I’ve settled on using wsl2 on a windows machine. I run Ubuntu and kali in wsl as virtual machines on my main windows computer. I was an early user of linux and bsd but have found it’s just plain easier to run day to day on windows.

I run both Ubuntu and kali simply because I haven’t been able to make sound work correctly with Ubuntu on wsl but it works great in kali, plus kali has all the pentesting stuff so I can play around with that in my free time.

I’m not sure if they would be classified as influencers but have you ever fallen into the rabbit hole of youtube reaction channels? I fell into it because of a band I like was being heavily reacted to on youtube but I quickly noticed there is a cycle of right wing propagandists like Tom McDonald and other music type people who get featured on these reaction channels. The majority of the reactors I watch are black but they sell their souls for the traffic they get from what I assume are mostly bots that watch and comment in support of the right wing propaganda.

The first time I watched one of those reaction videos I was awestruck by how the reactor was so agreeable to the theme of “I won’t apologize for being white”. I know it’s only tangibly related to the topic here but I have been bothered by it and wanted to share and see what other people think.

I am convinced the reactors or paid to favorably review this stuff.

It’s complete shit right now. 5 or more years ago I could quickly find an answer to a very technical question with no problem. Now it is useless for anything. Just today I was looking for a shop near me that can perform a front end alignment on my RV, I searched for “Tractor Trailer front end alignment near me”. The entire first page is either tire shops that do not offer front end alignments, car tire shops that don’t even sell the correct size tires I would need for a tractor trailer, or shops 2000 miles away in various directions. It’s horrible and I think it would be faster to look in the yellow pages for what I need in this case. I never found a shop using google.

Also today I was searching for the tires I need in the shopping tab there were ads for tires that google had labeled as wal-mart but when I would click the link it would take me to a Chinese scam site.

In 1999 / 2000 I started using Mandrake because I missed the days of using a terminal instead of a GUI. That got me into setting a web and mail server up and running things from home once I had stable internet. I have always had an on and off relationship with Linux and the other *nix. Currently I have a few servers running around the house for various things all running Ubuntu but besides upkeep and making changes I don’t touch them much until my ADHD kicks in and I want to learn something new then I burn out for awhile and repeat the cycle. I am probably the outlier here that uses windows daily and Linux secondary these days.

Man Mandrake brings back some memories. It was my first linux install solely because they had the fastest shipping time for install cd’s and at the time I was on dialup so I couldn’t just download anything I wanted. I ran it for several years and ended up on a few different distro’s and freebsd for a bit.

I used to really like running it. I had quite a lot of aggregated content on that site.

I wondered the same thing at the time it had to have been ungodly expensive unless it was a stolen device. I can’t remember for sure if it was intelsat or one of the other companies that was around at the time but it was a sat connection. I was also running that webserver on a really bad dsl line. I lived right next door to the phone company CO but was at the end of the line. I had to go with an independent isp because the phone company said it was too far and wouldn’t work. It did work but was super unreliable.

About 20 years ago I was running a phpnuke site on my home server and had someone doing the same thing as you describe. Hundreds of attempts over and over all night long. I went through the logs and saw it was someone on intelsat (I think, it’s been a long time) internet from Africa. I called intelsat or whoever the company was and talked to their system admin that was on call. Within 20 mins of getting off the phone the attack stopped and never happened again. They guy I talked to was really nice and seemed like he was happy to be able to help me.

I don’t know, but I think he either had a marketing team or he himself made the choice to interact with and allow the reaction channels full access to his works in order to drive more people to him and it created a viral wave on YT. If you look at any 2 or more of the reaction videos the same people are commenting in mass on the videos. It usually takes me a few days of not watching any music videos to get the recommendations back to normal.

r/homeimprovement was one of my favorite subs and a topic I hope takes off over here. Glad you all are sticking to your guns.

Just ran my 3rd set of edits today. I agree with you.

I used redact.dev to bulk edit mine. I am waiting a few days to make sure they don’t get changed back by reddit and then I am going to edit them one more time then delete them and my 13 year old account.

Funny I said in another thread that they needed to go outside more often. It is what it is I guess.

I’m glad you did this. Hopefully more mods will follow your lead.

I thought it might be an admin or a mod who really sides with them.

I got banned from r/news and talked down to by some mod shortly after editing all of my posts. The reason for the ban was protest bot. That took away any hard feelings I had about leaving reddit.

I was just banned from r/news today for deleting a 10 year old comment then got a snarky message from a mod about being a ‘hero’ and told to grow up. Reddit is dead to me.

I’m using Redact and having it run repeatedly to overwrite my comments with a message that says why I removed the comments. I have 13 years of comments being edited and I manually deleted my posts. Hopefully they will stay gone.

I just used redact.dev to overwrite and delete 13 years worth of comments. I also manually deleted all of my posts. Kinda hurt me to do it but I think it’s the right thing to do.