While I have to apologize for not being able to provide you with any help for the problem at hand I just wanted to note that if you open up identical public threads via a reddit account and via a lemmy account at the same time then those two accounts are then, for data analysis purposes, connected for all eternity. You might as well not bother using different nicknames.
If that isn’t a concern to you then just ignore my ramblings.

Is that just something that’s intrinsically missing from some distros due to technical constraints or is it a regular type of feature the simply hasn’t been implemented (yet) due to… human constraints?

It absolutely is, at least from my observations!

That’s an impressive project indeed.

And here all I can cynically think is “Great, finally a way to make the FP4 a bit more unwieldy and hard to hold with small hands, that had always been way too easy before!”

Blacklist everything then whitelist the IPs you know you’ll be connecting from (work, cell phone, etc). I don’t connect from random places usually. If I need to then I use cellular. You might be better off with a VPN if you need to connect from random places.

I see, thanks!
Is there any concern with whitelisting a cellular CGNAT’s public IP? Presumably that would potentially whitelist thousands or tens of thousands of other mobile devices at once, wouldn’t it?

IP whitelisting

How do you do that? I understand how blocklisting would work but how does whitelisting work in practice? How can you know in advance from which IPs you will connect to your home network in the future? That just seems like a recipe for getting stranded in some hotel without a way into your network.

I’m a bit baffled that this hasn’t popped up yet: Sell them on eBay.
Mark them as broken goods/scrap and re-iterate that fact very clearly in the product description. Broken drives often sell for up to 1/3 of the value of a working one, no scamming needed.

I cannot tell you why that is, but my theory is that a lot of folk buy up broken drives in private sales in the hopes that the “broken”-diagnosis is just user error and that the drive is actually fine. Knowing my users that might actually be true in many cases.

Edit: I didn’t quite catch that you were not able to successfully overwrite your data. I guess that’s a point against selling it. Always encrypt your drives, that way you can always sell them when they break!

Unlimited* plans are always sold on the idea that a sizeable part of the user base aren’t going to use an actual unlimited amount of the resource.

Unless there is a contract regarding a fee over a period of time, there isn’t that much that users can do to compel a service to offer a service they no longer want to offer.

Absolutely! But I don’t think that’s the point of contention here. The problem is the “abuse” rhetoric, since it’s not just incorrect but disingenuous to basically claim that the users did anything wrong here. They’re imposing limits because they miscalculated how many heavy users they could handle.
Again, that’s a completely reasonable move, but framing it as anything but a miscalculation on their part is just a dick move.

Aves is great!