Lastpass was hacked and might have lost control of some data https://blog.lastpass.com/posts/2022/12/notice-of-security-incident

1Pass hasn’t been hacked directly, but they were affected by the Okta https://blog.1password.com/okta-incident/

(One of the most common vectors for hacks is through your vendors - see Target https://krebsonsecurity.com/2014/02/target-hackers-broke-in-via-hvac-company/)

Dropbox had an unauthorized access, but the seemed on top of it. https://sign.dropbox.com/blog/a-recent-security-incident-involving-dropbox-sign

Dropbox also has had a more significant data breech, but a while ago. https://www.twingate.com/blog/tips/dropbox-data-breach#

Overview of all password manager breeches! https://bestreviews.net/which-password-managers-have-been-hacked/

Storing Drivers Licence: Was answered elsewhere. Bottom line… Bitwarden seems like it can store other types of data. Note that I don’t use Bitwarden yet, but have experience with Enpass and 1Pass, both of which can store all sorts of data.

Why separate storage if Bitwarden is E2EE? You are placing all your trust in a single organization - Bitwarden. If they get hacked, then it is possible for the hackers to poison their software to deliver master passwords (hacks of s/w repositories has happened). I prefer to separate encryption from storage so a hack in both is required to get my data. Note that I do the same for offsite backups to Glacier/S3. I use Arq to do the backup and encrypt the files, then send them to S3 for storage.

The 2023 IBM Report on Cost of Data Breeches indicated that the average time for a company to discover a breech is about 200 days, and on average another 70 days to remediate. That keeps me up at night in my day job as security dude.

Good to know, thanks. I haven’t actually started looking for the Enpass replacement yet, but it sounds like Bitwarden will be a lead contender.

Fair comment, although due to the distributed nature of our implementation we are unlikely to lose services. All Vaults are stored locally on all devices.

Having said that - the copy of the vault on the Mac is backed up with TimeMachine.

[I’ve been a greybeard sysadmin and use 3,2,1 even at home]

My approach to this is as follows:

• the password manager is probably the most important and often used piece of software I own. We (wife and I share the vault) store everything important/private in there - bank details, hundreds of passwords, passport details, drivers licence etc. It is used many times a day by us both.
• Loss of control of this data would be catastrophic, so I took its security very seriously.
• No one company can be trusted with our data, because they all get hacked or make mistakes at some point.

I’m the security dude for a cloud service provider in my day job, so my goal was to use Separation of Concerns to manage my passwords. I therefore split the software from the storage, choosing software from one company, and storage from a second company. That way, it requires a failure on both parties at the same time for me to lose control of all the data.

I used to use OnePass for the software, storing the data in Dropbox. But then they removed that option, so I switched to Enpass. Data is stored in a vault on the local device and synced to a folder on Dropbox, which we both have access to from all our devices (Mac’s, iPads, iPhones). The vault is encrypted using our master password and Dropbox only sees an encrypted file. Enpass provides software that runs locally and doesn’t get a copy of my vault file.

If Dropbox has another failure and the vault gets out, then that is not a problem as long as Enpass have properly encrypted it. If Enpass has a bug making the vaults crackable - again it’s not a problem as long as Dropbox doesn’t lose control of my vault file. I update Enpass, the vault gets fixed and life goes on.

Enpass is very usable, but buggy. It crashes every night (requiring me to start it again and log in), and often loses connection to Safari and wont re-establish it. It got better with a previous update, but has got unreliable again. I’m about to look for another.

Cheers.

If you did get a seriously large lump of cash… after a settling in period a lot of changes will happen, and you will be happy they did (IMHO).

The reason is that one of the biggest gifts that wealth gives you is TIME. A lot of the day to day crap that the rest of us need to deal with just evaporates. No need to shop (there are people for that). Want to travel… people will organise everything. There will be no waiting in lines at airports, at restaurants, at government offices… there are people for that. Someone to clean, someone to pick up the kids (unless you want to of course), someone to cook, holidays on a fuck-off huge yacht with crew to manage everything, or just to zip to Paris for the weekend.

You will probably really appreciate not having to deal with most of that crap. Also, while you probably don’t want a stupid large house, you do want privacy and so will want to get a house on 1000 acres in a gorgeous landscape (plus perhaps apartments in various cities that you like).

Imagine moving from a food insecure lifestyle to a secure lifestyle where food, safety, housing is always there. Would you want to keep your old food-insecure lifestyle? No. Same with going from a food secure lifestyle to a time-and-resource abundant lifestyle.

I second the advice to switch to a different/previous/known good kernel. That has been the cause a most boot problems for me. I just had it happen on a VM a couple of weeks ago, so I switched to the old kernel, then removed the new kernel. I’ll wait for another kernel before upgrading.

It’s probably worth scanning your disk just in case as well.

I always plug in. I don’t know if it works with calibre server.

My unmodified kobo syncs with calibre.

I wish you both the best.

Damn… I feel for you. It sounds like you are in a tough spot. There’s lots of good advice on this page, and the one thing I will add is to protect and keep working on your relationship. Money is the core component of many (or was it most?) relationship problems.

