For real. Literally yesterday, reboot my computer and Nvidia drivers that had worked fine the day before no longer functioned resulting in my screen resolution being reduced and unchangeable.

Had to run a few commands to fix it but they are not obvious to me as a new-ish Linux user. Something about dkms being a dependency but not configured?

To recover, I had to:

sudo apt purge nvidia-*

sudo apt autoremove

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade

sudo rm -rf /var/lib/dkms/nvidia/

sudo apt install nvidia-dkms-550

(Reinstall Nvidia 550 drivers)

Why did I have to do all this? I ask that rhetorically, but Id like to know so I can understand what went wrong. Linux is non-trivial and people who deny that are not seeing things clearly. Then again, triviality of use isn’t particularly the most salient to me. Rather, it’s a mixture of is there enough compatibility to what I use my desktop for, is it reasonably easy to use for most tasks, and does it give me the freedom I want for the device.

Probably a 200 GB download too.

You are implying that any data gathered will be delivered to the government upon request (unsure if you are implying with or without a warrant). If you can show me from this article, or even this case, regarding this privacy case that that happened, then yes I agree with you and the fourth amendment applies.

But this issue is between private entities which generally precludes amendments from being applicable. Specifically, the plaintiffs alleged that the infotainment systems collected and stored personal data without consent and violated Washington’s Privacy Act.

The “unlawful search and seizure” amendment? Why would that apply here?

I’m in IT security and I’m fighting this battle. I want to lessen the burden of passwords and arbitrary rotation is terrible.

I’ve ran into a number of issues at my company that would give me the approval to reduce the frequency of expired passwords

• the company gets asked this question by other customers “do you have a password policy for your staff?” (that somehow includes an expiration frequency).

• on-prem AD password complexity has some nice parts built in vs some terrible parts with no granularity. It’s a single check box in gpo that does way too much stuff. I’m also not going to write a custom password policy because I don’t have the skill set to do it correctly when we’re talking about AD, that’s nightmare inducing. (Looking at specops to help and already using Azure AD password protection in passive mode)

• I think management is worried that a phishing event happens on a person with a static password and then unfairly conflating that to my argument of “can we just do two things: increase password length by 2 and decrease expiration frequency by 30 days”

At the end of the day, some of us in IT security want to do the right things based in common sense but we get stymied by management decisions and precedence. Hell, I’ve brought NIST 800-63B documentation with me to check every reason why they wouldn’t budge. It’s just ingrained in them - meanwhile you look at the number of tickets for password help and password sharing violations that get reported … /Sigh

replaced Google’s Network Time Protocol servers with NTP Pool Project

In the the context of degoogling and privacy, NTP would seem way down on the list of concerns.

What’s the importance of calling out NTP? Is it just to emphasize the point?

Yes and no. The people that truly keep the lights on to critical systems I think are more insulated. I deal with active directory (and azure to an extent). I’m one of two engineers that are attuned to what is going on in AD in a 65k+ staffed company. I do other things than AD, but it needs care and feeding.

AD is going to stick around for a lot longer and may end up being in that cobol state where companies have it for critical things but there are few who truly understand how to work it.

Everyone else may end up in a DevOps-esque role. Then you have the scope of the industry too. I think this article overblows the premise it puts forth.