Hate to point it out, but it's an entirely different scenario.
43 USC §364.e: With respect to geographic names the pertinent decisions and principles issued by the Secretary shall be standard for all material published by the Federal Government. The United States Board on Geographical Names in the Department of the Interior created by Executive order, is abolished, and the duties of said Board are transferred to the Board herein created, and all departments, bureaus, and agencies of the Federal Government shall refer all geographic names and problems to the said Board for the purpose of eliminating duplication of work, personnel, and authority.
We didn't rename the Gulf, but the way its referenced from within the federal government (and its agencies) was changed by EO. Since Google is a government contractor, they're contractually obligated (and legally obligated) to follow the nomenclature expressed by the US board on geographical names or they risk losing all of their government contracts.
So did we change the name of the Gulf? No. Is it shown different to US residence now? Yes. Google additionally released a statement saying;
“a longstanding practice of applying name changes when they have been updated in official government sources.”
If you want to support a *nix distro, that's awesome and I fully support you. What you shouldn't support is distributions locking features behind a paywall.
This is how you get Microsoft Windows and Copilot.
To answer your question--Windows is destructive to *nix boot sectors. When you update Windows, it will bork your *nix install. Dual booting with Windows is a real PITA.
I was unaware of this change, and it's perfectly acceptable. No one has any ground to lambast Signal for requiring phone numbers to get an account. I think that's a perfectly reasonable spam mitigation technique. The issue is having to shotgun your phone number to every Howard and Susan that you want to use Signal to communicate with.
This was honestly the only thing holding me back from actually using Signal. I'll likely register for an account now.
This shift of the dollar from a global reserve to being just another currency went from a realistic impossibility to "probable" in the course of a 90 days. If it weren't so fucking crazy it would actually be impressive.
I mean, twitter sucked when it first launched, too. Doesn't mean it won't get better.
Not sure why everyone is so hellbent on FOSS software to be in its most usable and polished state on launch but will buy prereleased and/or beta games and put in 10,000 hours into half finished games without batting an eye. The double standard for FOSS developers is insane to me.
So, you're going to get two schools of thought on this, and one of them is wrong. Horrendously wrong. For perspective, I was a certified CEHv7, so take that for what its worth.
There's a saying in security circles "security through obscurity isn't security," which is a saying from the 1850s and people continually attempt to apply the logic to today's standards and it's--frankly stupid--but just plain silly. It generally means that if you hide the key to your house under the floor mat, there's no point to having the lock, because it doesn't lend you any real security and that if you release the schematics to security protocols and/or devices (like locks), it makes them less secure. And in this specific context, it makes sense and is an accurate statement. Lots of people will make the argument that F/OSS is more secure because it's openly available and many will make the argument that it's less secure. But each argument is moot because it deals with software development and not your private data. lol.
When you apply the same logic to technology and private data it breaks down tremendously. This is the information age. With a persons phone number I can very likely find their home address or their general location. Registered cell phones will forever carry with them the city in which they were activated. So if I have your phone number, and know your name is John Smith, I can look up your number and see where it was activated. It'll tell me "Dallas, Texas" and now I'm not just looking for John Smith, I'm looking for John Smith in Dallas, Texas. With successive breakdowns like this I will eventually find your home address or at the very least your neighborhood.
The supposition made by Signal (and anyone who defends this model) is that generally anyone with your private number is supposed to have it and even if they do, there's not much they can do with it. But that's so incredibly wrong it's not even funny in 2025.
I've seen a great number of people in this thread post things like "privacy isn't anonymity and anonymity isn't security," which frankly I find gobstopping hilarious from a community that will break their neck to suggest everyone run VPNs to protect their online identity as a way to protect yourself from fingerprinting and ad tracking.
It frankly amazes me. Protecting your data, including your phone number is the same as protecting your home address and your private data through redirection from a VPN. I don't think many in this community would argue against using a VPN. But why they feel you should shotgun your phone number all over the internet is fucking stupid, IMO, or that you should only use a secure messaging protocol to speak to people you know, and not people you don't know. It's all just so...stupid.
They'll then continue to say that you should only use Signal to talk to people you know because "that's what its for!" as if protecting yourself via encryption from compete fucking strangers has no value all of a sudden. lol
You have to be very careful in this community because there are a significant number of armchair experts which simply parrot the things that they've read from others ad-nauseam without actually thinking about the basis of what they're saying.
To put this into perspective for you, if your NAS sits at idle for 90% of the time (probably true) and an older CPU is 50w (kinda high, but maybe) and a newer CPU is 15w, over an entire year it will save you around 305.76 kWh. Average price per kWh in the USA is 12.89¢. So over a year a new CPU can reasonably save you around $39.41. So it's not nothing, but it's nothing crazy, but lower idle wattage = lower temp = components last longer, which is the real savings.
If an older CPU is only gonna last you 5 years, when a new might last 10, you're going to save almost $400 in energy and generally a CPU today is going to be cheaper than a CPU in 10 years (probably). So it makes sense to spend an extra $200 on a newer CPU and still net a $200 savings over 10 years vs the older CPU.
I quickly got pissed at synology and QNAP and just started making my own shit.
It sucks, because I really like Synology's ecosystem--but I don't buy vendor lock-in devices. Luckly we have arc that lets you use SynologyOS on bare metal. If you get get it working with your hardware it's badass.
Why they don't sell home server licenses for SynologyOS is beyond my understanding. It's a really nice little OS and is specifically designed for NAS.
I've tried TrueNAS, Rockstor, Openfiler (iSCSI), EasyNAS, and a few others and TrueNAS is easily the favorite. Running it alongside Proxmox is ideal if your server is beefy enough.
It does, however ever dollar of tariff revenue goes to the federal government. So it still increases revenue. Especially when essentials are tariff'd. Generally you can't avoid Chinese imports.
Choose an online University, and register as a student. Don't sign up for any classes. Totally free (maybe an application fee depending on the university you choose), and generally they give you an email when you are approved as a student.
This is mind-blowing to me. I've been using them for several months now and not had a single issue yet. I feel like a dick suggesting them as a provider when people are having issues with them, but I've not had a single one.
This is a ping graph over an hour directly connected to my VPS with them: https://x0.at/daqx.png
The connection speed isn't stellar by any means, certainly well below the advertised--but they're shared VPS, so that's really to be expected. My uptime is 38 days since I last restarted my server because of a DDoS. The benchmarks were underwhelming, but considering I'm paying like, $2-3/mo for them, I'm okay with it. I even use this server to as a reverse_proxy for Jellyfin and it works just fine, no issues whatsoever. Transferred over 260GB in the past few days alone streaming HD content.
I'm looking hard for flaws but they're no better, but no worse than any provider I've ever had. 🤷♂️
Hate to point it out, but it's an entirely different scenario.
We didn't rename the Gulf, but the way its referenced from within the federal government (and its agencies) was changed by EO. Since Google is a government contractor, they're contractually obligated (and legally obligated) to follow the nomenclature expressed by the US board on geographical names or they risk losing all of their government contracts.
So did we change the name of the Gulf? No. Is it shown different to US residence now? Yes. Google additionally released a statement saying;