It’s better because Bing may still have selling ads as a priority when building the indexer. If you’re not the one paying, you’re the product.

Because last time I checked they just used Bing anwyay, while Kagi runs their own indexer.

I can tell you from experience I have a Samsung T5 (500GB) that has over 95TB of writes over 5+ years to it and it’s only used up 17% of its spare blocks. The T7 which is the newer model is like $40, I’d just get one of those. They’re very reliable, I’ve bought a few and none of them have failed. The larger drives have more spare blocks and are even more resistant to writes.

Personally I would recommend a portable SSD, over a HDD as I’ve had several HDDs fail but never lost an SSD, BackBlaze backs this up with their total drive failure statistics being 2.5% for HDDs and under 0.5% for SSDs. Your real danger will be that a portable drive is guaranteed to get jostled and an SSD is far more resilient to that.

Google’s becoming pretty terrible anyway, it only seems to return pages that are selling things. I’ve switched to Kagi at this point and it seems to work better, it’s subscription only, but you know you’re the one paying for it and that means that you’re the end customer.

In some places you can get a home internet line that runs through the mobile phone data network, and they tend to be more reliable than cabled connections, they can get even better if they use a modem data plan and not explicitly a home bulk plan. It really hinges on how much data you use and what plans are available where you are. Of course if you do it this way you won’t have a private IPV4, but if your ISP allows IPV6, that should be unique and directly accessible no matter what.

As the other poster mentioned there are routers that have a SIM connection as backup, and now they’re being offered with a SIM and automatic fail-over as part of some fiber to the home plans.

If I were running a Unity project, I’d be tempted to just jump to Unreal. No matter what promises Unity makes you don’t have any actual guarantee that they’ll keep them while Unreal has the “non-retroactive” clause directly in their contract. However painful the switch is, you’ll only have to do it once.

That was my first thought too. Wasn’t there like a checklist for “Why this spam detection scheme will fail” that was floating around since the late 1990s?

For management ports, I set up a firewall on the VPS to only respond to connections from known IPs.

Do we really want more of their cash grabs on Steam? Their old stuff was great, but now the ship has sailed and their newest stuff just isn’t that good anymore. Especially after the latest Diablo 4 patch.

But why does it work like that? You could just as easily make the phone silently pick up and silently hang up.

If it became a thing, I’d keep an older machine around just for accessing stuff like that. How much is a second hand craptop these days, like $400, not nothing, but not a huge amount.

I had no idea Proton Drive was a thing. I’ll switch to it, Dropbox is becoming incredibly obnoxious with the advertising popups and notifications.

At this point non-internet connected Windows machines are such a niche part of their budget that they’re almost but not quite mandating cloud accounts just for installation. They can absolutely force this on people’s machines.

Absolutely, with TPM chips now being a requirement to install Windows, it’s only a matter of time until DRM becomes a mandatory low-level part of the OS.

This theory makes a lot of sense if you consider that Russia’s biggest problem is that losing the war might make their country cease to exist completely. But even so, their problems are training, cultural and logistics based, no amount of biological weapons are going to fix their problems; though they probably wouldn’t admit that even to themselves.