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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 14th, 2023

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  • PCs are expensive and unpractical.

    I wanted a PC, bought a tablet. Ideally, I’d want a SFFPC plus screens that I could easily move. I’d settle for a SFFPC with a dedicated graphics card if I couldn’t move it. I’d also settle for a notebook that would allow me to easily swap HDDs/SSDs. However, none of those things are possible and/or have a good cost-benefit, so I got a tablet.

    Notebooks are too clunky compared to tablets because they are attached to a keyboard and to a screen. If those parts were removable, they would be more successful. Tablets would also be more popular if you could use them as PC screens (some from Lenovo already come with this featur).

    Manufacturers are moving in the opposite direction, soldering memory, and making as hard as possible to change parts.



  • Yes.

    Depends on the virus, but unlikely.

    The thing about viruses is that it is an arms race. It’s almost impossible to get a virus from playing media on your computer. Why? Well, let me explain in a 3 easy steps:

    1. Viruses have specific goals. They want to spy on you, encrypt your files, use your computer on a botnet, access ads with your computer, etc. In order to do that, they must gain access within your system to do those things.

    2. Since they need access, the easiest way to get access is just by simply asking you. Which is why executables (software and games) are the riskiest stuff to pirate. But it’s possible to get viruses from other sources, they do that by exploring flaws in the software. For example, a while ago they managed to insert viruses through VLC media player subtitles.

    3. However, simply exploiting a flaw isn’t enough because flaws get fixed. Following the VLC Media player example, few days after the virus was distributed, VLC launched a new version that corrected the flaw, making the virus useless. Therefore, it’s necessary that the virus either explores a 0-day (a flaw that hasn’t been widely discovered - this kind of information is sold for a lot of money on the deep web and is usually used to hack governments and bit corporations) or targets people using old software on their machines.

    In conclusion: you can catch Aids having sex with condoms, maybe it had a tear, maybe you had a small bleeding on your mouth, etc, but you aren’t getting aids using condoms unless you’re extremely unlucky. In the same vein, it’s possible to catch viruses from media files, but if your software is updated, it’s extremely unlikely.