I use Zimbra with an external email gateway that only accepts authenticated email. Zimbra is pretty heavy (it's intended to be a Microsoft Exchange replacement) but it at least has a huge amount of protection built-in to deal with spam and comes configured out of the box to not relay (well, outside of you setting up aliases and lists.)
That said, it's not hard to find "incoming email only" configurations that deliver to local mailboxes only, for most email servers. The thing to avoid is having a single server configuration that tries to do both - accepting external email and sending locally originated email out. The configurations do exist to do that, but they're confusing and tricky.
External email gateways... that bit is hard. I use a mail server I set up myself on a VPS. It does not listen on incoming port 25. It requires credentials. I did this largely because I was trying to send email out via Xfinity's customer email relay, but the latter kept upping the authentication requirements until one day Zimbra just couldn't be configured to use it any more. And each time they changed something, I wouldn't find out until I noticed people had clearly not received the emails I've sent out.
VPSes are problematic as some IPs are blocked due to spam. There's not much you can do about it if you're stuck with a bad IP, so if you can find a way to send outgoing email via your ISP's outgoing email server, do that. For Postfix, you can send out authenticated email using something like: in main.cf:
relayhost = [smtp.office365.com]:587
smtp_sasl_auth_enable = yes
smtp_sasl_security_options = noanonymous
smtp_sasl_password_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/sasl_passwd
smtp_use_tls = yes
and in /etc/postfix/sasl_passwd:
[smtp.office365.com]:587 example@outlook.com:hunter2
So in summary:
- Consider an email-in-a-box solution like Zimbra, I understand the wish to go for something light but it might make sense if your aim is just to control your own email
- Regardless of whether you do or not, use separate servers for incoming/outgoing email.
- For incoming email, lock it down to accept local email down if you're manually doing this rather than using an email-in-a-box solution like Zimbra.
- For outgoing email, use authentication and avoid it listening on port 25. Consider either directly using your ISPs, or if that's not practical, configuring your outgoing email server to relay in turn to your ISP (see above for how to do this.)
Good luck.
The big problem with blocking GA altogether is that GA is usually how people who put together websites find out what browsers people are using to browse those websites.
And if you're about to say "But they can just look at the user agent in access.log!", sure they can, but those are in logs that are accessed by sysadmins, not people trying to find out how their websites are used. The first thing someone who's trying to find out how to optimize their website does is go into GA. If they see no Firefox users in GA, then they don't care about Firefox compatibility. They may even filter it out to prevent bots.
In order to fix the tracking cookies thing we need to do more than block a popular tool for getting website metrics, we need to understand why it's used and provide alternatives that respect privacy.
This feels like more of an operating system issue than a hardware issue. What you're looking for is a way to reduce the power it sips while still allowing downloads to happen. Leaving aside the edge cases like OS updates others have mentioned, the major issue is that applications aren't structured like that.
If I have Firefox open with one tab displaying a website that runs 1,102 javascript routines all the time in an attempt negotiate a really good advertising deal for each of the banner ads it's showing - you know, the type you visit and your machine starts crawling and the fans start blowing almost immediately - and another open on Ubuntu.com where I've just clicked on the "Download Ubuntu desktop ISO" button, only Firefox knows which of those tasks can be backgrounded and right now (as far as I can see) there's no API in any of the major OSes where it can say "Send me this signal and I'll only do the thing that can't be interrupted." nor "I've put the stuff that can't be interrupted in this thread, so only run this when you're trying to save power and nobody's using the computer anyway")
Would it be a good idea? Well, that would depend on whether developers actually use that API if it ever comes into existence. I'd like it, I just see it being one of these well meaning things that devs would avoid using because it complicates their code and probably makes it easier to break.
Oddly enough, the Gen Zers that have decided not to talk to me or my wife, because they can't stand disagreement, are our nieces and are both rabid Trump supporters (well, unfortunately I currently live in Florida) and couldn't stand the fact my wife made a joke at Twitler's expense.
Not that I'm complaining, I don't want anything to do with Trump supporters (SEE! It's US TOO!) so that made it easier for me. My wife is more family oriented than I am and is pissed about it.
