I played a lot of Sierra games in the 80s. I grew away from computers for a while and at some point in the 90s, Sierra sold out. They were basically drug through the mud, canned all its devs and became a brand rather than a software company. Sierra was also the first publisher of Half Life.

I was reading the history of Sierra there other night on Wikipedia and was sad because so many great games came out of that company and most were memorable. Hard to see that in any gaming these days

Back to my point, I started thinking that Valve saw what happened to Sierra and Newell decided fairly early on that they would be a software company and publisher and not sell out to a third party or take the company into the market. Pure speculation on my part, but they got their start sort of at the end of life of a bunch of 80s software companies. EA is certainly a shadow of what it was but it’s still around at least as a brand.

There was a game called The Culling. The sequel was crap and it bombed immediately. The first one was excellent though.

I almost feel sorry for the mindless twits still using that platform.

To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women.

Well, yeah. Private network sysadmins tend to act like a big hammer. Torrents can be terrible on a network, particularly Linux distro torrents, especially if the hardware itself was put together on a shoestring budget. That said, a lot of universities are mirrors and there isn’t really a need to go outside the university network to obtain that stuff. Not all the time, though.

Must be a legacy thing. All the tracker guides instructed users to turn all that off.

Red Dawn

Also, government reach is infinite. If you’re using them Internet, the government has your traffic. This isn’t a conspiracy, it’s a real thing. Go look up Room 641a.

Generally there is a centralized “tracker” that creates a torrent on the fly specifically for your user. I’ve you load the torrent and connect to the tracker via sometime like transmission or rtorrent or deluge, the tracker provides you with a list of peers (as far as I understand it). There’s usually some settings you need to change on your torrent tool, like disarming different, DHT, etc - the sure usually has instructions for beginners. The communication between you and your peers is encrypted, so deep packet inspection at the ISP level is not possible. It also significantly reduces, but not eliminates, the risk a particular torrent is a honeypot.

I’ve been doing this for 20 years and I’ve never received a notice about torrenting from my ISPs. However, people I know that got stuff from open places like Pirate Bay and the like did get notices. The difference being I always used private trackers.

Seeding is safe when you aren’t using P2P discovery functions. If it is a private tracker, and everything is encrypted, you’ll never have any issues. Stay away from public torrents that aren’t explicitly controlled by a tracker unless it’s freely available data (like a Linux distro).

Surprised so few people use Yacy.

Born before the A-Team existed, drive both. Prefer my sports cars to be manual but would be happy with DCTs. I have not had good experiences in terms of longevity with automatics. And no, I don’t consider DCTs to be automatics.

Wrap all the cron job tasks in a bash script and make sure it works. Call the script directly in the cron configuration. Dump the output of the cronjob to a logfile. Set it up to run every minute so you can ensure it works via the cron environment.

Naive question here: would it be valuable to generate hashes of those images and provide them as a public database? Seems like it would be valuable to reject known images using some mechanism to prevent this from happening broadly. It wouldn’t stop someone from on-the-fly systematically editing/saving/uploading CSAM, but hashes are cheap to store and it would at least provide one barrier to entry.

Thank you! I’ll start fresh and see what happens. I’m moving to a dedicated r/w & r pool for pgsql, which will have much better storage and maintenance associated, so hopefully I can avoid this issue in the future.

It’s new enough that you don’t need torrents. Just grab it from Usenet.

I share services with the public, so… strong passwords on everything, MFA, host scanning, SSH MAC/KEX/ciphers tweaked to ultra modern set and exposed only with keys with f2b activating on first failure, constant backups and automatic updates and scheduled reboots. Has worked great for a decade+.

Did you buy chance do a release upgrade? I had this happen in a headless VM I run, upgrading from 20.04 to 22.04 VM would become unresponsive (go to sleep) and I would have to wake it up. For whatever reason, a full desktop gui and accessories had been installed. So I ripped all that out via apt and everything was ok after that. This VM has been upgraded over before from 18, and has been running for years so I had not seen this issue before (it runs my Plex server and a bunch of accessory docker containers).

Permissive mode is definitely a life saver. My path was usually exercising the application in permissive mode for a few days then running the SELinux scanner on the log file to determine what roles needed to be setup. Same with the Debian/Ubuntu equivalent.

Good luck!

What is the reason to shy away from Ubuntu? It is pretty solid in terms of automatic updating and rebooting. I used to be hardcore centos but I gave up after all of the hubbub around 8. I just need to server to update, reboot when necessary and keep running all my stuff so I don’t have to touch it. In my old age, I don’t care to tinker anymore - I just want my services running and I want reports given to me about health and status.

Also, if you’re concerned about privilege escalation, running a MAC is probably a good idea. SELinux saved my hide one a dozen years ago with a php bug where I did not sandbox an app properly. Thankfully, SELinux caught this and prevented anything bad from happening.