The broad censorship of government data in the US, combined with the recent political attacks on Wikipedia caused me to download the whole English Wikipedia earlier this year. Guessing OP is similar
Not sure why they’d download Debian with all packages though
Edit: I should mention it’s less about a potential loss of Wikipedia as it is a personal source of truth on politically sensitive topics that get censored, or turned to propaganda by bots
For example the Wounded Knee Massacre. Pete Hegseth has recently been calling it the, “Battle of Wounded Knee”. I wouldn’t be surprised if the current administration went to war with Wikipedia and forced them to 1) Change articles they disagree with, and 2) Hide those changes from history
My rationale with Debian is that distros are kind of like portals to entire compendiums of free and open-source software. With the increasing attacks on vpns in particular right now, I’m concerned there are any number of programs we take for granted that we might not have access to soon.
The internet is already deeply enshittified. There is a real possibility that it will no longer be a free and open web in any capacity soon. So it’s past time to make archives, and start setting up meshnets.
I had downloaded the full (no pictures) Wikipedia earlier this year for exactly this reason. This thread told me about kiwix, which is awesome, so I downloaded the “Wikipedia .08” using kiwix, which is the best 45,000 articles from Wikipedia with pictures and it’s 7G, very manageable, has most topics anyone would care about.
I saw that post about texas requiring app stores (specifically says mobile devices, so not the typical distro repository… yet) to have age verification. If they expand that, it would mean all linux distros, while maybe leaving the windows .exe downloads (ugh, shudder) alone. Wikipedia is probably more relevant in most folks’ minds for having a backup though.
Sorry, I’m out of the loop. Is there something particular that triggered this that I missed?
gestures broadly
The broad censorship of government data in the US, combined with the recent political attacks on Wikipedia caused me to download the whole English Wikipedia earlier this year. Guessing OP is similar
Not sure why they’d download Debian with all packages though
Edit: I should mention it’s less about a potential loss of Wikipedia as it is a personal source of truth on politically sensitive topics that get censored, or turned to propaganda by bots
For example the Wounded Knee Massacre. Pete Hegseth has recently been calling it the, “Battle of Wounded Knee”. I wouldn’t be surprised if the current administration went to war with Wikipedia and forced them to 1) Change articles they disagree with, and 2) Hide those changes from history
My rationale with Debian is that distros are kind of like portals to entire compendiums of free and open-source software. With the increasing attacks on vpns in particular right now, I’m concerned there are any number of programs we take for granted that we might not have access to soon.
The internet is already deeply enshittified. There is a real possibility that it will no longer be a free and open web in any capacity soon. So it’s past time to make archives, and start setting up meshnets.
I had downloaded the full (no pictures) Wikipedia earlier this year for exactly this reason. This thread told me about kiwix, which is awesome, so I downloaded the “Wikipedia .08” using kiwix, which is the best 45,000 articles from Wikipedia with pictures and it’s 7G, very manageable, has most topics anyone would care about.
Well for starters, teachers have had to start telling students that .gov websites are no longer considered credible sources for research.
Nothing in particular that I’m aware of, just a growing recognition that things are very much not well in the US these days.
I saw that post about texas requiring app stores (specifically says mobile devices, so not the typical distro repository… yet) to have age verification. If they expand that, it would mean all linux distros, while maybe leaving the windows .exe downloads (ugh, shudder) alone. Wikipedia is probably more relevant in most folks’ minds for having a backup though.
Yeah I wonder too.