I haven’t been using instant messaging programs much for some years, but checking https://old.reddit.com/r/xmpp/ I see:
https://www.glukhov.org/post/2025/09/xmpp-jabber-userbase-and-popularity/
This has an estimate of 13–20 million users globally for 2023, but warns that because many servers don’t publish information about their userbase, there’s necessarily uncertainty. According to it, Germany is the country with the largest userbase, followed by Russia, followed by the US.
jabber.org is a major server.
Sacks, the Trump administration’s AI czar and co-host of the conference, stopped Musk mid-answer. “Well, Elon, by the way, could you just publish that?” he asked. “Wikipedia is so biased, it’s a constant war.” He suggested that Musk create what he called “Grokipedia.”
This past week, as the Wikipedia controversy reignited, Musk announced xAI would, in fact, offer up Grokipedia. Soon after, the Wikipedia page for Musk’s Grok was updated. The entry included a brief comparison to an effort almost 20 years earlier to create another Wikipedia alternative called Conservapedia.
Yeah, my initial take is “Conservapedia was pretty much a disaster, and there’s a reason that people don’t use it”.
Like, go to Conservapedia’s “evolution” article.
https://www.conservapedia.com/Evolution
Like, you’re going to have to create an entire alternate reality for people who have weird views on X, Y, or Z. And making it worse, there isn’t overlap among all those groups. Like, maybe you’re a young earth creationist, and you like that evolution article. But then maybe you don’t buy into chemtrails. It looks like Conservapedia doesn’t like chemtrails. So that’s gonna piss off the chemtrail people.
There are lots of people on the right who are going to disagree with scientific consensus on something, but they don’t all have the same set of views. They might all complain that Wikipedia doesn’t fit with their views on particular point X, but that doesn’t mean that they’re going to go all happily accept the fringe views of some other group. And some views are just going to outright contradict each other. You could have a conservative Mormon, Amish, and a Catholic, but they’re going to have some seriously clashing views on religion, even if they’re all conservative. In broader society, the way we normally deal with that is to just let people make up their own mind on particular issues. But if you’re trying to create a single “alternate reality” that all of them subscribe to, then you have to get them all on one page, which is going to be a real problem.
Maybe Musk could make Grok try to assess which fringe group that someone is in and automatically provide a version of truth in Grok’s responses tailored to their preferences. But…that’s not a Grokipedia, because the latter requires a unified view.
I don’t know if there’s a term for them, but Bacula (and I think AMANDA might fall into this camp, but I haven’t looked at it in ages) are oriented more towards…“institutional” backup. Like, there’s a dedicated backup server, maybe dedicated offline media like tapes, the backup server needs to drive the backup, etc).
There are some things that rsnapshot, rdiff-backup, duplicity, and so forth won’t do.
At least some of them (rdiff-backup, for one) won’t dedup files with different names. If a file is unchanged, it won’t use extra storage, but it won’t identify different identical files at different locations. This usually isn’t all that important for a single host, other than maybe if you rename files, but if you’re backing up many different hosts, as in an institutional setting, they likely files in common. They aren’t intended to back up multiple hosts to a single, shared repository.
Pull-only. I think that it might be possible to run some of the above three in “pull” mode, where the backup server connects and gets the backup, but where they don’t have the ability to write to the backup server. This may be desirable if you’re concerned about a host being compromised, but not the backup server, since it means that an attacker can’t go dick with your backups. Think of those cybercriminals who encrypt data at a company and wipe other copies and then demand a ransom for an unlock key. But the “institutional” backup systems are going to be aimed at having the backup server drive all this, and have the backup server have access to log into the individual hosts and pull the backups over.
Dedup for non-identical files. Note that restic can do this. While files might not be identical, they might share some common elements, and one might want to try to take advantage of that in backup storage.
rdiff-backup and rsnapshot don’t do encryption (though duplicity does). If one intends to use storage not under one’s physical control (e.g. “cloud backup”), this might be a concern.
No “full” backups. Some backup programs follow a scheme where one periodically does a backup that stores a full copy of the data, and then stores “incremental” backups from the last full backup. All rsnapshot, rdiff-backup, and duplicity are always-incremental, and are aimed at storing their backups on a single destination filesystem. A split between “full” and “incremental” is probably something you want if you’re using, say, tape storage and having backups that span multiple tapes, since it controls how many pieces of media you have to dig up to perform a restore.
