Binary on fingers really comes into its own when you need to order 1023 beers over heavy background noise. Except when there’s a mix-up and you end up with -1 beer.

The thing about this one is no one seems sure of the source (it appears to be from multiple sources, including infostealer malware and phishing attacks), so you don’t know which passwords to change. To be safe you’d have to do all of them.

Some password managers (e.g. Bitwarden) offer an automatic check for whether your actual passwords have been seen in these hack databases, which is a bit more practical than changing hundreds of passwords just in case.

And of course don’t reuse passwords. If you have access to an email masking service you can not only use a different password for every site, but also a different email address. Then hackers can’t even easily connect that it’s your account on different sites.

A password manager is still a good idea, but you have to not use a hacked one. So only download from official sites and repositories. Run everything you download through VirusTotal and your machine’s antivirus if you have one. If it’s a Windows installer check it is properly signed (Windows should warn you if not). Otherwise (or in addition) check installer signatures with GPG. If there’s no signature, check the SHA256 OR SHA512 hash against the one published on the official site. Never follow a link in an email, but always go directly to the official website instead. Be especially careful with these precautions when downloading something critical like a password manager.

Doing these things will at least reduce your risk of installing compromised software.

Mint or Fedora would be my first choices. I use OpenSUSE Tumbleweed for my own computers but I think those others are better for people new to Linux. In my experience Fedora does a good job of combining up-to-dateness and stability. Mint is less up to date, but close enough to Ubuntu and Debian that loads of the help materials out there will apply to it.

Your title still says “Kagy” instead of “Kagi”.

You can talk horsepower and dogpower all day, but I won’t really understand until you convert it to bananapower, for scale.

That’s my thinking but I suspect it probably does this anyway.

I suspect “yes” comes with strings attached, which is why I’m sticking to the other option. But it’s likely I already agreed to the strings when I agreed to my company’s demand that we use Teams.

Also I don’t want to give some manager at Microsoft the satisfaction of adding my click on “Yes” to their stats.

Every single time I open Teams it pops up a dialogue asking if I want to try Copilot. There’s no “No” option, just “Yes” and “Maybe later”. If you click “Maybe later”, it asks again the next day. One day they’ll just assume “Yes” and not ask.

And this is at work for a company that has demanded we jam needless AI into all our applications.

Sometimes companies gradually reduce the usefulness of the free product to incentivize people to pay. They may do this.

The best bit is that if you lose patience and cancel, the “Cancelling…” takes even longer than finishing the job would have done. I really have no idea what’s going on. Journalling file systems in Linux don’t have to do this.

I copied 400GB of assorted files in an RDP session today and Windows had to think for a minute or two, then copy them ever so slowly, then stop at 99% done, then crash Explorer and disable the start menu and taskbar and CTRL-ALT-DEL and all ways of getting to the Task Manager, and then freeze the whole machine so that I had to travel to the physical machine and hold down the power button, since when it has been unusably slow because Windows now wants to rebuild the RAID array, which takes days. This was a pretty average Windows session.

Not 99%. Windows has many usability issues. I’d vote for “dont steal focus and stick windows in front of where I’m typing” and “don’t move things just as I go to click on them” for a start, and also “don’t somehow take an hour to delete 50 files.”

For people to test, you need management that is willing to invest in QA. But that incentive disappears for a corporation when there’s no free market of competitors who can poach your customers by making a better quality product or service.

Windows should just tell you “The file is in use by <actual information here>” by default.

Didn’t Microsoft fire their dedicated human testing team in about 2014?

I think legally this suggestion makes you a pirate, a thief, a terrorist and a mass murderer.

The public, aka Microsoft QA Team, found the bug. It’s a QA success!

Are we doing product placement like reddit now? Lemmy has grown up!

The best possible scenario is that they’re just using it to entice people to pay for a premium subscription and will leave it that way. But the chances are that once they’ve pulled enough people in with the offer of free software, they’ll alter the deal.