Thanks for that link. That issue somehow didn't come up when I researched the removal of append-only. The only hint I had was the vague "remove remainders of append-only and quota support" in the change log without any further information.

> So, I left the Firecuda in the freezer at -18C for 30 minutes.

Just scrolled through the Ontrack website:

    Data recovery myths: why you should avoid the temptation of a DIY repair
    Suggestions we’ve seen online that definitely _will not_ help you recover your data include:
    - Putting your hard drive in the freezer overnight

:')

This isnt a hard drive. It worked because cold causes components to shrink and pulled BGA ram chip closer to the board. Cold spray is standard practice when diagnosing electronics defects.

Even when it's midnight and the clock hands point to 12, it's just 0:00 in our heads. Of course when thinking an talking about time, sometimes the numbers 13 to 23 are replaced with their 1 to 11 counterparts and if it's ambiguous, a "in the morning", "in the afternoon", "in the evening" is added. But there's a clear distinction between "0" and "12". When someone says "12 o'clock", it's always 12 noon and never 12 midnight, since that would be "0 o'clock".

The fly mode reminds me of the 3D scenes from the movie "Hackers" from 1995 where they "flew" through the system looking for interesting files

Hack the planet!

Also the MS Excel simulator Easter egg.

Is this VM like a DigitalOcean or Linode VM with storage attached and the customer is fully responsible for it or is this VM managed by rsync.net like the normal storage accounts?

No. Yes.

There's actually a name for that: pepper

Instead of a salt, which is random for each entry and has to be stored along the hash, one single pepper is added to each password before hashing and kept secret.