I don’t know how Bacula or AMANDA handle it, if at all, but if you have a DBMS like PostgreSQL or MySQL or the like, it may be constantly receiving writes. This means that you can’t get an atomic snapshot of the database, which is critical if you want to be reliably backing up the storage. I don’t know what the convention is here, but I’d guess either using filesystem-level atomic snapshot support (e.g. btrfs) or requiring the backup system to be aware of the DBMS and instructing it to suspend modification while it does the backup. rsnapshot, rdiff-backup, and duplicity aren’t going to do anything like that.
I’d agree that using the more-heavyweight, “institutional” backup programs can make sense for some use cases, like if you’re backing up many workstations or something.
Because every “file” in the snapshot is either a file or a hard link to an identical version of that file in another snapshot.) So this can be a problem if you store many snapshots of many files.
I think that you may be thinking of rsnapshot rather than rdiff-backup which has that behavior; both use rsync.
But I’m not sure why you’d be concerned about this behavior.
Are you worried about inode exhaustion on the destination filesystem?
looks
For Linux, my off-the-cuff take is that I’m not that excited about it. It means that if you can launch a Unity game and pass it command-line arguments, then you can cause it to take actions that you want. Okay, but usually the security context of someone who can do that and the game that’s running should probably be the same. If you can launch a game with specified parameters to do something bad, you can probably also just do something bad and cut the game out of the picture.
This is why you have few suid binaries on a Limux system (and should never make something large and complex, like a Unity game, suid) — because then the binary does have a different security context than the launching process.
Now, it’s possible that there are scenarios where you could make this badly exploitable. Say games have chosen to trust command-line arguments from a remote system, and that game has community servers. Like, maybe they have a lobby app that launches a Unity binary with remotely-specified command line arguments. But in that case, I think that the developer is already asking for trouble.
Most games are just not going to be sufficiently hardened to avoid problems if an attacker can pass arbitrary command lines anyway. And as the bug points out, on Linux, you can achieve something similar to this for many binaries via using LD_PRELOAD anyway — you can use that route to make fixes for closed-source Linux games. Windows has similar routes, stuff like DLL injection.
It’s possible that this is more serious on Android. I don’t know if there’s a way to pass command line parameters there, and doubt it, but part of the Android security model is that apps run in isolation, and so if that’s exploitable by any local app, that could cause that model to break down.
But on Linux — GNU/Linux — I’d think that if someone malicious can already launch games with arbitrary command line parameters on your system, you’re probably not really in much worse trouble due to this bug than you already are.
slow
rsync is pretty fast, frankly. Once it’s run once, if you have -a or -t passed, it’ll synchronize mtimes. If the modification time and filesize matches, by default, rsync won’t look at a file further, so subsequent runs will be pretty fast. You can’t really beat that for speed unless you have some sort of monitoring system in place (like, filesystem-level support for identifying modifications).
Most Unix commands will show a short list of the most-helpful flags if you use --help or -h.
sed can do a bunch of things, but I overwhelmingly use it for a single operation in a pipeline: the s// operation. I think that that’s worth knowing.
sed 's/foo/bar/'
will replace all the first text in each line matching the regex “foo” with “bar”.
That’ll already handle a lot of cases, but a few other helpful sub-uses:
sed 's/foo/bar/g'
will replace all text matching regex “foo” with “bar”, even if there are more than one per line
sed 's/\([0-9a-f]*\)/0x\1/g
will take the text inside the backslash-escaped parens and put that matched text back in the replacement text, where one has ‘\1’. In the above example, that’s finding all hexadecimal strings and prefixing them with ‘0x’
If you want to match a literal “/”, the easiest way to do it is to just use a different separator; if you use something other than a “/” as separator after the “s”, sed will expect that later in the expression too, like this:
sed 's%/%SLASH%g
will replace all instances of a “/” in the text with “SLASH”.
I would generally argue that rsync is not a backup solution.
Yeah, if you want to use rsync specifically for backups, you’re probably better-off using something like rdiff-backup, which makes use of rsync to generate backups and store them efficiently, and drive it from something like backupninja, which will run the task periodically and notify you if it fails.
rsync: one-way synchronization
unison: bidirectional synchronization
git: synchronization of text files with good interactive merging.
rdiff-backup: rsync-based backups. I used to use this and moved to restic, as the backupninja target for rdiff-backup has kind of fallen into disrepair.
That doesn’t mean “don’t use rsync”. I mean, rsync’s a fine tool. It’s just…not really a backup program on its own.
OOMs happen because your system is out of memory.
