technology

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/2720264

What's the point of this post?

We all love to dunk on M$ for repeatedly fucking up Windows, and we all love to recommend installing the superior OS, but there hasn’t been a guide on how to actually do so. My aim is to create a guide on how to actually install Linux so that every time M$ fucks up, people can link to this guide (or any other successive guide) on top of the usual dunking.

Note: This guide is tailored towards people who are using Windows devices.

Why Linux Mint?

• Linux Mint has a well-deserved reputation as the “newbie distro for people who came from Windows.”
• Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu, which is based on Debian, and all three distros combined have a wealth of information online owning to their popularity, meaning that there’s less obstacles in troubleshooting.
• Linux Mint owning to its Debian heritage isn’t cutting edge or bleeding edge, meaning there’s a greater focus on using what currently works.

Which version of Linux Mint?

https://www.linuxmint.com/download.php

Linux Mint comes in three main editions:

• Cinnamon (←pick this one)
• MATE
• Xfce

Pick Cinnamon since this edition is more modern and closely imitates the Windows desktop environment (DE) the most. The other two use DEs that consume less resources, but don’t mimic the look of Windows as much.

How to create a USB boot drive?

There are various ways of creating a USB boot drive:

• Rufus (easy and fooproof): https://rufus.ie/en/
• Ventoy (takes more work but you can add multiple ISO images to the boot drive): https://www.ventoy.net/en/index.html

Live session:

After creating your USB boot disk with Linux Mint Cinnamon Edition, you need to boot from your flash drive. The exact steps vary, but you essentially have to go to your BIOS and either change the boot order or specifically boot from your flash drive. Once there, you’ll come across a couple of screens before arriving at the Linux Mint desktop.

There’s a desktop icon that tells you to install Linux Mint, but you don’t have to do it yet. In fact, nothing’s stopping you from just running Linux Mint like this through the flash drive (there are entire Linux distro designed to be run from a flash drive like, but Linux Mint isn’t one of those). The live session is also good to catch any hardware issues like your wifi not working.

Actually installing Linux Mint:

It’s honestly pretty straightforward.

Pick the language you want, which will mostly likely be English.

Pick the keyboard, which will mostly be what you’re already using.

Connect online so Linux Mint will install the latest programs. You can skip connecting online, and Linux Mint will install the version of the programs that are in the iso image, but you’ll have to upgrade all those programs at once later.

Check Install multimedia codecs. The codecs allow you to watch videos.

Unless you have some weird logical partition set up for your drive, just choose Erase disk and install Linux Mint, and let Linux Mint handle the partitioning. If your PC has multiple drives, I would suggest physically disconnecting the drives that you don’t want the installation to touch as a precaution. Obviously, do this while the PC is off.

Pick the time zone you live in.

Set up your username, hostname, and password. It doesn’t have annoying password complexity restrictions on what password you want to use. Just pick any password.

This is a slideshow while installation is taking place.

Once installation is complete, Linux Mint will prompt you to reboot your PC. When you reboot your PC through that window, you will eventually get to a black screen with a prompt asking you to remove the USB boot drive and press Enter. Do so, and your PC will reboot to a fresh installation of Linux Mint.

https://www.businessinsider.com/tokyo-government-launching-dating-app-marriage-rates-population-decline-japan-2024-6

ImagePerfect AI: Delivers zero dropped frames while supporting heavier workloads. Versatile Capabilities: Intelligently adapts to the scale of your AI environment, supporting up to 64 HD video streams and 32 AI streams.

What does this have to do with hardware? Can that not be done on other hardware?

SkyHawk Health Management: Actively helps protect your surveillance storage by focusing on prevention, intervention, and recovery options. Includes RAID RapidRebuild—providing 3× faster volume rebuilds over traditional RAID rebuilds.

"We strapped an LLM to the hard drive and it tripled the write speeds!"

Club Penguin fans hacked a Disney Confluence server to steal information about their favorite game but wound up walking away with 2.5 GB of internal corporate data, BleepingComputer has learned.

Club Penguin was a multiplayer online game (MMO) from 2005 to 2018, featuring a virtual world where players could engage in games, activities, and chat with other players. The game was originally created by New Horizon Interactive, which Disney later purchased.

While Club Penguin was officially shut down in 2017, and its successor, Club Penguin Island, in 2018, the game continues to live on in private servers run by fans and independent developers. Though Disney pushed back on a more prominent 'Club Penguin Rewritten' remake, causing its operators to be arrested, private servers continue to this day with thousands of players.

This week, an anonymous person uploaded a link to "Internal Club Penguin PDFs" on the 4Chan message board with the simple statement, "I no longer need these :)."

The link goes to a 415 MB archive containing 137 PDFs that contain old internal information about Club Penguin, including emails, design schematics, documentation, and character sheets. All of this data is seven years old, if not older, making it only interesting to fans of the game.

