If it’s not connected to the internet, that certainly does take away a significant cause of problems. Good luck

In theory if there are no security holes, a user account can only mess up its own account.

Note that what steps you want to take will really depend on who these users are and what you want to achieve. There’s a vast chasm between allowing in, say, friends or colleagues, vs. letting random people on the internet access it. The latter will mean someone will intentionally look for exploits, which means e.g. regularly applying security updates becomes far more pressing.

If you are letting in random strangers, I’d look into only giving them access within a separate container or ideally virtual machine per user as an extra precaution unless what you’re making available is very stripped down.

And there you have the reason they sued to force Musk to stick to his word of buying it rather than let him off the hook and look for someone else dumb enough to pay that much for it.

Revenue is money in before costs, so yes their revenue is still positive given they are actually charging some people positive amounts. Their earnings are quite likely negative.

It feels like most Western CCP cheerleaders are basically cheering on a pre-Deng version of the CCP and haven’t quite noticed that the CCP of today would totally purge anyone pushing the pre-Deng/pre-1978 views of the CCP.

Just a few years back, Vernor Vinge’s scifi novels still seemed reasonably futuristic in dealing with the issue of fakes well by including several bits where the resolution of imagery was a factor in being able to analyze with sufficient certainty that you were talking to the right person, and now that notion already seems dated, and certainly not enough for a setting far into the future.

(at least they don’t still seem as dated as Johnny Mnemonic’s plot of erasing a chunk of your memories to transport an amount of data that would be easier and less painful to fit in your head by stuffing a microsd card up your nose)

It’s stupid that it’s not there, though, and I suspect it will get fixed at some point. Basically, some concerns were raised about people using it to doctor timelines (but they can already do that by setting up a single-person instance and messing with the database), and the new instance can validate the signatures of the posts anyway, so they’re no less secure than posts from other accounts received via federation. If anyone is really concerned they could slap an “imported from …” banner on old/migrated posts so people are aware they were not originally posted there.

Sadly, while you can export everything, you can’t import posts in Mastodon without having direct access to the database and poking about.

You can import following lists, bookmarks, blocks and mutes, though.

"Four score and seven years ago"‍ from the Gettysburg Address… Many languages have or had words for counting in 20’s. They’ve just mostly gone out of fashion.

Wiktionary suggests the common proto-Germanic root of eleven/twelve, elf/zwölf are likely to have been “ainalif” and “twalif” - “one left over” and “two left over”.

They’re both Germanic languages, just like Dutch, German, Norwegian, Danish and a few others. Same origin. All of them have variations of tre/dre/drei/thir/þre/þrēo (say them with sounds halfway between t and d as the first sound, and you’ll see how similar they are) followed by variations of ten/teen/tin/tan/ton/tien/zehn as a suffix for ten (again, pick a halfway point between t and z and it’s easier to see how similar they are).

In Old English it was þrēotīene ( þ is “th”), and in Old Norse it was þrettán, same as modern Icelandic, so the first common root is even further back, but you can see the similarity. The *hypothesized proto-Germanic root is þritehun. (þriz + tehun.

But, it goes back even further than that. The Romance languages (tres, trois etc) shares the same proto-Indo-European root (hypothesized to be tréyes) for three with proto-Germanic.

The names for numbers are ancient, and though not always recognisable, sometimes recognizable variants pop up even further away than you’d expect. E.g. Pashto (Southeastern Iran) has dre for three, Sanskrit has trí, Indonesian has tri, all of them descendants of the same proto-Indo-European root.