rwhitisissle

A “typical” home user, whom I assume is less knowledgeable about technology, is probably the person who would benefit the most from strict firewalls installed on their device. Such an individual assumedly doesn’t have the prerequisite knowledge, or awareness required to adequately gauge the threats on their network.

They also would not realistically be doing anything that would cause open ports on their machine to serve data to some external application. It's not like someone can just "hack" your computer by picking a random port and weaseling their way in. They have to have some exploitable mechanism on the machine that serves data in a way that's insecure.

Would this not be adequate rationale for having contingencies, i.e. firewalls? A risk/threat needn’t only be an external malicious actor. One’s own mistakes could certainly be interpreted as a potential threat, and are, therefore, worthy of mitigation.

I am assuming that there's a hierarchy of needs in terms of maintaining any Linux system. Whenever you learn how to use something (and you would have to learn how to use a firewall), you are sacrificing time and energy that would be spent learning something else. Knowing how your package manager works, or how to use systemctl, or understanding your file system structure, or any number of pieces of fundamental Linux knowledge is, for a less technically sophisticated user, going to do comparatively more to guarantee the longevity and health of their system than learning how to use a firewall, which is something capable of severely negatively impacting your user experience if you misconfigure it. In other words: don't mess around with a firewall if you don't know what you're doing. Use your time learning other things first if you're a not technically sophisticated user. I also don't exactly know what "mistakes" you'd be mitigating by installing a firewall if you aren't binding processes to those ports (something a novice user should not be doing anyway).

Well, no, not necessarily. It’s important to understand what the purpose of the firewall is. If a device can potentially become an attack vector, it’s important to take precautions against that – you’d want to secure other devices on the network in the off chance that it does become compromised, or secure that very device to limit the potential damage that it could inflict.

You just wrote that "One’s own mistakes could certainly be interpreted as a potential threat, and are, therefore, worthy of mitigation." The best way of mitigating mistakes is by not making them in the first place, or creating a scenario in which you could potentially make them. Prevention is always better than cure. You should never open ports on your local network. Ever. I don't care if you have firewalls on everything down to your smart thermostat - if you need to expose locally hosted services you should be maintaining a cloud VM or similar cloud based service that forwards connections to the desired service on your internal network via a VPN like Tailscale. Or, even better, just put Tailscale's service on whatever machine you're using that needs access to your personal network. And, yes, if you're doing things like that, you would also want robust firewall protections everywhere. But the firewall simply isn't ever "enough."

Anyway, just my 2 cents. The more you know and do, the greater steps you should take to protect yourself. For someone who knows very little, the most important thing that can help them is knowing more, and there is a hierarchy of learning that will take them from "knowing little" to "knowing much," but they shouldn't/don't need to concern themselves with certain mechanisms before they know enough to reliably use them or mitigate their own mistakes. That said, if you are a new user, you're probably installing a linux distro that already comes with its own preconfigured firewall that's already running and you just don't know about it. In which case, moot point. If you're not, though, I'm assuming your goal is learning linux stuff, in which case, I've gone into that.

They pretty much all say that South Africa presented a case in the Hague that argued that Israel has violated the 2nd article of the international genocide conventions and that Israel has acted with genocidal intent towards the people of Palestine. Or is there something else of note that isn't being discussed? Like did a horse briefly get loose in the court and they had to stop proceedings to try and catch it?

And like most things related to Linux on the internet, the consensus is generally incorrect. For a typical home user who isn't opening ports or taking a development laptop to places with unsecure wifi networks, you don't really need a firewall. It's completely superflous. Anything you do to your PC that causes you genuine discomfort will more than likely be your own fault rather than an explicit vulnerability. And if you're opening ports on your home network to do self-hosting, you're already inviting trouble and a firewall is, in that scenario, a bandaid on a sucking chest wound you self-inflicted.

Comfortable middle class. Upper class people have full time servants. They don't come to your house. They're just always there.

Religions and philosophical traditions frequently have overlap. It's not really an either/or situation.

What part of this is a meme?

It assumes multiple entire generations of people were shitty and verbally abusive to their children on the basis of nothing more than being from a different generation.

And it's always been a cudgel used by the powers that be to distract from the real sources of everyone else's problems. Funny how that works.

And pretty much an equal amount actively fought against those policies, but were not politically effective in doing so as a result of complex historical and political factors. The Baby Boomers were and are complicated, just as everyone is, and it's kind of incorrect to treat them monolithically because as a generational cohort, the Boomers were ludicrously massive. So much so that there can actually be considered two dominant sub-cohorts within that generation. Early boomers protested Vietnam and made huge contributions to American racial, gender, reproductive, and sexual rights. Late generation Baby Boomers, sometimes referred to as "Generation Jones" grew up in an era of political malaise, and lived through the economic recession of the 1970s, Watergate, the Iranian hostage crisis, and a bunch of other things that helped to shape their more generally conservative political identities.

Is the inheritance of generational hatred depicted here even real? Some of the nicest people I've interacted with in my entire life were Baby Boomers. I've met shittier Gen Xers and Millennials than Baby Boomers.

Baby Boomers as a generational cohort are well on their way to completely dying off and generational antagonism is a tool of the capitalist class to turn the workers of different ages against one another. Be better than that. Make better memes.

Letterbox is where you go to find some truly wild takes. It's filled with people who have no genuine sense of media literacy, combined with a profoundly unjustified sense of confidence in the universality of their own opinions.