The scam and spam call problem is really bad in Germany to this day. And has been for 10 years.
A couple years ago I would sit at my desk thinking about a really hard problem in silence. The phone rings. Spam call. Every 30-180 minutes another one. If you now think turn the phone off, well not that easy as CEO of a business when people expect you to be reachable.
It creamed my corn so much that I recorded my own voice samples as a senile "Opa Denny" (german grandpa Denny), modelled after Lenny. Complete with background ducks hanging out on the couch to Opas dismay, later in the call. It works on autopilot without interaction because on Asterisk, and with the largest German SIP provider at least, you can extract the calling peer identity from the SIP header. So I wrote a scoring system based on indicated number, black and whitelist regexs for number and for calling peer, greylist for the geographically surrounding number prefixes, etc. A legit mobile call would show up as number@t-mobile.de for example, while a spam call would say fakenumber@01012.com.
Asterisk would record the call in wideband stereo, normalize the audio, and mail it to me as MP3 attachment. Funny for a while, but these days I just throw all such calls onto the mailbox. Since they need a real person to scam or create a sale, the call is finished right away.
It works great to this day, because I never published it.
Surprised to hear this as well. I have never received a Spam call growing up in Germany and living there again between 2015-2019. In 2019 I moved to Australia and spam calls have been a constant annoyance due to massive data leaks across all banks and public institutions.
I have both a German mobile number and landline number, and have never once received a scam and spam call on either in the 8 years I have been living in Germany. I guess it is a problem of having a public contact number on a website.
Depends on the prpvider as well. Vodafone seems to have (had?) zero qualms about passing my old landline number to multiple shady call centers after taking over Unitymedia. The number was not known to anyone but my parents and I opted out of erverything I could find, still for some time got weekly calls. I haven't had that woth Telekom so far.
Spam calls (and even more so: SMS) have gotten much more frequent on my mobile number in the last 2 years. But in this case, it's a number that has been in active use for the last decade and has by now probably been in multiple data leaks... :/
Not only is voicemail still a thing but just yesterday my iPhone took it upon itself to identify an incoming call as 'suspected spam' and route it to voicemail. I didn't tell it to do that so I guess it's part of some update Apple have pushed. I sometimes wish Apple would ask me first before that kind of thing! Although I probably would have ok'ed that one if they had asked.
Dunno about the US, but where I live (Czechia, in Europe), voicemail is simply not a thing. I've never used it in my life and I don't know anyone who's ever used it, young or old.
We have it here for mobile but by default providers set it to "call waiting" instead. One of the reasons people don't use voicemail (other than not knowing it exists) is they charge you money to leave a message. Your plan minutes don't count. They probably charge you to listen to messages too.
Wow, I am surprised to hear that. Is blocking calls not a thing there? In Sweden you can say that no sellers may call your numbers, companies where you are a customer excluded though.
Using i3 with rofi on X11 git version (because of new TearFree option) myself. A very thin top bar for virtual desktops, tray icons, email notifications, sound volume and date time is all that I need anymore. Tiling is the best way for me to use my single 32" monitor.
The publication of high quality fonts since WindowMaker was a thing 25 years ago and expired patents for font rendering also needs to be mentioned. Desktop Linux has evolved nicely.
Small tip for anyone running a superlight and minimally distracting Linux desktop with X11, i3, and no compositor.
Until recently, tear-free video playback necessitated double buffering hacks and older Intel drivers, or using a compositor like picom. Results were always sub-par imo.
Been running the patch set through Arch's xorg-server-git package ever since it came out, and with mpv as player spaceships have never been zooming smoother along the starry sky. For ultimate playback smoothness I scan the video file for dimensions and refresh rate and then set a custom modeline using xrandr to match display timing with media fps, while maxing out the capabilities of the display link.
There is no easy way, because you have to be able to identify the greats of a field to find relentless quality. You have to become a nerd of greatness, armed with an RSS reader. Example: You can probably tell what Jeff Beck, Stefan Hauk, Jacob Deraps have in common. Sreten of M539 Restaurations? Marco Reps or Shariar of The Signal Path? Igor Bogdanov. Chips and Cheese. The Orbital Mechanics Podcast. The War Zone. Some post once a year or even less.
This is actually a big problem for Germany, because the cited StGB 202 ff. penal code paragraphs have made security research in any private sector shape or form impossible, or at least highly unattractive.
Now a gap of almost 20 years has opened, where basically no young engineers have been interested in the field, let alone trained. The biggest companies with the deepest pockets have been mopping up anyone they could find. Top talent went abroad. And so the majority of German businesses which are SMB get hacked more every day. Nobody audits anything. Unfortunately, anything networked is a security risk these days.
I caution that it is highly naive to bet on this getting thrown out at higher court levels. Defendant is looking at YEARS of wasted brain cycles, trying to go from AG to LG to OLG to BGH. My guess is a 100k EUR of fees also wasted. And for what. Because a company couldn't properly secure their data, you told them that, and as a "thank you", they sued you in court?
My advice: If there is no clear bug bounty program, or it is not your own company, or you weren't tasked in writing and paid by the very company to find any holes, don't make it your problem. Suppress any good samaritan helper complex you might have. Wipe all files and talk to nobody. Especially not in your place of employment. Once a lawsuit is involved, anyone questioned will say "Oh, Mike from DevOps figured that one out from the hexdump". You will regret it.
Some of the older German infosec dogs are aggravated by this so much, that they refuse to help any governmental organization if there is an incident. Lernen durch Schmerz.
I'm using a 20 KiB awk script that I wrote from scratch to calculate taxes owed from investments. German tax code is a bit tricky when your broker is abroad because you have to calculate everything yourself. Hilariously some German brokers don't even apply the FIFO rule correctly. Nevermind regulations about fees or double taxation treaties. FX rates for conversion into EUR are extracted either using rga from Swissquote's own PDFs, or downloaded off the internet. The transaction history itself is one big CSV export from their web site that is also parsed and analyzed using awk. For tax time I call the script with the year I want and transfer everything into official forms. Without spending 3 days in Excel. Or 10. I can't praise awk enough.
I'm on Arch and a 4K display and had to hack the package 'xf86-input-libinput' to be able to adjust mouse scroll speed, towards faster. Upstream has been unwilling to implement it. I published the mod here: https://seitics.de/files/xf86-input-libinput/ should anyone stumble on this post via search engine. To change scroll speed from 1 1 to 2 2 use e.g.
Plus a bunch of services below that, which at this point is only noise. If palemoon works for you as a browser, that will only use 320 MB RSS empty on startup.
Machine has 64 GB RAM, no idea if Chromium by design would eat less on less beefier machines. At 4 GB RAM, zRAM is certainly an option, if you can't or don't want to upgrade. Without such tweaking, modern Linux desktops profit from 8 GB RAM. No matter what WM or DE you run. Once you start a web browser, game over. ;-)
Firefox may work a bit better when it comes to memory usage, especially because about:memory allows manual garbage collection calls if memory usage gets too high.
Version 10 also now without any startup errors due to slightly wrong sqlite database structure.
Together with vscodium a joy to use.