I agree, that physical isolation will always be the best policy. However, that can become a problem if you need to access multiple operating systems, and have them working. It would require several computers, so these sort of programs definitely have their uses. Plus, if you're using a open source program, and you know the language it's coded in, you could take a look if it's doing anything malicious.

However, whether or not popular operating systems check for dual boot, and access data is another problem worth considering, and isn't as easy to verify depending on the operating system.


Right, I failed to mention that. Also, worth noting that you need specific hardware requirements, specifically a CPU capable of virtualisation, which of course is sort of the norm these days, however certain hardware is more supported than others. My hardware isn't exactly perfect for it so doesn't come without its problems, but does what I need it to do, and has the core security which makes Qubes what it is.

Qubes OS does have a certified list of hardware that works completely, but you aren't restricted to them. There's good documentation out there of users listing all the problems they've had with hardware not on that list.

However, Bitcoin is incredibly new when you compare it to other fiat currencies. Plus, it's a completely new concept as well, which takes some time for adoption. I understand why companies aren't willing fully jumping on board, because there's a risk for them. Especially with the volatility. For anyone that has ever owned a business, you'll understand that constant cash flow is vital, especially when you're working on a contract basis, and you don't get paid until like after 30-90 days after you've completed the work. If you factor that in, you might wait 90 days for payment for work you've already done, and taken a hit for due to materials, and wages then it drops, and becomes a lot less than you paid out.

At the moment, Bitcoin doesn't suit everyone due to the volatility. The volatility does mean it's especially attractive to speculative investors though.

No. Although, I don't think my moral compass would allow me to even operate a casino in the first place. At the end of the day, casinos claim to care about their customers, and that's why you see all  these adverts about being responsible, and having features which limit the amount you can spend, but the thing is they're too easily removed, it usually only takes 24 hours.

They don't actually care all that much about the customer, they care about looking ethical, and basically use it as a PR trick. Now, I'm not saying every casino is like this, because they clearly aren't. However, the vast majority, and particularly physical location ones, literally pray on their customers by offering them suites, and benefits if they gamble over a certain amount, and most importantly lose.

I can tell you now, if it was someone I cared about, throwing their money, and their life away, I'd absolutely be willing to lose my job over it. Family is more important. Even, if it wasn't family like the example given, if I heard they had a new child, a wife, and all of that malarkey I'd absolutely have a talk with them. There's more important things in life, than profit. 

Staff. If they are manually approving bets, then it's going to be a logistic problem if they don't have enough staff. Newer casinos or betting websites aren't going to have the funds to have as many staff a the big dogs. Same as the maximum payout is usually widely different depending on the company you go with. Some have a little leeway because of the vast amount of volume, then others have to put a strict limit on it due to not having the funds.

It all comes down to logistics. Some states or countries might actually require them to perform additional checks, like where the money came from, if it was laundered etc. There's a ton of things they need to comply with, as well as checking the location of the user, if they're using a VPN, which are usually not allowed on these types of sites due to the legal issues.

Bitcoin gambling websites are a little different, and currently sit in the grey area, I do expect over the coming years things will get a little more tighter.

It's only important if you wish to spend it in the short term. If you are saving for the long term, the current price doesn't really mean much at all, except you can accumulate more Bitcoin right now, than you could last month. People do obsess over the price a little bit too much I feel. Although, that's only natural if you are a investor looking to profit on your investment, rather than use it to escape capitalism, and the banking system.

I'm not sure why we would even care what other people use Bitcoin for. That's the beauty of it. I don't look down at speculative investors looking to use Bitcoin as a means of obtaining more fiat currency, and the same as I don't look down on the sort of elitist attitude of holding regardless of what happens.

People are free to use Bitcoin for whatever they want, as long as it's legal. That's perfect, and I certainly don't have the authority to tell someone else how they spread or spend their wealth.

Plus, a global recession will always effect the price. It's a pretty easy prediction to make. Buying power will be down, since everyone will be penny pinching. Unless, people decide to take the risk, and try to secure their future by investing at low prices, but honestly I don't think many will do that, especially those that are exceptionally poor, and living pay check to pay check, which if you listen to statistics, most people are living pay check to pay check.

Although, I don't think the CEO is doing it out of the kindness of his heart. There's likely a motivation behind it, after all he's a businessman.

I've done a couple rounds in advance, and I've already input two weeks later this year where I'll be away on a trip. So, I've already input more predictions than last year . I won't forget this year I promise, but I definitely can't promise I'll be any good. I've been close to winning big money before betting on the Premier League though. One time I was two results away from £200k+, and another goal away from £25k. Funnily enough, Chelsea is usually the team that lets me done, and usually are the bloody favourites. Despite being close a few times, I've never won big though.

