Never forget what this man is.

One of the advantages of having a 13yo car. Another advantage is nobody would steal it anyway.

They’ve not only raised prices, they’ve drastically reduced food quality.

We take regular road trips and routinely use to stop by McDonalds for a burger and fries. After years of mediocre but edible food, the cheeseburgers started to be missing toppings and cheese, or be so salty they were inedible, or be full of gristle and bone, or completely cold. The fries would often be cold or way over-salted too.

Of course by time we realized the food McDonalds sold us was utter crap we were back on the freeway and miles away. We stopped going for a long time and then every once in a while would try it again, only to have another truly lousy experience,

We’ve now reached a tipping point - We’ve had so many bad McDonalds experiences we don’t even consider going there anymore.

I have a VR headset from Facebook that is on its own VLAN because it defaults to randomizing its MAC address by default and this allowed it to bypass the firewall, phone home, and nonconsensually install new anti-features after being blocked because the setting got reset back to random when changing something.

That is infuriating and I’d do the same.

Plenty of reports of devices like LG TVs acting as gateways to external devices and LG in particular seems to be a privacy nightmare. I bought a couple of appliances that advertised their smart features only to find LG’s app was required. That app actually required both Internet access AND my exact location at all times to function at all! I shut it all down and disconnected everything from wifi.

You may be right to be concerned even about printers though. At some point we’re going to be reading about some built-in AI hacking other network devices for Internet access and transmitting our private information to the world.

What’s your concern with a new printer? In case 1, once set up and working how is a company going to introduce malicious features when the printer has absolutely no Internet access?

You’re overthinking this with 2 & 3. All you need is to block all Brother Internet traffic.

Set up a static DHCP IP for the printer in Openwrt and create firewall rules to drop all WAN packets to/from that IP.

If you want to see evidence those packets are being dropped in real time use tcpdump. When watching LAN traffic you will see the printer sending packets to the WAN interface (they won’t get there) but will never see a response directed back to the printer.

I have a Brother printer (plus cameras & TVs) and an Openwrt router set up that way and have had zero issues.

If you have an old PC or laptop and are willing to take time figuring things out, a basic Frigate installation is free. I run it with Home Assistant and it provides completely customizable notifications to my cell phone with no cloud storage or servers required outside of some kind of SMS or push notification account.

Lots of cameras are compatible, but for a truly cheap option, TPLink cameras ($20) can be mounted inside your windows (with a very minor modification) as long as you have dim exterior lighting at night. I have 3 of these installed and they work fine the vast majority of the time.

Democrats would rather lose the Senate to the Grand Old Pedophiles than support El-Sayed.

You know who dances with Nazis?

Nazis.

It was not.

They stopped doing that in 2017. Until now.

I had the same setup and the same problems with VPN (in my case Wireguard) server availability. While looking for a solution I realized I was trying to solve an architecture problem with software.

Instead of trying to find a software solution to work around my WG server uptime issues, I moved the Wireguard endpoint to an OpenWRT router. Now if my router is up, my WG endpoint is up and my network is accessible. I’ve been running this configuration for years and it has been 100% accessible.

I’m comfortable with the security of WG - open ports for WG endpoints are invisible to network scanners because they do not respond at all and appear closed unless they are sent the the correct key. Even if an attacker has some way of know a WG peer is listening on a specific port, cracking a 256-bit key would take trillions of years. I was then free to choose a remote access application without worrying about remote attackers gaining access to my servers because of some company’s failed security.

FOSS VNC server apps work OK, but I found them somewhat limited so I added NoMachine as my primary option and run both. It’s a commercial app but it’s free, and is one of the only closed source app I use. It can be run 100% locally (although they have a paid option that uses their servers). It allows full control over your servers including file transfer and audio.

Doesn’t check all your boxes, but it comes close.

With liberty and and justice for all.

How is sending a picture of a check to the person it’s made payable to bank fraud? You have no idea what’s he needs it for, right, right??!!

I understand your hesitation considering your history with him, but if anyone would be committing fraud it would be your father. Even so, IMO there is no bank that would press charges if he deposits an image of a check that is payable to him, especially for $600.

42 years of statistics were analyzed in the linked study. Perhaps the chart’s creators were trying to alarm drivers and parents to make them more careful, but they could have done so without wildly overstating the danger.

A textbook example of how to lie with statistics.

In the entire US there are around 10 child pedestrian deaths on an average night. On Halloween there are only around 14 deaths despite thousands more children on the street. This means the actual risk per child is exponentially lower on Halloween night.

So the reality is the opposite of what’s being claimed. Halloween is perhaps the least dangerous day of the year for child pedestrians.

Yet another reason to avoid McDonald’s, as if the lousy food wasn’t enough.

Even in my relatively liberal U.S. city, Next Door is overrun by Magats who are cheered on and protected by right-wing Magat moderators. It needs to die and this looks like a great replacement.