I wonder what the criteria are to define what an artist is, or what requirements are needed to qualify for such assistance.

How would you suggest I respond in the future?

We have a person, claiming that CUPS doesn’t work and they now uninstall it on every installation.

There is no context, no data, no information that suggests what the issue is, what they tried, when this occurred, on which platform, under which conditions.

In other words, the user was essentially saying “CUPS sux”.

Having used Linux as my main system for over 25 years, that sentiment did not match my own experience, does not help anyone, not me, not the user and not the OP who was trying to solve a problem, let alone anyone else reading along.

I responded accordingly.

This has not been my experience … at … all.

Perhaps it would be helpful to discover what exactly doesn’t work for you and fix that, rather than remove CUPS because one time it didn’t work for you seven years ago.

You could print to CUPS from the other devices and potentially bypass all those shenanigans.

Also, CUPS has a PDF printer which saves you from even heating up your printer at all … I haven’t had a printer in my life for over 25 years.

The point I was trying to make is that End Of Life is in the eye of the beholder. Just because it doesn’t get any updates from the manufacturer, doesn’t mean that the user has to throw it away.

Similarly, a user can give the device to a second hand store and the next user can use it … and so on.

As I said, it is not a fixed date or concept.

It essentially depends on what level of support you require.

End Of Life is a concept, not generally a fixed point in time … even though the likes of Microsoft are attempting to rewrite history and making everyone move off Windows 10 by a specific date.

And just like in that situation, you have options.

You can consider your relationship with Microsoft at an end and install a different OS, or you can continue the relationship and buy new hardware even though there’s absolutely nothing wrong with what you currently have.

The same is true for a router.

The decision around EOL is about what happens next.

Do you want to yell at the supplier if it breaks, or will you realise that yelling only happens if you spend money on lawyers, and in the meantime you can move on with your life and decide on an alternative path.

My car is worth $700 or so, even though I bought it new 15 years ago. Is it at the end of its life? It’s still getting me from here to there and back.

The Australian government has just emailed the following:

ASD’s ACSC is aware of targeting of multiple vulnerabilities within Australia impacting Cisco ASA 5500-X Series models, that are running Cisco ASA Software or FTD software:

CVE-2025-20333 (Critical) – A vulnerability in the VPN web server of Cisco Secure Firewall Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) Software and Cisco Secure Firewall Threat Defense (FTD) Software could allow an authenticated, remote attacker to execute arbitrary code on an affected device.

CVE-2025-20363 (Critical) – A vulnerability in the web services of Cisco Secure Firewall Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) Software, Cisco Secure Firewall Threat Defense (FTD) Software, Cisco IOS Software, Cisco IOS XE Software, and Cisco IOS XR Software could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker (Cisco ASA and FTD Software) or authenticated, remote attacker (Cisco IOS, IOS XE, and IOS XR Software) with low user privileges to execute arbitrary code on an affected device.

CVE-2025-20362 (Medium) – A vulnerability in the VPN web server of Cisco Secure Firewall Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) Software and Cisco Secure Firewall Threat Defense (FTD) Software could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to access restricted URL endpoints that should otherwise be inaccessible without authentication.

A number of versions of Cisco software releases are affected, including those within the following ranges:

Cisco ASA Software releases 9.12 to 9.23x and; Cisco FTD Software releases 7.0 to 7.7x.

Please see

https://sec.cloudapps.cisco.com/security/center/resources/asa_ftd_continued_attacks for specific version details.

Cisco reports active exploitation of these vulnerabilities has been observed globally.

They’ll use machine learning to determine based on your behaviour if you’re under 16, then they’ll ask for proof of age.

Thank you for making my point.

In ICT circles, sure, on the nightly news it’s crickets.

We know very little beyond:

1. It will go live on 10 December 2025
2. There will be heavy fines.
3. Government ID is not allowed to be the only method.
4. A self declaration (tick box) is insufficient as a check.

There are to my knowledge no third party providers approved for this legislation. The process to assess actual implementation details started in July 2025, and the results thus far are underwhelming to put it mildly, you might call it a shitshow.

Below is the official sum total of what we know, most of it motherhood statements and “coming soon”.

https://www.esafety.gov.au/about-us/industry-regulation/social-media-age-restrictions

Media commentary wants to “protect the children”, but have no idea how you might do so, let alone consider the implications or implementation details.

Source: I’m an ICT professional with 40+ years experience.

The comments here seem to be missing a salient point.

In order to determine if a user is under 16, you need to determine that for every single user … including you!

This means that your personal data will be harvested in order to determine if you are over 16 or not.

From memory they use Cisco.

In 2023, apparently Optus attempted to blame them for the default values on the hardware (IIRC the size of the routing table), which several people pointed out was blatantly absurd. Apparently Optus also didn’t follow up with a welfare check of each of the failed calls in their network. Apparently they had to physically visit each affected router across the entire network. They were fined. I’m not aware of any other penalties.

Now, in 2025, it appears that Optus didn’t follow their own processes, ignored several early customer reports about emergency calls not working, didn’t inform the communications minister, under reported the impact, didn’t inform customers and didn’t make any announcements until it was fixed.

In 2023 I couldn’t help but wonder if the staff at Optus had ever heard of testing. Today it seems obvious … to me … that they don’t.

Disclaimer: Note that whilst I’m an ICT professional, I don’t have any direct knowledge of the internals of these incidents and I’m relying on memory of reports and commentary and Wikipedia, I have also never played with Cisco routers, so YMMV. I also note that I haven’t been an Optus customer for about a decade, and my own experience with their ICT systems as a customer over fifteen years or so has been … let’s call it “suboptimal”.

Just so we’re clear … we’re angry because it’s the second time it’s happened and if anything their response was worse this time around.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Optus_outage

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Optus_emergency_calling_outage

Except that in civil discussion with experts, other ideas are what helps people arrive at a solution suitable for them and their situation.

I’ll also add that I’ve been a Linux user for 25 years and the toxicity you claim in relation to the Linux community is in my experience not evident as a “major reason”, instead I’ve found it to be innovative and flexible with a wide perspective and approach to problem solving.

Are there dickheads in the Linux community? Yes, just like there are everywhere in society.

What are you attempting to achieve by opening this list of urls?

What is the difference between running this script and setting this list as either a bookmark, or the homepage in your browser?

What does your network have to do with the reachability of these sites?

If you’re managing the privacy of your own network, why are you not monitoring those services?

I’ve run my business for over 25 years, and I haven’t had a printer in over two decades. I have needed to print something less than half a dozen times since making the decision to not replace it. Instead I print to PDF and if I need actual physical paper, I’ve put a PDF on a USB flash drive and taken it to my local office supplies store to print on demand.

I have a scanner, it’s been used perhaps a dozen times in the same period.

In other words, have you considered not buying a printer?

I used to have a pihole running on my network, but now I just use the dns.adguard-dns.com on my network and phone.

But imagine the commit log.

You don’t need the wildcard, and as others have pointed out, it doesn’t include "hidden " dot files by default.

tar -czf ~/package.tgz admin api mobile

You can even archive extended attributes with the ‘--xattrs flag.