“For only $1000 in bitcoin we will decrypt your files until the next time we fsck you over.”

One can hope, but I suspect nobody will be announcing a victor on Tuesday night.

I’ve been reading some discussions this week about fake polls claiming Republicans are winning to make Dems think there’s no point in voting. Apparently it was a technique used in a previous recent election? It would explain all the results I’ve seen in the last few days showing them with a strong lead, where a week or two ago other polls showed an even race. Doesn’t really matter though, everyone should remember that the only thing that counts is getting out and casting your vote no matter what the polls might suggest.

I’ve got another ten years or so before I consider retiring, but I’m close enough that this kind of stuff has been on my mind lately. Retirement itself is easy – just don’t ever get sick, have any accidents, or reach the age where the insurance companies decide it’s cheaper to pay your family for a wrongful-death suit than to pay for your medical costs. The bastards will choose to murder you every time.

I’ve seen the opposite being true… A loved one dies after a lifetime together and the other person no longer has the will to keep going. I think you can keep going as long as you have the desire and your body doesn’t give out on you (and your insurance company doesn’t deny you a life-saving procedure because they think you’re too old and need to die).

Who said anything about it being standard? I said I know this CAN happen, and I said it was quite some time ago. We can only hope this insanity isn’t still in practice anywhere, but I learned long ago that expecting a corporation to NOT do foolish things will give me the same disappointing results as expecting money to come out of my ass. If there’s a manager involved, then something on the tech side is going to get fucked up in the name of saving a buck. Therefore I cannot just assume OP gets a normal NAT address, nor can I assume they have any other firewall type device between them and the internet. With limited data, the best I can do is try and provide some general information, hopefully encourage them to ask more questions or provide more specific information, and just hope they don’t have a ridiculously stupid ISP that makes things needlessly complicated.

Most of my experience is with iptables, but yeah, I think until you start adding rules nothing is implicitly denied? Once you enable a couple of initial rules then you should have good blocking from the outside while allowing internal traffic to connect freely. It doesn’t get in your way until you start using it, but then it doesn’t take much to get it going.

You’re right, it doesn’t make any sense. And it didn’t make any sense at the time either. After setting up the router with a laptop, I moved the connection to the firewall but it refused to connect. When I finally got ahold of tech support they said the connection locks into the first machine that logs in and they had to release it so I could connect the new machine. And just like that the firewall was given a routable IP address and connected to the internet. Stupidest thing I ever heard of, but that’s how they were set up. Now this was around 15+ years ago and I would certainly hope nobody is doing that crap today, but apparently that was their brilliant method of limiting how many devices could get online at once.

What are you talking about? You’re assuming that every residential router is going to have some kind of firewall enabled by default (they don’t). Sure, if OP has a router that provides a basic firewall type service then it will likely block all incoming unauthorized traffic. However OP is specifically talking about a linux-based firewall and hasn’t specified if they have a router-based firewall service in place as well so we can only provide info on the firewall they specified. And if you look at UFW, the default configuration is to allow outgoing traffic and block all but a very few defined incoming ports.

You’re also making the assumption that OP is using NAT, when that is not always the case for all ISPs. Some are really annoying with their setup in that they give a routable IP to the first computer that connects and don’t allow any other connections (I had that setup once with Comcast). In this case, you wouldn’t even need to define port-forwarding to get directly to OP’s computer – and any services they might be running. This particular scenario is especially dangerous for home computers and I really hope no legitimate ISP is still following a practice like this, however I don’t take anything for granted.

Regardless of what other equipment OP has, UFW is going to provide FAR better defaults and configurability when compared to a residential router that is simply set up to create the fewest support calls to their ISP.

Possibly? The way I read it, it sounded like OP wasn’t really even sure what a firewall does.

Sure it CAN be configured, but the typical policy of firewalls is to start from a position of blocking everything. From what I’ve seen, on Linux the standard starting point is blocking all incoming and allowing all outgoing. On Windows the default seems to be blocking everything in both directions. Sure you could start with a policy of allowing everything and block only selected ports, but what good is that when you can’t predict what ports an attacker might come from?

You’ve got it backwards. A firewall blocks everything, then you open up the ports you want to use. A standard config would allow everything going out, and block everything coming in (unless you initiated that connection, then it is allowed).

So the question you should be asking, is what services do you think you’re going to be running on your desktop that you plan to allow anyone on the internet to get to?

From my own experience it was more about being a solution in search of a problem. I see some comments about how the old init system was so horribly broken, and yet the reality was it worked perfectly fine for all but some very niche situations. The only advantage I have ever seen with systemd is that it’s very good at multitasking the startup/shutdown processes, but that certainly wasn’t the case when it first arrived. For example I had a raspberry pi that booted in 15 seconds, and when I loaded a new image with systemd it took close to two minutes to boot. And there were quite a lot of problems like that, which is why people were so aggravated when distro admins asked the community for their thoughts on switching to systemd and then changed the distros anyway. This also touches on the perception that the “community” accepted it and moved on – no, systemd was pushed on the community despite numerous problems and critical feedback.

But we’re here now, systemd has improved, and we can only hope that some day all the broken bits get fixed. Personally I’m still annoyed that it took me almost a week to get static IPs set up on all the NICs for a new firewall because despite the whole “predictable names” thing they still kept moving around depending on if I did a soft or hard reset. Configuring the cards under udev took less than a minute and worked consistently but someone decided it was time to break that I guess.

What’s your fear of editing config files? They’re just text files, and manual edits certainly allow a degree of customization that you’ll never find in a GUI interface. My own config is set up with domain name folders under /home/ to contain the many domains I run, that’s something I’ve never seen handled by a GUI and yet it makes so much more sense for keeping files organized.

sudo apt install apache2

Did you really need a GUI for that? The web folders are under /var/www/ and you can browse to it from another computer by typing the IP into the address bar. As long as you’re not using Chrome you might even be able to type the computer name into the address bar.

“He doesn’t think that elections are a real thing. He doesn’t think that elections are legitimate, and he doesn’t want an American form of government in which elections decide whether or not he’s in power because he doesn’t believe election results should be binding.”

– Rachel Maddow

Green felt top hat with a size tag stuck in the band. Oof that’s been about 20 years ago now.

According to Buttigieg they are waking up thinking “Oh shit I don’t want people talking about that… what other fucked-up shit can I spew to distract the rubes?”

That’s such a common thing these days that I have to wonder if humans have always had this issue, or if it has anything to do with our modern lifestyles. I was going to do a sleep study at one point, but when I took their questionnaire I checked off no on everything on their list. Then I found out my insurance wouldn’t even cover it, and couldn’t afford to do the study anyway. Ah well, if I ever get back to a point where I’m having trouble sleeping again then I’ll reconsider.

Another suggestion… have you considered if something in particular might be preventing you from getting good sleep? In my case, I’ve had restless-leg for quite awhile which was managed by doing some stretches before bed as needed. After a really car car accident, that went into overdrive, the stretches made no obvious difference and so I didn’t think that was an issue any more, but apparently I was tossing and turning all night. I’d sleep for 9+ hours and wake up a zombie.

After years of this I finally talked to my doctor about it, we discussed a lot of things and I mentioned how I had previous had the problems with my leg pains at night. He decided to try treating this symptom and suddenly I started getting real sleep again. By now it has gotten so bad that if I forget to take my pills at night, my legs absolutely scream at me the moment I lay down in bed. Yeah I’ll be on this med the rest of my life, but I’m getting good sleep now and feeling energetic the day.

The point is, your issue may be something you have already dismissed without realize fully how it affects you. When an unknown problem comes up, sometimes you just have to go back and reevaluate everything.