All of which is kind of meaningless given the article conveniently forgets that under 25 year olds of all generations (as in I saw it with mine) traditionally (1) tend to be more politicized, (2) tend not to have the practical social skills to understand the need for tolerance and (3) quite honestly, the country has swung to the right recently and being intolerant of fascism is no vice and a mark of being a human being, so anything they're seeing with Gen Z is simply an amplification, thanks to (1) and (2), of what's actually happening among all generations.
If people want me to hang out with them, they can stop wanting LGBT people killed, can stop supporting politicians who are passing laws denying life saving healthcare to women, can stop calling everyone who disagrees with them pedophiles (and can stop supporting groups that actually support pedophiles like the big three churches), can stop supporting the murders of black people by law enforcement and "white people who think they're law enforcement", and so on. 'cos all of those positions are extreme. And horrible. And you don't get a pass in my home for having them.
I think the implicit assumptions about the "Police carry insurance" thing are:
- Non-criminal Qualified immunity protections are replaced by insurance carriage
- LEOs have to pay their own insurance (presumably with a pay hike that's the "average" insurance payment
Without QI, LEOs would be liable. Insurance companies can certainly force LEOs to fight court cases, but the costs of doing so will fall on the insurance companies. An LEO that's constantly a problem will find themselves in court a lot, and will end up costing the insurance company a lot, regardless of whether it's just legal fees, or massive damages to their victims in addition to legal fees. So the insurer will force them to pay ever increasing premiums, and eventually they won't be able to afford to be in law enforcement.
Most of what you're saying would undermine the existing professional insurance requirements for doctors etc. Hell, it'd undermine insurance requirements for driving!
Also remember insurance companies rarely insure just one thing. You may get a carrier that specializes in LEOs, but in practice like most insurers it'll cover a wide variety of different types of liability insurances, directly or indirectly. So it's not necessarily in its best interests to defend LEOs regardless of what they've done. That just encourages bad law enforcement, pushing up its costs elsewhere.
The only thing I can think of (aside from the remote possibility that someone's trying to move something very wide along the walkway and their way is blocked by 1") is that it's very pseudo-OCD triggering, which definitely would put it in the Mildly Infuriating camp, just not in the way that is normally posted here.
While that's true, the boomers entering the "oldsphere", to coin a term, are the ones adjacent to Gen X who weren't scared of personal computers when they started to become a thing during the 1980s. They're people who have been using computers in offices for the last 30+ years, and they're very used to how they work. I genuinely think they're less likely to fall for an online scam.
Older boomers, sure, but those are people who were, as a group (individuals are different! I can name plenty of awesome technically skilled boomers of that age group, I'm just making a generalization which for statistical purposes is reasonable) were more suspicious of computers and which contained a large number who managed to reach retirement age without going into jobs that absolutely required computer knowledge.
Those people are not the majority of people crossing the 60-65 age barrier today.
This may be true. The other thing that's been bothering me for a while is that Millennials were really the last generation to be given an understanding of how computers worked. The computers they grew up with had hierarchical file systems, file types, programs that understood both, etc.
From iTunes onwards (yes, iTunes, this didn't even start with the cloud), there's been an attitude of "Computers are too hard to understand so let's dumb it down and hide everything" from computer makers. This got ramped up when everything moved to the cloud and/or mobile devices, the latter doing everything practically possible to avoid giving anyone some language in which they could understand what the computer was doing underneath.
Hell yeah, I'd expect people to fall for online scams when they've had the ability to understand what they're looking at ripped away from them by a short-termist industry that's just, today, looking for ways to charge people for stuff they could do themselves like manage their own data.
And I've seen this dumbing down impact other things too. People furious about the idea of using BBSes other than Reddit because... I honestly don't know, but there's always massive support for their opinion. People who, likewise, describe Mastodon as "too hard" because they have to pick a server. Even in tech communities, people who you'd assume had no problem picking a mobile phone carrier, or an ISP, or an email provider, have a massive problem with picking a Mastodon node, and when you talk to them, not only are you flamed to hell and back by everyone else, but it becomes clear that actually, no, they didn't pick a mobile phone carrier, they used their parent's. They didn't pick an ISP, they picked Xfinity because Comcast already gave them TV. They didn't pick an email provider, they didn't even realize you could, they just signed up to GMail.
Ten years ago, none of this was true. People as a whole, especially those who were discussing tech topics, were not that tech ignorant. Today? We are regressing as a society.