Jason2357
@Jason2357@lemmy.ca
- Comment on Self hosting Sunday! What's up, selfhosters? 7 hours ago:
Your perspective aligns with a lot of self-hoisters who run things on rpi’s and such, but not the “home labbers”. Also, see the pubnix, tildeverse, smol web, indie web, and to some extent the retro computing communities. You are definitely not alone!
- Comment on Create a retention period for online backup storage 3 days ago:
Restic is great, and the de-duplication between snapshots is amazingly good. Same content in different files (e.g. tar files of linux systems) take very little space like magic). Backrest is a nice web frontend for it.
Note that you should use some retention features of your provider to manage the risk of ransomware deleting your backups.
- Comment on CHAT CONTROL 2.0 THROUGH THE BACK DOOR – Breyer warns: "The EU is playing us for fools – now they’re scanning our texts and banning teens!" 4 days ago:
I think the strategy used the world-over, is to surveil everyone and build network graphs. You may work extremely hard to secure your device and communications, but the algorithms will build up a dossier on you based on all of the people you associate with who are less capable or motivated. Machine learning is insanely good at filling in missing data in an information rich dataset.
- Comment on CHAT CONTROL 2.0 THROUGH THE BACK DOOR – Breyer warns: "The EU is playing us for fools – now they’re scanning our texts and banning teens!" 4 days ago:
On the other hand, we live in a golden age of private, end-to-end encrypted communications tools. There are literally too many to list here. The problem is our end-points are extremely vulnerable to surveillance now.
Also, the PGP web of trust was a pretty terrible idea for anyone concerned about authoritarian governments. Especially “key parties” that network based on government IDs. They also barely worked in practice anyway. Web-key discovery actually has decent UX, despite being tied to a purchased domain rather than a drivers license. It works fine for people you don’t know, but know by their domain. For people you know, exchanging keys via QR code or verifying keys via some hash out of band has become standard.
- Comment on CHAT CONTROL 2.0 THROUGH THE BACK DOOR – Breyer warns: "The EU is playing us for fools – now they’re scanning our texts and banning teens!" 4 days ago:
I would be terrified of using a bluetooth mesh network in a situation where private, encrypted communications are illegal. That would be literally walking around transmitting your intent. It’s a great idea in a free country though.
In a dystopia, you want to blend in. Something like deltachat has the right idea there - you have to look like boring email on the network. Maybe even layer on stenography -sending boring emails with cat pictures, but your messages are hidden inside them.
Honestly, I would probably go with sneakernet. A microsd card can be hidden very easily, are difficult to detect electronically, transport virtually unlimited text, and be encrypted in-case the mule gets caught to prevent networks being exposed. The latency is just a necessary evil.
- Comment on The Economist on using phrenology for hiring and lending decisions: "Some might argue that face-based analysis is more meritocratic" […] "For people without access to credit, that could be a blessing" 4 days ago:
Usually these models are trained on past data, and then applied going forward. So whatever bias was in the past data will be used as a predictive variable. There are plenty of facial feature characteristics that correlate with race, and when the model picks those because the past data is racially biased (because of over-policing, lack of opportunity, poverty, etc), they will be in the model. Guaranteed. These models absolutely do not care that correlation != causation. They are correlation machines.
- Comment on The Economist on using phrenology for hiring and lending decisions: "Some might argue that face-based analysis is more meritocratic" […] "For people without access to credit, that could be a blessing" 4 days ago:
I cant imagine a model being trained like this /not/ end up encoding a bunch of features that correlate with race. It will find the white people, then reward its self as the group does statistically better.
- Comment on Passkeys Explained: The End of Passwords 6 days ago:
That’s not the biggest disadvantage “if used properly.” Any account you have should get a passkey on every device you own. Each device has it’s own passkey system. If you have an iPhone, yeah, you get an apple passkey, but then if you have a windows laptop, you have a microsoft passkey, a FLOSS system will have it’s own, and so on. You are already on whatever system would contain the passkey and can easily add different ones each time you get a new device.
The biggest issue is that most people use a small number of devices (including many who use 1). Passkeys work best if you have many devices, so if you lose one, you just use another to access your services. If you have 1, you need to use recovery codes (and people don’t save them).
- Comment on Passkeys Explained: The End of Passwords 6 days ago:
How many good passwords can you memorize? I can maintain 2-3 in my head long term, especially if only used rarely, and you can be phished if you are typing it in. Not tenable for online accounts. The only real comparison with security parity is a password manager + 2fa generated on-device, compared with passkeys. In both cases, you have “strong” password, no re-use, resiliency to fishing, and requires both “something you know and something you have.” I think a password manager is slightly more usable, but I’m not convinced either is a “good” experience yet.
- Comment on U.S. Tech Layoffs Hit Two-Decade High in October 6 days ago:
We have had more outages in our corporate tech services in the last month than the last year before that. Between AWS, Azure, and Teams issues, it’s been crazy.
- Comment on 1 week ago:
This comment prompted me to look for a picture of it. Nothing I can find, except in the background behind a baby picture of my now-in-university baby when I was apparently debugging the network connection:
- Comment on 1 week ago:
There was a time when I had an old desktop packed full of spinning hard drives in my living room under a CRT television! Yes that works, but a NAS in the furnace room that is accessible from “smart TVs” and everyone’s mobile devices is pretty nice. No more fan noise either.
