Nollij

It's not so much that Google is declining, but the entire Internet. Google just hasn't figured out how to route around the damage.

Try adding "before:2023" to your searches to see what I mean.

“Let’s imagine: It’s time to elect a world leader, and your vote counts. Which would you choose:

“Candidate A: Associates with ward healers and consults with astrologists; has had two mistresses; chain-smokes and drinks eight to ten martinis a day.

“Candidate B: Was kicked out of office twice; sleeps until noon; used opium in college; drinks a quart of brandy every evening.

“Candidate C: Is a decorated war hero, a vegetarian, doesn’t smoke, drinks an occasional beer, and has had no illicit love affairs.

“Which of these candidates is your choice? You don’t really need any more information, do you? Candidate A is Franklin Roosevelt. Candidate B is Winston Churchill. Candidate C is Adolf Hitler.”

Biased and selective comparisons can prove anything.

The worst part is, look into the public records of all of the corrupt politicians. Most were bought for under $10k.

Adding to this, unless you did the importing yourself, it's still subject to the exact same regulations. Under the law, Hondas are domestic (made in Ohio). Lexuses (made in Japan) are imported, but have to meet all of the same requirements to be sold en masse. This includes federal (including safety standards) and state (most famously, California fuel efficiency requirements).

Licensing and activation are separate, and only loosely related. If you are at anything resembling a large org, they don't even use the HWID or OEM key- they will be using an internal KMS server.

It really sounds like you have way more permissions than you should have on a work device. You should've hit a wall even attempting to install Win11 (I can confirm that my work blocks this very effectively). I also question why you would want to do that at all. I'm also not sure you needed to do anything to activate- I believe 10 and 11 use the exact same HWID/keys/etc

Your description isn't very clear on what exactly you have, or what you need.

It sounds like you have wired NICs in both server and laptop, which will be physically close to each other, but your only connection to the Internet will be WiFi that you don't control. How accurate is that?

Next question is how do you want them to connect to each other? You can do a P2P wired connection, which is more complicated but fully isolates your traffic. It also means that, unless each device has a separate connection and an appropriate routing config, it won't be online to the Internet (unless you set up some form of connection sharing). You can also connect them to a router that has no Internet. Simpler than the above, but the same limitations.

You could easily and cheaply get a USB Wi-Fi NIC. The major downside is that all traffic will be going across the wireless connection, both ways. This makes it slow and unreliable.

You can also connect them to a modified router configured as a wireless bridge. DD-WRT and others can be configured in a different way than usual. The wireless router will provide wired LAN ports to your local network, but then use the wireless connection to connect to an upstream WiFi.

None of this has anything to do with Linux, BTW. Once you choose a path, you should be able to implement it in whatever OS (or multiple OSes) you would like. None of it is new or special. You might get more options if you post in the Homelab, Data Hoarder, or Self Hosted communities.

It uses Bluetooth, not Wi-Fi. But there are a ton of factors that make wireless communications less reliable than wired. Have you ever been on Wi-Fi and had connection issues right next to the router? All of those factors also affect Bluetooth.

That said, I've never had any issues connecting my phone to AA via wireless.

Many private trackers, and even a few public ones, have a request forum. The private ones reward users that fill these requests, so they are often effective.

There are some very accessible private trackers (sometimes referred to as semi-private) that meet these requirements. Once you get set up, they can be very set-and-forget. Just avoid the forums.

Unless you're on a self-hosted VPN (defeating the whole purpose), it's not especially hard to identify VPN connections. All of the common ones are known, and many use IP ranges and reverse lookups that clearly identify the VPN/seedbox provider.

It's a bit harder when you are connected to one that resolves to a residential-looking hostname. But again, unless it's truly unique (defeating the purpose), simply sorting users by IP will reveal almost all of them.

Some trackers used to do this to weed out people with multiple accounts. Some of the big ones still actively detect and block (or punish) anyone connecting to their website with a VPN (torrent traffic is still generally allowed, though)

I'm not even sure a person would spell it that wrong.

240 million PCs were shipped last year, with about 10% being Apple. A negligible number run Linux. If we assume 5 years average life, that's still easily a billion active Windows devices.

That said, devices may not be the best metric. You mentioned users, which may use many devices. For instance, I use a Windows laptop at work, Windows desktop at home, Android on my phone.

I would use web server metrics, which are an approximate indicator of time spent on each OS.

All I see is "there are no viruses because it's a small platform".

It's also a total lie. Do you know how many Linux servers there are in the world? It's a lot. Same for Android devices.

While these aren't quite the same, and thus not the same vulnerabilities as desktop Linux, they do provide some insights into the effectiveness of its security model.