You asked how to know which process is responsible. There is no correct answer to which process is “wrong” in using more memory — all one can say is that processes are in aggregate asking for too much memory. The kernel tries to “blame” a process and will kill it, as you’ve seen, to let your system continue to function, but ultimately, you may know better than it which is acting in a way you don’t want.
It should log something to the kernel log when it OOM kills something.
It may be that you simply don’t have enough memory to do what you want to do. You could take a glance in top (sort by memory usage with shift-M). You might be able to get by by adding more paging (swap) space. You can do this with a paging file if it’s problematic to create a paging partition.
EDIT: I don’t know if there’s a way to get a dump of processes that are using memory at exactly the instant of the OOM, but if you want to get an idea of what memory usage looks at at that time, you can certainly do something like leave a top -o %MEM -b >log.txt process running to get a snapshot every two seconds of process memory use. top will print a timestamp at the top of each entry, and between the timestamped OOM entry in the kernel log and the timestamped dump, you should be able to look at what’s using memory.
There are also various other packages for logging resource usage that provide less information, but also don’t use so much space, if you want to view historical resource usage. sysstat is what I usually use, with the sar command to view logged data, though that’s very elderly. Things like that won’t dump a list of all processes, but they will let you know if, over a given period of time, a server is running low on available memory.
I would note that, to pick two examples:
ExpressVPN appears to have California-based exit nodes:
https://www.expressvpn.com/vpn-server/us-vpn/san-francisco-vpn
NordVPN appears to have California-based exit nodes:
https://nordvpn.com/servers/usa/sanfrancisco/
You can effectively choose the state law under which you want to access the Internet.
looks at Ohio meaningfully
If these news organizations cannot fix that embedded video behavior, then just download the clip, credit the poster, and cite the link at the bottom of the page. It’s public domain when it’s posted, so I don’t understand why that’s not the standard.
Posting something does not place it in the public domain.
Yeah, I saw, but it’s an interesting topic.
Is your concern compromise of your data or loss of the server?
My guess is that most burglaries don’t wind up with people trying to make use of the data on computers.
As to loss, I mean, do an off-site backup of stuff that you can’t handle losing and in the unlikely case that it gets stolen, be prepared to replace hardware.
If you just want to keep the hardware out of sight and create a minimal barrier, you can get locking, ventillated racks. I don’t know how cost-effective that is; I’d think that that might cost more than the expected value of the loss from theft. If a computer costs $1000 and you have a 1% chance of it being stolen, you should not spend more than $10 on prevention in terms of reducing cost of hardware loss, even if that method is 100% effective.
Mantraps that use deadly force are illegal in the United States, and in notable tort law cases the trespasser has successfully sued the property owner for damages caused by the mantrap. There is also the possibility that such traps could endanger emergency service personnel such as firefighters who must forcefully enter such buildings during emergencies. As noted in the important American court case of Katko v. Briney, “the law has always placed a higher value upon human safety than upon mere rights of property”.[5]
EDIT: I’d add that I don’t know about the “life always takes precedence over property” statement; Texas has pretty permissive use of deadly force in defense of property. However, I don’t think that anywhere in the US permits traps that make use of deadly force.
It might be that it’s taking into account how recently you used the thing or something.
As long as any infrastructure used to hint to the indexing engine that its index is dirty to avoid fully-rescanning the filesystem occasionally is available to non-Apple software, I assume that you could just use a different software package for this.
kagis
I haven’t used any of these, and can’t recommend them, but it looks like Mac developers have built alternatives:
https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/spotlight-alternatives-mac-search/
I mostly use plocate on my Linux machine if I want to do a search across filenames on the filesystem as a whole.
Setting aside Trump, I have no idea why people who can apparently be mostly reasonable about, say, cars subscribe to utterly batshit insane views about diet and health and buy into all kinds of snake oil.
I’m not saying that there’s no magical thinking with cars — “my magical fuel additive” or whatever — but I have seen more utterly insane stuff regarding what someone should eat or how to treat medical conditions than in most other areas.
It’s also not new. You can go back, and find people promoting all kinds of snake oil when it comes to health. Some of my favorites are the utterly crazy stuff that came out when public awareness of radiation was new, and it was being billed as a magic cure for everything.
I get that not everyone is a doctor or a dietician. But you’d think that any time you see someone promoting something as a fix for a wide, unrelated range of conditions, that it should be enough to raise red flags for someone, layman or no.
You might want to list the platform you want to use it on. I’m assuming that you’re wanting to access this on a smartphone of some sort?
You can use VoIP if you have a cell data connection.