BleepingComputer has since learned that Club Penguin data is only a small part of a much larger data set stolen from Disney's Confluence server, which stores documentation for various business, software, and IT projects used internally by Disney.

According to an anonymous source, Disney's Confluence servers were breached using previously exposed credentials.

The source says that the threat actors were initially looking for Club Penguin data; they wound up downloading 2.5 GB of data about Disney's corporate strategies, advertising plans, Disney+, internal developer tools, business projects, and internal infrastructure.

"Lot more files here including internal api endpoints and credentials for things like S3 buckets," an anonymous source told BleepingComputer.

The data, seen by BleepingComputer, includes documentation on a wide variety of initiatives and projects, as well as information on internal developer tools named Helios and Communicore, which have not previously been disclosed publicly.

CommuniCore is a "high-performance asynchronous messaging library, aimed at use in distributed applications."

Helios is a show authoring and playback tool that allows Disney producers and authors to create interactive non-linear "experiences" using real world inputs from sensors in Disney's parks.

Strewn across the documents are links to internal websites used by Disney developers, which could be valuable for threat actors who wish to target the company.

While the Club Penguin data is fairly old, the rest of the data circulating on Discord is far newer, with information from 2024.

BleepingComputer was told that the original Club Penguin PDFs shared on 4Chan were stolen weeks ago. However, the Disney corporate data appears to have been downloaded much sooner, as they contain the following text, "Document generated by Confluence on Jun 01, 2024 21:59."

BleepingComputer contacted Disney multiple times with information and questions about the breach but has yet to receive a reply.

Oral-B released the Guide for $230 in August 2020 but bricked the ability to set up or reconfigure Alexa on the product this February.

The Guide toothbrush's charging base was able to connect to the Internet and work like an Alexa speaker that you could speak to and from which Alexa could respond. Owners could “ask to play music, hear the news, check weather, control smart home devices, and even order more brush heads by saying, ‘Alexa, order Oral-B brush head replacements,'” per Procter & Gamble's 2020 announcement.

On February 15, Oral-B bricked the Guide's ability to set up Alexa by discontinuing the Oral-B Connect app required to complete the process. Guide owners can still use the Oral-B App for other features; however, the ability to use the charging base like an Alexa smart speaker—a big draw in the product’s announcement and advertising—is seriously limited.

The device should still work with Alexa if users set it up before Oral-B shuttered Connect, but setting up a new Wi-Fi connection or reestablishing a lost one doesn't work without Connect.

Recently, music-streaming app company Spotify similarly announced that it’s discontinuing its first and only hardware this December. Spotify's Car Thing originally cost $90 when released to the general public in February 2022. Even companies dedicated to smart home products entirely can meet an abrupt demise, and if a company suffers from poor communication skills, customers can be left in the dark.

Meanwhile, Oral-B is pushing its latest toothbrush to capitalize on the latest AI tech trend. Without real detail, Oral-B claims its new $400 toothbrush has "AI position detection that tracks where you brush across all 3 surfaces of your teeth.” Like many, I'm skeptical about the toothbrush’s incorporation of actual AI; notably, P&G declined to comment to The Washington Post on what, exactly, makes the toothbrush "AI."

and if so any suggestions? i have like 6 on my windows

They're not even doing refunds or recalls, they're just giving people 2 free months of the subscription and telling them to only charge the device and the hotswap add-on batteries with the home charger.

This piece of shit has a 4 hour standby time if you're not using the case to recharge the batteries. Literally unusable.

techbros owned.

Hello everyone, I've recently been curious to try Fedora Linux. I've been using Linux Mint for a while now, and while I really enjoy Mint, I think it's time to finally give something else a try. I want to go to a different distribution that will allow me to customize it more and have better support for GNOME and KDE.

Any information I should know before trying it out?

I feel that a little bit copium, they still print money from ads with p/e of round 20, same as it ever was, but growth will probably slow

https://www.theverge.com/2024/6/3/24170352/x-xxx-porn-adult-content-terms-of-service-policy-update

Hello software-savvy Hexbears, I am a person who knows basically nothing about Linux and I’m looking to switch over. I have an M1 macbook (I know, very bourgeois) and I’m not looking to get new hardware. Which Linux distribution should I choose, and what’s the best way to migrate my data over without data loss?

I’m also looking to pirate games once I switch to Linux, so a distribution good for g@ming is preferred.

This thing has trouble running anything made past like 2012 and the newer emulators out there totally bust it. I tried recently running citra and it could barely hit 30%. Would switching over to linux lighten the load on the cpu and free it up so I could run more demanding games?

Also how is linux for emulation and gaming in general?

https://futurism.com/the-byte/ceos-easily-replaced-with-ai

I have an app for work that uses wifi scanning to track my location. It basically wants a location update every hour so it can geotag my location. If the data is too far apart between where I am and where I'm supposed to be, it creates a red flag.

