From what I gather, a company is being asked to retain potential evidence during a lawsuit involving said data. Am I missing something? What’s outside the norm here?

I'm a senior with a good boss, I pretty much just ignore it. And fortunately, at least in my company, most people have done that (especially with the safety critical stuff). But management still has a way of making your life miserable when you stand your ground on this kind of thing, so it's also common to just tell them some bullshit and go about your job.

Cool. Well, the feedback until now was rather lukewarm. But that's fine, I'm now going more in a P2P-direction. It would be cool to have a way for everybody to participate in the training of big AI models in case HuggingFace enshittifies

it's an insecurity.

We have to do this ourselves in the government for every decommissioned server/appliance/end user device. We have to fill out paperwork for every single storage drive we destroy, and we can only destroy them using approved destruction tools (e.g. specific degaussers, drive shredders/crushers, etc). Appliances can be kind of a pain, though. It can be tricky sometimes finding all the writable memory in things like switches and routers. But, nothing is worse than storage arrays... destroying hundreds of drives is incredibly tedious.

I use it for my self hosted apps, but yeah, it's rarely useful for websites in the wild.

Forgive me for not explaining better. Here are the terms potentially needing explanation. Provisioning in this case is initial system setup, the kind of stuff you would do manually after a fresh install, but usually implies a regimented and repeatable process. Virtual Machine (VM) snapshots are like a save state in a game, and are often used to reset a virtual machine to a particular known-working condition. Preboot Execution Environment (PXE, aka ‘network boot’) is a network adapter feature that lets you boot a physical machine from a hosted network image rather than the usual installation on locally attached storage. It’s probably tucked away in your BIOS settings, but many computers have the feature since it’s a common requirement in commercial deployments. As with the VM snapshot described above, a PXE image is typically a known-working state that resets on each boot. Non-virtualized means not using hardware virtualization, and I meant specifically not running inside a virtual machine. Local-only means without a network or just not booting from a network-hosted image. Telemetry refers to data collecting functionality. Most software has it. Windows has a lot. Telemetry isn’t necessarily bad since it can, for example, help reveal and resolve bugs and usability problems, but it is easily (and has often been) abused by data-hungry corporations like MS, so disabling it is an advisable precaution. MS = Microsoft OSS = Open Source Software Group policies are administrative settings in Windows that control standards (for stuff like security, power management, licensing, file system and settings access, etc.) for user groups on a machine or network. Most users stick with the defaults but you can edit these yourself for a greater degree of control. Docker lets you run software inside “containers” to isolate them from the rest of the environment, exposing and/or virtualizing just the resources they need to run, and Compose is a related tool for defining one or more of these containers, how they interact, etc. To my knowledge there is no one-to-one equivalent for Windows. Obviously, many of these concepts relate to IT work, as are the use-cases I had in mind, but the software is simple enough for the average user if you just pick one of the premade playbooks. (The Atlas playbook is popular among gamers, for example.) Edit: added explanations for docker and telemetry