Looking at the Manchester United situation, I think they'll be even worse than last year. They at least had Ronaldo banging in a ton of goals, but if he is to leave or worse yet refuse to train, and gets dropped I think they could be in some real trouble, because quite frankly he bailed them out last year multiple times. We also play them within the first couple of rounds, so we could maybe compound that pressure on them by beating them convincingly.

I can't recall it hitting the ground against Cannonier? Except for once at the end of the round? I don't know, I've slept since then . I know Izzy has fantastic takedown defense, he has had that for a while. The only time I recall him being taken down properly recently was against Jan, who dominated, but understandably so considering the weight advantage.

Yeah, Izzy is probably one of the best counter punches around, and Alex might just fall into that trap. Alex doesn't have fantastic head movement or ways of avoiding getting hit himself, so I expect Izzy basically to have free shots. I don't see Alex winning via points, that's for sure. He'll either get the knockout, lose on points or get knocked out himself.

I will be supporting Izzy, I'm just excited that he'll at least be challenged, due to the history of the two fighters. I want to see Izzy challenged, in an exciting way rather than the usual domination of points fighting.

Yeah, 4GB wouldn't work. I'm only just touching it, but this is this machine I use for the forum, and some other minor things. I'm not running much software, and basically only using it for certain things other than web browsing. I've done some coding on it, but the performance is lacklustre obviously. It's usually in a pinch, and when I'm away from my main machine.

Live CD in this case, might be the better option if you don't necessarily need to retain the data. Although, some live CD's do now allow persistent data, like Ubuntu I believe.

Yeah, mprep summed it up nicely. Don't communicate, at least with any detail in relation to security with users that might do this sort of thing, as it could lead to a social engineering attempt.

I think most suspicions came from how the personal message was worded, but also we're a rather suspicious community as a whole. Which, neither helps when combined. I do think things could've been handled a bit better, but the actions have already been taken.

Like I said, I was somewhat suspicious to how the personal message was worded, but I wasn't ready to get the pitchfork out yet.

Yeah, it was the wording of the personal message that was tripping me up. Might have been a better option to contact the admins, and say you're aware of someone's security question, they could've possibly checked, and then forced the security question to be disabled, rather than forcibly locking an account. Maybe, the admins could've messaged only those with security questions enabled, I'm not sure of the best way of going about this.

Also, not a fan of talking about the specifics of a certain users security question as that could potentially be a further security/privacy issue.

However, I think the point has been made, and hopefully this highlights the issues of a security question. Personally, I'd prefer it to be removed, but at the very least hopefully this wakes up some users to discontinue using it.

For those that are unaware; Security questions are designed in such a way, that it encourages you to ask a question, and then directly answer that question, therefore it's no longer random. We've talked about random for ages now, and how it's important to generation of passwords. So, the mere fact you come up with the question, and the answer usually means you either reduce the randomness or completely remove it. You could say you'll have a answer that's not something that's related to the question, but it likely is as we as people aren't very good at thinking randomly.

You're much more likely to make a point, if you make it to the higher ranked users of the forum, as the point hits closer to home, than doing this to someone who is of a lower rank. The user has proven that security questions are ridiculously stupid, which we kind of knew anyway, but has highlighted that to those that don't know it.

Maybe check it, and amend it if so.

Right, I didn't make the connection that frozen = locked I admit . However, we know that hasn't happened since the OP confirmed nothing has happened. Therefore, they haven't frozen anything. So, the whole thing from a white hat perspective doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

Besides, its always best to leave things how they are when it comes to being a white hat. Locking someone out of their account before they can change it, isn't exactly the best idea.

I'll be starting to report them soon. I'm not all that bothered by unhandled reports.


Absolutely, especially when they're heavyweights. The thing is about most heavyweights, especially unranked or lowly ranked ones, they gas out so quickly so apart from the first round, they're usually clinging onto one another. I honestly, believe it's one of the best lines to bet on if you want to nudge up that profit. I've done it a few times, and been successful, but since I always put accumulators on I don't usually benefit from them, until the other week when everything came in.

That's the unfortunate bit though. You guys haven't really utilised these players yourselves, and instead have shipped them onto the highest bidder. Sure, if that works for you it works, but when you go, and invest into Lukaku with that money you've generated, there's some issues there.

I like the emphasis on youth development by Chelsea, I just kind of wished they'd use it more to ease them into the senior side, because you've had some great players that were definitely capable of doing so.