Ive deduced its because of wifi scanning. Tried a GPS spoof which seemed to work once I turned off wifi and wifi scanning.

But now if I disable wifi scanning, the app insists I turn it back on and it refuses to work. Any feasible workarounds for this? Android device.

Side Note.

If you don't care about your privacy and want to continue using Windows 11 with Telegram, this isn't for you. If this is correct, please do not respond to the post. If you use Windows 11 and Telegram and are concerned about your privacy, I highly urge that you read this post. Thank you. If there is any incorrect information linked in this post, please let me know so that it can be updated consistently.

What's been going on with Microsoft and Telegram?

Microsoft and Telegram collaborated, and Telegram is now a component of Copilot, which is extremely bad news for privacy. Microsoft is almost becoming another Facebook, given what they are doing with their copilot, which is being included in recent Windows 11 updates. More information about Copilot will be down below this post.

Telegram consistently claims to be "the best and most secure chatting app for privacy" and much more. We all know it's a lie given the number of strange incidents that occur there and the association with Microsoft Copilot. Not only that but they have openly stated multiple times that "They need your data to ensure a secure experience". Which is very suspicious. If you use Telegram on a daily basis, it might be time for you to switch.

What is Microsoft Copilot?

Microsoft Copilot is an artificial intelligence function that, like Alexa, can assist you, but it is built into the Windows 11 operating system. It can communicate with you, hear you, and observe and hear everything you do. It can hear you ask a question, browse the internet, listen to your voice calls unless you turn off your computer, recording and monitoring everything you do. It knows everything. It also sends all of this data to Microsoft and the CIA. Which is extremely bad news for privacy. Microsoft is almost becoming another Facebook, given what they are doing with their copilot, which is being included in recent Windows 11 updates.

What do I need to do to get actual Privacy from now on?

Before you do anything else, I highly recommend that you buy a USB stick and switch to Linux. You have four distribution options to select from.

Linux Mint (2 gigs of ram, NIVIDIA and AMD supported)

Debian (2 gigs of ram, NIVIDIA and AMD supported)

Kubuntu (2-8 gigs of ram, NIVIDIA and AMD supported)

Pop OS (8 gigs of ram, NIVIDA and AMD supported)

Ubuntu (4 gigs of ram, AMD Supported)

• I will say this about Ubuntu: it doesn't work very well if you want to play games on it and you use NIVIDIA drivers. With NIVIDA drivers, it can work well for general use such as watching videos, making documents, and editing photos. However, gaming performance is not very good when using NIVIDA drivers on Ubuntu. My friend tested it out for me. Going all RED (AMD) is definitely the best option if you want to play games on Ubuntu.

These are definitely the best distributions for a beginner, however if you thoroughly understand linux and know how it works once you get used to it, you can finally try something like Arch, Fedora or NixOS.

If you want a alternative to Telegram, you have two options

Signal (Best Option)

Signal is the best alternative to Telegram, it has great end to end to end encryption, it's open source, amazing screen sharing and voice calling, privacy, and it's extremely private compared to telegram.

The only thing that Telegram has that's better than Signal is better built in customization. However, aside from that, it still can't beat Signal. If you have an Android phone, you can install custom clients with it, making it incredibly customizable, or you can even develop your own because the source code is open source; even at that point, Telegram cannot surpass Signal.

Telegram-FOSS (Maybe?) Telegram-FOSS is a Telegram fork that aims to remove Telegram's spyware and data collection while increasing your privacy. However, it is only available on Android through the FDROID App Store, and keep in mind that I am not 100% certain that it will provide you with the finest privacy; use at your own risk.

Matrix (Not Recommended) I suppose Matrix is an additional choice for a Telegram substitute; but, in my opinion, it's more of a messenger alternative. Although it's fantastic for privacy, I don't think it's ready in terms of usability or user friendly. Matrix isn't ideal for communities and isn't very user-friendly. It's more for corporations/software development teams who want a self hosted slack. Yes, Matrix is more private & secure then Telegram, and you don't need to setup your own matrix server to use it. You can register on the public matrix server and message friends etc that way. Matrix just doesn't advertise, it relies on clients & servers to do the advertising. The issue with that is the main client (Element) is only trying to appeal to corporations/non-tech savy people who can't setup their own matrix server so the messaging is based around that. I still think Signal is easily your best alternative

My point is, if you value your privacy, you should quit Windows 11 and Telegram while you still can and try Linux and Signal; it will be well worth it. If there is any wrong information in this post, please notify me so that it can be changed, and if you have any questions, please contact me and I will gladly assist you.

Say you want to go to twitter.com/dril.

"But AssortedBiscuits, that just redirects to x.com/dril"

Ah, but if you add an ?mx=1 at the end like twitter.com/dril?mx=1, the URL will then redirect to twitter.com/dril. From there, you can pretty much just use Twitter like normal. twitter.com/?mx=1 will take you to the normal Twitter login page or twitter.com/home if you're already logged in.