You can get through it, but (IMHO) you need your wife right there with you (or at least, I did). We were doing ok until I tried to start a business and dropped my 9-5 job. Revenue was slim, and then at one point I earned nothing for 6 months. We were on the bones of our arse - living off a meagre kindergarten teacher’s wage paying rent and food. Without my wife, we would have drowned. She did amazing things in budgeting down to the last penny, no luxuries, riding everywhere, spending time together. It was hard and there was no end in sight for a long time. We were very lucky and things turned around. But I would have not managed it without her (and her incredible budgets).

It sound like you have been deep in it for longer than we were, and I wish you all the best in working your way out.

I have one, and they are great. But wasn’t there just a scandal about a recent firmware update that applied DRM to ink?

While there is a slow, but steady, stream of interesting topics, the number of responses is typically in the 10s (at most) rather than hundreds or thousands. Often its just 0. And the quality of the responses is still lacking mostly, although some of the tech channels I follow usually have one or two people with good knowledge.

Plus… waaaay too many old memes. (Yeah… I know I can block them, but I do like living dangerously and browsing all sometimes to look for interesting channels)

You probably did the right thing for headphones.

I’ve been looking for real data on the effectiveness of Sony’s MX5 vs Max vs others - specifically I want to see how well they do passive and ANC across the frequencies we are exposed to. And Verge have come through with this video: https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/31/23852241/we-took-six-pairs-of-headphones-and-a-dummy-head-on-the-subway

Its a good video, but its also got real data from some experts. If you are TLDW - then skip to the end for a table from the experts.

The Sony MX5 are head and shoulders above the rest (with the max second in most categories).

I know it was a sorta joke… but I had to find out if it was true.

This link: https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/AirPods+Max+Teardown/139369 provides an awesome breakdown on the contents and lots of X-rays.

It turns out the answer is no, although both batteries are in the right ear cup, and ifixit never do figure if there is a counterweight in the other ear. There’s just a gap.

And yeah… adding that weight was a crappy move and very un-apple IMHO. Their products should stand on their own and not require gimmicks like that. Having said that, this is Beats. Analysis showed that their products cost as little as $18 to make (including parts and assembly) - talk about cheap overpriced crap. The other few hundred dollars per set is marketing, distribution and profit. Shows what celebrity endorsements can get you.

And heavy. The Max’s are quite a bit heavier than competitors.

Be wary of RAID 5 or 6.

They both have a « write hole » problem (or though much less so in RAID 6). Any power failure which causes an incomplete write can cause a complete RAID corruption - meaning all data is lost. Hardware RAID controllers usually have an onboard backup battery so they can store some information to complete operations should there be a sudden power failure. Software RAID does not have this, and you need to provide a UPS with automatic clean shutdown as the battery runs low using nut or some equivalent.

Some people go as far as to say that RAID 5 should never be used.

You also have very long recovery times when you replace a failed drive (days). Any other failure during this time means total data loss (of course RAID 6 gives you a second redundancy). Weekly Resyncs are very slow too (hours to days), and (unless you constrain your max throughput) will bring your system to its knees.

zfs does not suffer from these problems, BTW.

I run software RAID 5 via mdadm and have a UPS. I’ve replaced drives twice with no issues other than a slightly nervous long wait during recovery. I’m too cheap to buy the extra HDD for RAID 6, and may end up regretting it one day.

My $0.02c worth - I have run all sorts of servers at home over the years, and one of the main challenges around the hardware is managing heat.

I’ve used mini-ITX mobos and tiny cases for builds. They look gorgeous, but at some point, when you stick enough drives in there (assuming you can) or make the CPU/GPU busy, you are going to have a heat problem, or a noise problem, or both.

On my mythtv build I used M-itx and a gorgeous Lian Li small case. It was a beautiful add to my home theatre stack, but in the end I drilled a ton of small holes in the top and added a slow 140mm fan to control the heat without noise.

The same goes for my file server - it was a slightly larger case with no GPU, but once I added my 6th HDD and had a ton of services running, heat became an issue and I was having to add extra fans, which could only be 80mm so they ran fast and noisy.

My new build I’m going to go all the way with a Phanteks Enthoo Full Tower and a few 120mm fans. I’ve decided that looks don’t matter

The other problem for me with these tiny builds is cable management. I’m complete shit at it, and small builds requires some skills. A big case gives you space to spread those cables out.

Lastly, you can get ATX or EATX mobos with 6, 8 or more SATA connectors - room for growth! And there are very low power options available.

I’ll soon have the appleTV + TV upstairs, laptop in the office, and the monster server downstairs with cat-6 + Gb fibre throughout.

My 5 year old brother color laser is awesome. Cheap to run and toner doesn’t dry out, and it doesn’t wake up in the middle of the night and clean (i.e. use up) the ink.

However having seem comments like this, I think I will hold off on any firmware updates.

While technically that is true, if you have any other users they will be annoyed. And anyone running iOS will almost immediately get regular popups about the mail server being down (because iOS checks for new mail frequently - and yes I know this can be adjusted) and so they will be telling you straight away.

Also - I’m not convinced that all email servers obey the SMTP standard.