realistically you can’t really taste the difference between 10 year and 25 year aged cheddar, but it gets crumblier as it ages, so 100 year is great for bragging rights but ultimately for your average splashing on fancy cheese just go for 7-10 year aged

It says “max $400” but doesn’t list ome of the really fun cheese like 50 year aged cheddar

Y’know what that was terrible writing on my part. Where I put “physical vlan” I just meant specifying each port be a specific vlan rather than a trunk port that has multiple clans on in

I should probably proofread more and write less when tired

Physical wire tapping would be mostly mitigated by setting every port on the switch to be a physical vlan, especially if the switch does the VLAN routing. Sure someone could splice an ethernet cable, which would really only be mitigated by 802.1x like you already said, but every part of this threat model makes zero sense. You ultimately have to trust something (and apparently in OP’s case that’s a third party VPN provider that charges extra to not block LAN access while connected and they remain entirely on the free tier of)

But at the very least, not trusting everything on the network is a very enterprise kind of threat model, so using standard enterprise practices of network segmentation, firewalling, and potentially MAC-binding and 802.1x if so desired isn’t a bad idea, if for no other reason than it might lead to a career in network administration. And honestly I mostly want to get OP to not think of VPNs like a magical silver bullet and see what other tools exist in the toolbox

Wait you’re seriously using a free VPN?

Sounds far more likely that either someone misunderstood that residential IPs change frequently/may be shared by multiple subscribers or the ISP made an error when responding to a subpeana and provided the incorrect IP. Unfortunately both are all too common with privacy enforcement

If you really think the ISP router is snooping and can’t by bypassed you could simply double-NAT your network with a trusted router and call it a day. Much less VPNing and much less unusual decisions of trust and threat model involved then