The other poster gave you a lot. If that’s too much at once, the really low hanging fruit you want to start with is:

• Choose an active, secure distro. There’s a lot of flavors of Linux out there and they can be fun to try but if you’re putting something up publicly it should be running on one that’s well maintained and known for security. CentOS and Debian are excellent easy choices for example.

• Similarly, pick well maintained software with a track record. Nginx and Apache have been around forever and have excellent track records, for example, both for being secure and fixing flaws quickly.

• If you use Docker, once again keep an eye out for things that are actively maintained. If you decide to use Nginx, there will be five million containers to choose from. DockerHub gives you the tools to make this determination: Download number is a decent proxy for “how many people are using this” and the list of updates tells you how often and how recently it’s being updated.

• Finally, definitely do look at the other poster’s notes about SSH. 5 seconds after you put up an SSH server, you’ll be getting hit with rogue login attempts.

• Definitely get a password manager, and it’s not just one password per server but one password per service. Your login password to the computer is different from your login to any other things your server is running.

The rest requires research, but these steps will protect you from the most common threats pretty effectively. The world is full of bots poking at every service they can find, so keeping them out is crucial. You won’t be protected from a dedicated, knowledgeable attacker until you do the rest of what the other poster said, and then some, so try not to make too many enemies.

Correct, horse battery staple.

When I was little, long before I had a reason to want it to be true, I had this theory that the Secret Service, which is obviously not a secret, was called that because they had a secret mandate: If the President ever gets really out of pocket and goes for dictator powers, it’s their job to execute him as a traitor.

Anyway, I doubt it’s true, but I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately.

I don’t think we’re going to fix things in any meaningful way. I think we’re watching a big collapse. Not the end of humanity like some want to predict, but very rough times ahead.

I am with you that we should help each other out, and there’s ways to do that. We can feed and shelter people now, and we should, but much more than that becomes infeasible quickly. And I think it will become even less feasible as things get worse.

I think what the other person was saying is… If there’s a way to fix things, to make things better or at least lessen the harm, it’s going to take a lot of people doing a lot of things. Things that aren’t always profitable right away, but pay off later. Better public transit systems, more renewable energy, huge programs replacing the old but crucial infrastructure that brings us clean drinking water, turning useless land into productive fields, and so much more. If we had the political will, we could offer everyone the ability to work on these programs and in return have a better quality of life, while also building a better future.

And to be clear, this isn’t all manual labor. Probably most of it isn’t really manual labor. It’s math, it’s planning, it’s machine operation, it’s coordinating and transporting, it’s organizing and communicating. To solve our problems will require a lot of people with a lot of skills, and if we can encourage the right people to be in the right place, we could solve so many problems and make so many things better.

We won’t, though. But we could.

I genuinely believe it comes down to the moral question of: is inaction itself an action. Or maybe are you responsible for the results of not making a choice just as you would be if you did make a choice. I say yes.

That’s the neat part: Convicted felons ARE excluded from most public service jobs like being a teacher or a mayor. It was widely believed that this included the presidency until the Supreme Court decided it somehow didn’t.

This has happened before. GUI tools were going to mean less developers with less cost, but it didn’t materialize. Higher level languages were going to cause mass layoffs but it didn’t really materialize. Tools like WordPress were going to put web developers out of business, but it didn’t really. Sitebuilders like Wix were going to do it, too, but they really haven’t.

These tools perform well at the starter end, but terribly at the larger or enterprise end. Current AI is like that. It can help better than I think people on here give it credit for, but it can’t replace. At best, it simply produces things with bugs, or that doesn’t quite work. At worst, it appears to work but is riddled with problems.

I genuinely believe AI isn’t over hyped in the long run. We’re going to need solutions to fix our current way of work. But I feel confident it’s still further away than the people investing in it think it is, and they’re going to be paying big for that mistake.