Depends. What are you planning on using a VPN for?

If you’re in the position that the NSA is in your system trying to bypass SELinux, you have much bigger problems.

Besides, in that case, having it disabled is going to make it easier for them anyway.

Overkill and overpriced. If you’re on Windows, bitlocker is enough. If you’re on Linux, LUKS is enough.

I’ve used Apricorn drives at previous jobs. They’re cool and very much fit for purpose, but I’d have a hard time justifying the significant price premium when software is nearly as good, free, and works with any drive.

It wouldn’t be significantly different from any other access method.

yet

Mounting or unmounting a filesystem won’t make a difference for drive longevity.

If you want to keep your backups secure, you want to keep them offline, so if you get ransomware it doesn’t encrypt your backup too. (Or if you just mistype a command and target the wrong device, folder, etc.)

But drive motor starts and stops are when the most failures occur. So the ultimate question isn’t how to make a drive last longer, it’s how you plan to handle it when the failure inevitably occurs.

Sounds like a weak argument. They’re not going to be inclined to operate a local ML system just for one or two people.

I would see if you can get a quote for locally-hosted transcription software you can run on your own, like Dragon Medical. Maybe reach out to your IT department to see if they already have a working relationship with Nuance for that software. If they’re willing to get you started, you can probably just use that for dictation and nobody will notice or care.

What, exactly, are your privacy concerns about this?

How confident do you need to be? I don’t think I’ve seen any convincing evidence of any firmware spying in PC components.

Well, except the NSA’s Clipper chip, but I don’t think that really ever got implemented.

This doesn’t have anything to do with patient data and everything to do with pharmaceutical companies abusing care platforms.

Yes, and? They are not sending your PHI to Microsoft.

Or, if they use Microsoft cloud services like 365 or Azure, where they are sending PHI to Microsoft, Microsoft agrees to follow local healthcare information protection law. In the US, as a business associate, they are a covered entity under HIPAA and must maintain compliance to protect your information.

Probably AWS stuff. An application that hasn’t been designed to scale well can get very expensive very quickly.

They say their biggest expense is marketing. But I think they’re honest in saying that there are no current plans for layoffs. They just made the plans right after making that statement.

Seems like a bit of a reach to go from knowing which appliances you use and when, to identity theft and harassment by your landlord.

Besides, I feel like even if your landlord was able to get this info (in the US, utilities are surprisingly protective of account access), they’d be able to do much more just by virtue of having physical access to the property.

The burglary or home invasion angles I can see, but it actually working out like that seems extremely unlikely.

You ever seen a phone at 0%?

Never heard of that one. This one is trustworthy: https://haveibeenpwned.com/

They would only have the trademark as long as they’re still using it. I don’t think there’s anything first-party still in active development for any DS platform, but it’s still recent enough.

It might just not have caught their attention yet.

Those info sites aren’t built from bank records. They’re built from public records databases like voters, property, taxes, legal cases, and government actions, including stuff like just showing up to the city council to complain.

You could conceivably open an account in another country where they’re very private about banking info, but it wouldn’t help your case, and it would probably be a huge hassle for your day to day life.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2802370/

Results were mixed.

Yes, especially in the UK, since they’re a surveillance state.

There are some things that will always get flagged on any platform. This, drugs, and connections to sanctioned countries, for example. I’ve heard of people in the US having their Venmo accounts suspended because they put “Havana” in the transaction description. Havana is a local dance club.