Indeed. It should be at the top as the defacto music streaming platform based on popularity.

Reality check here. If morals or personal philosophy means the most to you, then self hosting is really the only honest choice, assuming you then buy merch from artists. If features and library size are most important then you probably need Spotify. All the other worthwhile options might come with a good USP but they’re usually flawed in comparison to Spotify.

Screw AI music, but it is on every platform. Spotify is just a victim of its success in this regard.

Edit: not a fanboi btw, just a dad with a family who likes to use Spotify. I have to pay for YT premium as well so the kids don’t get ADs on their stupid iPhones. If the YT music app wasn’t so shit I’d dump Spotify and make everyone switch, proving my point.

For me the EU should make all hardware manufacturers provide open source drivers with the full range of configuration options available. This is one of the biggest hurdles to moving away from Windows.

I’m waiting for the day when these enhanced terminals go full GUI and mouse driven.

My torrenting level is very casual and (sry) I only leech. Also my ISP is a small one in the UK. Our Government seems to only force the big ISP to tattle on its users and block pirating sites. At least that’s how it has been for the last 10 years.

I have qbittorrent and Plex on my server. It is tempting to setup a VPN just for qbittorrent just to be sure.

I think the desktop is evolving, and may one day become effectively irrelevant, But there is still a long way to go before local compute goes away, which means a local OS is still needed.

In the server world, yes. The desktop is the place that needs to be won over.

I dual boot windows and EndeavourOS. Every 6 to 12 months I make a concerted effort to make the switch 100% but it hasn’t worked out yet. So while Linux is great windows is unavoidable. In this use case I suspect managing Windows tools will be simpler, though I agree that effectiveness next to Linux options won’t be equal.

That was kinda my point. Securing a laptop that will have access to data you want to protect from loss is a near bottomless pit of issues. There comes a point you have to do a risk assessment and apply a level of security that meets your legal requirements and contractual obligations. I’m sure this is all doable on Linux as well but the low cost / easily available tools are mostly for Windows.

I suspect that taking the “secured remote session” approach is probably good enough for their needs. It just needs a client app you can trust to respect the security rules they want to enforce (no screen shots, no screen recording, no data transfers for any sort, etc).

OCRing what is on screen is not really stoppable unless you force them to keep their camera on so you can monitor them 24/7. But if you try hard enough there is usually a way around most security measures.

Either way, they need to decide what the risk impact vs likelihood profile is, and what the business can tolerate. They’ll need to discuss it with legal and data protection folks to assess that.

One tip is to embed records and values that look meaningful, but are unique, into the copy of the data given to the specific employee. This can be used to potentially prove that a data breach was a result of something that employee did. We like to put QUID’s as invisible watermarks in document headers. These trigger our DLP systems which is always funny cos its usually an employee who is leaving and wants to keep something. I love those conversions.

“Easy” from the point of view there a lots of off the shelf tools to help you do it that are easy to understand.

This is the only reliable solution. To expand:

1. Provide a Laptop with Windows on it, because that is easier to lockdown.
2. apply desirable OS lock downs like blocking usb ports prevent storage devices, don’t give the user admin rights, etc.
3. Setup a VPN server (openvpn should do) and configure the laptop with a VPN client. Configure the client so it blocks network connections that don’t go via the VPN. If you want to give them internet access you’ll need a proxy and firewall and DLP solution. At this point it all gets very complex and expensive.

The real answer is you are probably screwed without investing a bunch of time, effort, and cost.

You might get away with more basic security measures if the user has very limited IT knowledge.

I suggest getting legal advice before you give the user access to your data in the manner you intend.

The phrase is “I Couldn’t care less”.

Sry. Long day. Still in pedantic mode.

I like Nano. I think it is quite good. There, I said it.

I’m at the point of looking to pay for a good usenet service. I’ll definitely probably start looking next week.

I’m on the yearly trip to linux land. The one thing that bothers me is hardware support, specifically configuration of hardware devices. My external audio device (Focusrite 2i2) works fine but there is no easy to change the bit rate etc without messing with core config files. This is the sort of thing that should be in the GUI already. My PS5 controller works as well but I can’t make it automatically go to sleep after 5 mins. Also HDR support is still missing.

That said, so far I’m finding ways to do what I need, but it is clear Linux still has much to improve if it hopes to attract more windows users.