- Comment on 1 week ago:
While true, neither backups nor checksums are exclusive to hosting anything.
- Comment on 1 week ago:
Mainly just multi-device access.
- Comment on 10 Richest Americans Have Gained $700 Billion in Wealth Since Trump Reelection 1 week ago:
They also never hear no. No struggle in life and people just become playthings. That breaks your brain - even if they weren’t already broken, which they would have had to be to become a billionaire in the first place guilt-free.
- Comment on The Future of Advertising Is AI Generated Ads That Are Directly Personalized to You 1 week ago:
Because you are not the customer of the ad betworks. They are marketing bs to ad buyers, where you actually viewing the ad is merely incedental.
- Comment on The Future of Advertising Is AI Generated Ads That Are Directly Personalized to You 1 week ago:
Yes. Because targeted advertising is just selling something in it’s self. It was always a scam, but the mark os businesses that buy into the idea.
- Comment on The Future of Advertising Is AI Generated Ads That Are Directly Personalized to You 1 week ago:
Also the eugenics stuff. Yeah, it was just a low-effort way to set up the premis, but eww (and also very incorrect). They had to make sleepwaling into that kind of thing seem plausible with some explanation. Instead, we didn’t actually need that.
- Comment on Yunohost, CasaOS, or Cosmos? 2 weeks ago:
I see that cosmos advertises running your apps on a vpn built-in. That might be worth looking into. When I switched to self-hosting everything on my “tailnet” and closed incoming ports, a lot of the nice features of Yunohost for maintaining DNS and certs for the various apps stopped being that useful. In this day and age, I think being able to self-host and experiment within a safe VPN environment instead of on the open internet is the way to go.
- Comment on Aldi just launched its own £16.99 rival to Ring's battery video doorbell – and it's completely subscription-free | TechRadar 2 weeks ago:
Thanks, I’ll take a look.
- Comment on Every single time I think of restructuring my homelab storage. What do you use for storage engines and how does it benefit you? 2 weeks ago:
Hot take: For personal use, I see no value at all in “availability,” only data preservation. If a drive fails catastrophically and I lose a day waiting for a restore from backups, no one is going to fire me. No one is going to be held up in their job. It’s not enterprise.
However, redundancy doesn’t save you when a file is deleted, corrupted, ransom-wared or whatever. Your raid mirror will just copy the problem instantly. Snapshots and 3,2,1 backups are what are important to me because when personal data is lost, it’s lost forever.
I really do think a lot of hobbyists need to focus less on highly available redundancy and more on real backups. Both time and money are better spent on that.
- Comment on Aldi just launched its own £16.99 rival to Ring's battery video doorbell – and it's completely subscription-free | TechRadar 2 weeks ago:
Do you have a recommendation for consumer-priced outdoor cameras/doorbells? Seems like a minefield.
- Comment on U.S. agencies back banning top-selling home routers on security grounds 2 weeks ago:
I agree, but for the reasons above, it’s a terrible outcome for everyone on the internet. The number of people who will keep their router up to date with security patches are abysmal. Fix the ISPs and it would work, but you can’t fix the situation where the majority of residential humans suck at managing routers.
- Comment on U.S. agencies back banning top-selling home routers on security grounds 2 weeks ago:
Yes, this really is a situation where ISP managed devices could really be the right option for most -if they weren’t such terrible companies.
- Comment on International Criminal Court to ditch Microsoft Office for European open source alternative 2 weeks ago:
The ICC is one of those orgs where not having their data sitting on silicon valley servers is a big friggin’ deal, and they should have probably thought of that years ago.
- Comment on YouTube is taking down videos on performing nonstandard Windows 11 installs 2 weeks ago:
If that story is at all true, I feel so bad for that kid regarding so much more than the OS on his computer. I honestly hope you have thought about the potential future circumstance that you need to take on an abused teenager.
- Comment on Python Foundation rejects $1.5M grant with no-DEI strings 2 weeks ago:
a) the wording makes it legally ambiguous what exactly would constitute violating the text. If it just said “comply with anti-discrimination laws,” that would be one thing.
b) It applies to the whole organization, not just the group accepting and applying the grant, making it very challenging to meet the requirement.
c) Unlike just about any other grant, the funds can be clawed back in the future if something was violated. This is not normal for a grant, and puts the entire organization’s existence in jeopardy if they suddenly find themselves owing millions of dollars that had already been spent.
It’s very likely their legal council told them under no circumstances should they accept the terms.
- Comment on Python Foundation rejects $1.5M grant with no-DEI strings 2 weeks ago:
Besides the anti-woke bullshit, it’s just a bad idea to accept. It is absolutely not normal for a grant to have stipulations that if you violate some vaguely defined criteria somewhere in your organization, it can be clawed back at a later time. That’s a huge liability for an organization to take on that they may suddenly owe a million dollars some time in the future.
- Comment on Python Foundation rejects $1.5M grant with no-DEI strings 2 weeks ago:
They do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI, or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws.
Try reading that again. There’s an “or” in that sentence.
- Comment on Yo, fire fox what the fuck? 2 weeks ago:
Upvotes for curmudgeons.