Was Zouma an academy player? Look, I definitely don't like what he has done recently, and quite frankly he has lost a fan because of that, but there was a time he was looking like the most promising player coming out of Chelsea. A real world beater when it comes to defenders. He's playing for West Ham now, so its not all bad, but he could've been something special. I guess, with the somewhat recent news of a certain incident, it kind of indicates that his attitude is all wrong, and that's why he didn't really take off in the way I thought he would. Obviously, injuries too.

I'm hoping for neither. I want the old Joshua back that like to get into brawls. Think about the first Ruiz fight, Joshua went into that confident, got into a gun fight, and got clipped. However, he knocked Ruiz down before that exchange that hurt him. Ever since, he has just seemed a shadow of himself, and doesn't want to get in them risky, high reward sequences.

I'm not expecting Usyk to engage in them either, but if Joshua can turn up the pressure it'll be more entertaining for the fans at least. Otherwise, I literally see no other result other than A Usyk win, whether that's by a surprise knockout or the usual decision.

I don't think Izzy will take him to the ground, it's not his preferred place to be, and quite frankly he'll be confident in his abilities. You only have to hear him talk, and he tries to tell people he was up until he got knocked out. Now, that doesn't really matter if you got knocked out, but he's right. I also am in agreement that MMA gloves could change it, although I do get the impression Alex is tough. Although, he has been knocked out himself a few times in kickboxing.

Izzy is going to land a lot I'd imagine. What would be more impressive to me is if Alex tries to mix in the threat of take downs. So, go for one early on. That, might actually make Izzy a little more shy at throwing punches, and therefore allows Alex to get closer for those hooks he loves to throw.

I'm feeling a little silly now, because I've reread it a few times, and I'm still reading it the same way.

Here's the bit I'm talking about:
I've bolded the part which keeps tripping me up. That might be a language barrier thing as suggested, but I'm failing to read that another way other than they've frozen the account, "due to security" giving the impression they have access that a normal user doesn't. Although, its not exactly clear what they're talking about when they say freeze, and what that exactly means either.

The part where they talk about the captcha, and only talking to theymos is separate.

I do however, agree with JollyGood here, it does seem some of the sentences aren't quite fluid, in terms of a native speaker. So, there might be some translation issues here which just complicates the situation.

Yeah, kind of. You have to run virtual machines basically for each Qube. However, I've got a rather old machine running it right now, with only 8GB ram, which ram is a important piece of hardware when you're using Qubes OS. Don't get me wrong, the performance on my machine could definitely be better, and my machine does moan at me from time to time. Although, currently there's some key features on my machine that I don't want to give up, and can't easily replace without paying a fortune. For example, hardware switches, and the ruggedness of the machine.

I will eventually be upgrading, but now I've experienced Qubes OS you won't find me using anything else. You can run a limited version of Windows inside Qubes as well as Linux. Officially supported are Debian, Whonix and Fedora, but there's plenty of community made ones. Personally, I stick to the official templates.

Due to the USB isolation, I tend to do my diagnostic, and wiping work inside a isolation qube instead of booting up a live cd these days. Live cd's still do have some uses which Qubes OS isn't as suitable for.

Yeah, I've been converted for a number of years now. I don't personally own a Windows machine.
I've never used Dban, but I've used on Windows some others (including Eraser or SDelete).


Yeah, VirtualBox can be good, but has its limitations. I love Qubes OS, and I could talk about it all day, but that's for another thread. Although, I'll just add to fully convert to Qubes OS is difficult. Remember when you first converted to Linux, and you had to search up every painful step of a process? Yeah it's a bit like that. Knowing a bit of Linux does help obviously.

Right, when I receive this link from hilariousandco, I'm going to put all my predictions down either today or by the latest on the weekend. Therefore, I shouldn't be donating anything this season. I'll likely adjust them as time goes on, but this is just my contingency just in case I do the usual Welsh thing to do, and forget.

My one objective this season is to not get the wooden spoon, we'll see how well that goes.

EDIT: Well, I'm multiple rounds in. I didn't realise how long this would take .

I've used Ventoy (https://github.com/ventoy/Ventoy) in the past, looks like they do similar things. Although, I've since moved on to using Qubes OS as my main operating system, and just using different "Qubes" as a way of isolation, and therefore live boots have limited uses for me now. Not perfect, but live booting is only as good as the medium, and software you're using to do that i.e Easy2Boot, and Ventoy.

Seems Easy2Boot does have some additional features that might be useful though. For example, the transport partition. Sounds like you might be able to put Dban on that, and nuked some computers whenever you need to do so, which I usually do when looking to offload old hardware that hasn't had too much sensitive data.