Title is misleading. I thought this was some sort of modern-day alchemy that yields actual gold, as in this type of gold, chemical element symbol Au: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold
For smartphones, assume an always-on wiretap situation. But for laptops, it may be harder depending on how hardened your setup is, and how tight your opsec is. There is the possibility that if you're a high value target and you bought your laptop online that it could be bugged, but you would have to be someone like a drug trafficker or a journalist or some other high profile person.
You're right, Ubuntu feels bloated to me. It's subtle, but noticeable. Mint is a good lightweight alternative. 8GB is enough for everyday computing, although some people multitask with several apps open which can choke things a bit.
'The People' when really it's mostly bots these days, and getting smarter with LLMs too. Only a few blogs/articles are written by actual humans, and something strange has happened to my cognitive abilities lately; is discerning whether an article is written by an LLM or a human. I regularly play a game called 'bot or not' now.
> How do you defend against hackers using these to attack your SaaS server?
This is a broad question. There are multiple ways to defend, besides basic security like firewalls. Blocking nefarious IPs or domains only gets you so far, as something will slip through the cracks. Try reading this: https://opsec101.org/
It does not matter that much, relatively speaking. People include 1MB font libraries in their site without a care in the world, and force 1-2MB PNGs and JPEGs down the wire without caring. A few extra bytes in jQuery is nothing compared to that.
I try and find books that are not popular, since if you want to Think Different, you have to read what others are NOT reading, so you have an advantage over your competition who are all indoctrinated by the latest trend or groupthink. Old dusty libraries & bookshops with obscure literature are my favorite for procuring these items.
Why not fork it into a separate product? I understand the Everything App premise, but companies like Meta have their products in distinct buckets (Instagram, Whatsapp, Threads, etc). That way people's pseudonymous accounts are not tied to their finances. I know for me, I don't want my Twitter/X alt account anywhere near my finances.
Should have been nationalized and made a public utility IMHO. Musk just wanted a new toy to play with, and has trolled Twitter from day one. Billionaires buying up the media is nothing new.
And this gets trickier each time you do it. Eventually you end up literally with duffel bags full of unwashed notes being traded publicly in the ever surveilled New York.
> You may have heard of the 3-2-1 backup strategy. It means having at least three copies of your data, two local (on-site) but on different media, and at least one copy off-site.