It’s fascinating how some of that generation have turned out. My parents are in their mid 70’s and are on an edibles kick right now since they “are to old to be smoking”. Their neighbor is the same age and has bought into the whole war on drugs and just about every other bit of propaganda authoritarians have put out in the last 50 years. The neighbor is a good source of daily excitement and stories that my parents like to tell us when we see them.
It’s complete shit right now. 5 or more years ago I could quickly find an answer to a very technical question with no problem. Now it is useless for anything. Just today I was looking for a shop near me that can perform a front end alignment on my RV, I searched for “Tractor Trailer front end alignment near me”. The entire first page is either tire shops that do not offer front end alignments, car tire shops that don’t even sell the correct size tires I would need for a tractor trailer, or shops 2000 miles away in various directions. It’s horrible and I think it would be faster to look in the yellow pages for what I need in this case. I never found a shop using google.
Also today I was searching for the tires I need in the shopping tab there were ads for tires that google had labeled as wal-mart but when I would click the link it would take me to a Chinese scam site.
In 1999 / 2000 I started using Mandrake because I missed the days of using a terminal instead of a GUI. That got me into setting a web and mail server up and running things from home once I had stable internet. I have always had an on and off relationship with Linux and the other *nix. Currently I have a few servers running around the house for various things all running Ubuntu but besides upkeep and making changes I don’t touch them much until my ADHD kicks in and I want to learn something new then I burn out for awhile and repeat the cycle. I am probably the outlier here that uses windows daily and Linux secondary these days.
Man Mandrake brings back some memories. It was my first linux install solely because they had the fastest shipping time for install cd’s and at the time I was on dialup so I couldn’t just download anything I wanted. I ran it for several years and ended up on a few different distro’s and freebsd for a bit.
I used to really like running it. I had quite a lot of aggregated content on that site.
I wondered the same thing at the time it had to have been ungodly expensive unless it was a stolen device. I can’t remember for sure if it was intelsat or one of the other companies that was around at the time but it was a sat connection. I was also running that webserver on a really bad dsl line. I lived right next door to the phone company CO but was at the end of the line. I had to go with an independent isp because the phone company said it was too far and wouldn’t work. It did work but was super unreliable.
About 20 years ago I was running a phpnuke site on my home server and had someone doing the same thing as you describe. Hundreds of attempts over and over all night long. I went through the logs and saw it was someone on intelsat (I think, it’s been a long time) internet from Africa. I called intelsat or whoever the company was and talked to their system admin that was on call. Within 20 mins of getting off the phone the attack stopped and never happened again. They guy I talked to was really nice and seemed like he was happy to be able to help me.
I’ve settled on using wsl2 on a windows machine. I run Ubuntu and kali in wsl as virtual machines on my main windows computer. I was an early user of linux and bsd but have found it’s just plain easier to run day to day on windows.
I run both Ubuntu and kali simply because I haven’t been able to make sound work correctly with Ubuntu on wsl but it works great in kali, plus kali has all the pentesting stuff so I can play around with that in my free time.