Title is misleading. I thought this was some sort of modern-day alchemy that yields actual gold, as in this type of gold, chemical element symbol Au: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold
For smartphones, assume an always-on wiretap situation. But for laptops, it may be harder depending on how hardened your setup is, and how tight your opsec is. There is the possibility that if you're a high value target and you bought your laptop online that it could be bugged, but you would have to be someone like a drug trafficker or a journalist or some other high profile person.
You're right, Ubuntu feels bloated to me. It's subtle, but noticeable. Mint is a good lightweight alternative. 8GB is enough for everyday computing, although some people multitask with several apps open which can choke things a bit.
Ubuntu is now Winbuntu and the Microsoft tie-in there! And Linux Mint is Derived from an Ubuntu Base. But Linux Mint Debian Edition(LMDE) is directly downstream of Debian so that LMDE is the Mint developers Insurance policy should there need to be a complete break with the Ubuntu Base by Going to the Debian Base instead.
So the Mint Maintainers maintain MINT and LMDE in parallel to hedge that possibility of avoiding more than Just the Snap Store in the future should that become necessary.
'The People' when really it's mostly bots these days, and getting smarter with LLMs too. Only a few blogs/articles are written by actual humans, and something strange has happened to my cognitive abilities lately; is discerning whether an article is written by an LLM or a human. I regularly play a game called 'bot or not' now.
> How do you defend against hackers using these to attack your SaaS server?
This is a broad question. There are multiple ways to defend, besides basic security like firewalls. Blocking nefarious IPs or domains only gets you so far, as something will slip through the cracks. Try reading this: https://opsec101.org/
They keep trying to brute force a login. I block them after too many attempts but they just switch to a different IP in the same address range assigned to MS Virtual Desktop.
As explained in the original post, blocking an individual IP is ineffective and blocking the entire range is impractical because other legitimate customers use Virtual Desktop too.
