• 0 Posts
  • 28 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

help-circle


  • I’m a big fan of cheap (as in ~$10/yr vps) and reverse proxy over wireguard. My home ip isn’t exposed and I’m able to quickly spin new containers up by updating my reverse proxy config and adding a wireguard peer.

    I keep two VPSs- one as reverse proxy for all my miscellaneous services and another solely for email. The latter port forwards raw traffic over wireguard to my email server container. That way, even if the VPS gets compromised, my personal data remains secure.

    I end up paying ~ $30/yr (+ whatever I’m paying in electricity) for domain + VPS. It’s a bit more involved than tailscale, etc, but I’m willing to put in a little extra work to make sure I’m not at the mercy of some company getting up to some rent-seeking bullshit.




  • The only option that fits your budget today I can think of would be picking up one of the old xeon combos off of AliExpress. I spent like $100 on a MB+CPU+64GB DDR4 combo with a 2880 v4 I think. 14c/28t at any rate. You can probably grab a case/power supply/video card used for under $50 on eBay.

    Please note that I’m not saying that this is a good option; it took a lot of fiddling for me to get mine running smoothly. But if you’ve got more time and patience than money, it might work for you.


  • Doesn’t this only put a (statistical) limit on how cheaply a civilization can launch planet-ending attacks? It may well be feasible for a civilization to aim and accelerate a mass to nearly the speed of light in order to protect itself from a future threat. It doesn’t necessarily follow it would be feasible or desirable to spend the presumably nontrivial resources needed to do so on every planet where simple life is detected.

    Add to this the fact that, at least I understand it, evidence of our current level of technological sophistication (e.g. errant radio waves) attenuates to the point of being undetectable with sufficient distance and the dark forest becomes a bit more viable again.

    Personally, I don’t like it as an answer to the Drake equation, but I think that it fails for social rather than technological/logical reasons. The hypothesis assumes a sort of hyper-logical game theory optimized civilization that is a. nothing whatsoever one our own and b. unlikely to emerge as any civilization that achieves sufficient technological sophistication to obliterate another will have gotten there via cooperation.


  • Since before it was the CIA. Open Source in this context isn’t about software licensing, it’s about gleaning everything you can about an adversary from publicly available information without infiltrating anything.

    A non-intelligence example of this would speculating on what products a company is working on based on their job postings.

    To bring it full circle, one can glean from this posting that the CIA is looking to hire someone to troll the internet for folks to target for further intelligence gathering. Business as usual.





  • Seriously, what’s with all the Mozilla hate on Lemmy? People bitch about almost everything they do. Sometimes it feels like, because it’s non-profit/open-source, people have this idealized vision of a monastery full of impoverished, but zealous, single-minded monks working feverishly and never deviating from a very tiny mission.

    Cards on the table, I remain an AI skeptic, but I also recognize that it’s not going anywhere anytime soon. I vastly prefer to see folks like Mozilla branching out into the space a little than to have them ignore it entirely and cede the space to corporate interests/advertisers.





  • I think ChromeOS has its place, i.e. institutional settings and users with minimal tech literacy. I do IT for a non profit that employs and helps folks coming out of prison after long terms (many of whom have literally never touched a computer in their lives). As much as I dislike many of Google’s practices, Chromebooks make our work possible. I can’t imagine trying to singlehandedly manage hundreds of Windows/Mac/Linux systems by myself, to say nothing of teaching the additional intricacies. Is chromeos my ideal daily driver, absolutely not. However, it’s an incredibly accessible tool that allows folks with limited tech expertise and limited budgets to engage with the modern infrastructure of life.


  • However, extensions using Manifest V3 can still update some filters the old way, without a full update to the extension and a review process by Google. These are called “dynamic rules,” and starting in Chrome 121 (which arrives in January, several months before Manifest V3 becomes mandatory), up to 30,000 dynamic rules are allowed if they are simple “block,” “allow,” “allowAllRequests,” or “upgradeScheme” rules.

    Maybe the filter rules required specifically for YouTube don’t work with those rule formats, I don’t know! If they’re not, then Google still allows an additional 5,000 rules with more broad capabilities. Either way, the statement “whenever an ad blocker wants to update its blocklist […] it will have to release a full update and undergo a review” is not true and can be easily disproven by checking the Chrome developer documentation, Mozilla’s documentation, or a blog post that Google published a month ago.

    Perhaps my reading comprehension is off here, but I don’t follow the logical jump being made here. My only guess is that the author is reading claims regarding the need for a full extension update to update block rules as meaning that the extension update & review are needed for any/all updates to the filter rules. That seems a rather pedantic and ungenerous reading to me. Especially when considering that the impact on users is the same if an update to those 5,000 rules is needed to effectively block the most frequently encountered and obtrusive ads.

    Regardless, I think I’ll take my info from the folks developing these tools rather than someone who admits to not understanding how ad blocking works before acting on their urge to correct “someone who’s wrong on the internet.” 🙄



  • It’s not that I care what they’re made of. Here they’re required to charge 10¢/bag. I would happily take a paper bag. The thing I don’t like is being treated like an extremely petty criminal.

    As an aide though, everything I’ve read supports the conclusion that the bag bans only lead to more waste. IIRC, a generous estimate would mean you need to reuse a bag at least 20x in order to break even on resource usage… Which basically never happens. It’s an excellent example of a feel good solution that sounds good until you run the numbers. ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

    That said, I’d be perfectly happy to see us eliminate almost all uses of disposable plastics.