I've been browsing through new as a way of finding communities to join. The NSFW stuff in that feed is unideal but easy enough to ignore, whereas content that could send me to jail is a whole different ballgame.

The white car isn't parked in a disabled spot. Its parked in front of the ramp for a wheelchair, which isn't a space

Thats good to hear, will edit the OP to add it. I do think my post is a fair representation of the original update though.

I think you're misunderstanding which ramp I mean. Looking between the wheels of the white car, it looks like there's a ramp the goes from the parking lot up on to the sidewalk. The white car would prevent a person using a wheelchair getting onto the sidewalk.

I've always got them from eBay.

The T and X series are the high-end ones. Between those it mostly depends on what size of laptop you're looking for. Its worth checking a guide for how you replace the SSD/RAM/battery - some of the newer ones have these soldered in place, which means you're stuck with whatever it originally came with.

Personally, I think the sweet spot is around 4 years old. By that point they're pretty cheap (maybe 10% of the original RRP), and going for older ones doesn't save you much more money. I recently got an X390 and it's doing everything I need from a laptop

DNS = Domain Name System. This is used to lookup an IP address (e.g. 123.234.54.32) from a domain name (e.g. lemmy.ml). A DNS query is one of the first things your computer does when you visit a site.

Plain DNS is unencrypted, which means that anyone with the ability to read your requests (e.g. your ISP) can see the names of sites that you're visiting.

TLS = Transport Layer Security. This is a protocol that's used to create an encrypted connection between your device and another one, in this case the DNS server. When this is used, the content of your DNS requests is hidden. Your ISP can still see that you're talking to the DNS server, but not what you're saying to it.

TLS also allows your device to cryptographically verify the identity of the DNS server. Without it, someone with the ability to modify your connection could change the responses from the DNS server. That would allow them to send you back the IP address of a server they control, rather than the real servers IP.

They pay Microsoft for access to the bing index

The problem is that in my country those drawings are legally the same thing as child porn. As I said in the OP, I'm not making a moral judgement here, but as a purely practical matter that content is concerning to me.

You're right, my bad. (Source: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.html)

The x390/x280 are the same era as these but smaller, so might be a better fit here. The X390 has soldered RAM though, so I'd look for the 16GB version if you can find it (there's not much of a price difference used)

I wouldn't bother with the concept of de-federation in a beginners guide. One of the most confusing bits of the fediverse to new users is picking a server. For most users, the one they pick doesn't really matter, but talking about defederation makes it sound like a really important choice.

In my mind there's a big difference between NSFW and child porn, and where I am, that content is considered to be child porn. I'm happy to deal with filtering NSFW content for myself, but I don't want to risk CP.

The reason I phrased the OP as a question was that I suspect most users here will have a similar view to me and be in favor of blocking servers hosting CP. If that isn't the case I'll happily go find another instance, I don't want to enforce my boundaries on everyone else.

The problem with that approach is that it puts users here in legal jeopardy. Right now if I browse "All" rather than "Local" I'm risking jail time