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I’ll not talk about “the situation” today; I’m beyond my limits at the moment. Instead, I’ll regale you with tales of my technical derring-do.

My long-time readers know that “digital security” is one of my interests. Part of security is ensuring you’ve got adequate backups of your important information. A good first step is simply to ''make'' backups in the first place!

But a robust backup solution requires you consider “defense in depth”. What happens if the machine you’ve backed-up on crashes? It’s stolen? The place burns down?

So though I have redundant backups of my information, I’ve had them distributed amongst computers strewn around my home, which leaves me vulnerable to natural or man-made disasters. The correct and robust solution is to put backups off-site. But how?

Enter “the cloud”. There are a lot of “cloud providers” offering various amounts of storage for free. I settled on two: [https://pcloud.com pCloud] which offers 10G for free, and [https://mega.nz Mega] which offers 20G free. Both of them offer paid plans as well with ''terabyte'' storage – that’s excessive for me, and I’m a cheap lad. Both also claim “zero knowledge encryption”, meaning that they cannot view your data, which is encrypted on their servers. I choose to be sceptical of any such claims, but the large amount of free storage is perfect for my needs.

So what is my system?
* Every night, a script running on one of my machines refreshes its copy of all the data I wish to preserve
* Any ''changed'' files are encrypted locally using my [https://8th-dev.com/cryptor.html ''cryptor'' app], ensuring that indeed ''only I can view'' the files’ contents
* Those newly encrypted files are uploaded to Mega
* If a USB key is in the computer, the encrypted files are also copied to it
* Once a week, all newly encrypted files that week are also uploaded to pCloud, as a secondary backup

This gives me the ability to recover from everything but my own demise. I’m making plans to recover from that, as well…

Various:
* Douglas Murray’s [https://www.thefp.com/p/douglas-murray-diary-israel-hamas-hostages-war wartime diary]
* A long but very interesting analysis: [https://www.richardhanania.com/p/israel-must-crush-palestinian-hopes “Israel Must Crush Palestinian Hopes”]
* In what’s getting to be a habit: [https://penamacorrespondent.blog/orthodoxy-is-unconsciousness/ my friend’s blog] of this past week.
* Did you know? Venezuela is [https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20231124-us-defense-officials-to-visit-guyana-amid-venezuela-row-guyanese-vp considering annexing] part of Guyana. Didn’t make the news, did it? #LetsGoBrandon!
* And the “Red Cross” [https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-775395 have been useless] and worse than useless.

Sarah and Yarin returned to The Land, just in time for the so-called “cease-fire” to cease. Welcome back! They had a great vacation, and now they have to transition back to the workaday world.

We’re supposed to have sunny and slightly warmer weather for ''shabbat'', continuing sunny until at least mid-week, perhaps raining for [https://www.britannica.com/topic/Hanukkah ''ḥannuka''].

This ''shabbat'' our menu consists of:
<br>
pita,
chicken soup with [https://www.chabad.org/recipes/recipe_cdo/aid/1567/jewish/Perfect-Matzah-Balls-Kneidlach-Recipe.htm ''kneidlach''],
meatballs, 
rice,
baked chicken,
three-bean salad,
various ''salatim'',
and apple cake.

Until next time,<br>
''shabbat shalom'' and ''ḥannuka sameaḥ''! <br>

May God grant strength and victory to our brave troops, and sorely needed wisdom to our leaders, amen!

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