As a person who has been managing Linux servers for about a decade now, trust me that a few hours or days of learning docker now will save you weeks if not months in the future. Docker makes managing servers and dealing with updates trivial and predictable. Setting everything up in docker compose makes it easy to recover if something fails, it’s it’s self documenting because you can quickly see exactly how your applications are configured and running.

Most people shouldn’t self host. It’s a hobby for people who want to do it, and there are benefits, but spending 3 hours on a weekend fixing stuff is not how most people wish to spend their time. Furthermore, it’s not a good use of most people’s time. We split labor up into specialties, forcing people to do work outside their specialty causes pointless inefficiency. I agree with what other commenters have said in that a better approach would be to have more small businesses hosting federated together, and anyone not inclined to self host should just purchase service through one of those many small providers instead.

As far as I know there is only one SSD model that meets my criteria (Samsung 870 QVO 8TB), and at $520 right now so I’ve decided it’s best to wait. I’d like it to be quieter but not so badly as to spend $1k on it (need two).

How noisy are these? I have a pair of shucked WD drives that should be equivalent to reds, and they’re pretty noisy in my otherwise quiet home office. Given they’re only 8TB, upgrading them to SSDs for full silence is something in considering as soon as the pricing and availability permits.

Blocking a large messaging platform because a minority of people are using it for piracy, of all things, seems extremely disproportionate

Glad we both leaned something :)

That makes sense. Companies with no presence in the EU can likely skirt the rules, but any large company with an EU presence will be compelled to follow them.

On that page you linked, they say “So far, the EU’s reach has not been tested, but no doubt data protection authorities are exploring their options on a case-by-case basis.” So it hasn’t really been tested yet it seems. It’s true that there are extradition treaties and interpol that aid in cross-border prosecution, but that tends to be used primarily when the alleged crime happened in the prosecuting country’s jurisdiction, or the alleged crime is handled similarly in both countries. A GDPR violation by a US company wouldn’t be considered a crime at all in the US, so it’s entirely possible that they might decline to assist in prosecution.

That’s a really interesting point, has it been tested in court? The article is about US companies and US websites so I figured EU law was irrelevant, but I am curious to see if the EU can claim jurisdiction for actions foreign companies take outside the EU, regardless of if they have any official EU presence.

Subpoenas are tools the government uses to compel a private entity to provide information. This isn’t that though, this is one private entity asking another private entity to just give them data. It’s not a legal case, and because of our non-existant privacy regulations in the US, Reddit is free to just hand over this information, or not if they want. No crime has to even be alleged, Reddit can just hand that information out.

I don’t know if this would solve your problem, but if you’re gonna run Ethernet to wherever this device is, consider power over Ethernet. Common boards like the raspberry pi and others can be powered over PoE either with an adapter or in some cases directly. And if your switch doesn’t support PoE, an injector can be had for under $20.

Getting out of a VM reliably is not usually trivial, and VM escapes are usually designed to target specific configurations rather than an arbitrary deployment. A VM with a minimum amount of shared resources is usually a reasonable security boundary unless you think the malware you’re analyzing has hypervisor-specific 0 days.

That’s not even what 12ft.io was. It wasn’t scraping anything, it was just a redirect to the google web cache. Importantly, it was also accessible, something that anyone could use without installing anything.

It’s a bit more complicated than that. Your IP can identify you still, if there are few users connecting from that IP. VPNs reduce the efficacy of IP based tracking because they allow you to connect via many different addresses, and every one of those addresses will have hundreds of thousands of users on a given day. It adds a lot of noise that makes any pattern identification useless.

I’ve gotten good mileage out of just an Ubuntu live image. If the network is working you can install packages via apt like normal, but they include a lot of the basics already.

Blink is open source, but it’s more in a look-but-don’t-touch sort of way. Google uses their position to push their own standards without consulting others. This has the effect of making the web less open, since it is more closely tied to a single implementation.

It doesn’t really compare to Linux very well, as it’s very rare for an application to only support linux unless it’s very niche or for some reason tied to Linux. You don’t go to some government service site and have it show a banner “sorry, we only tested this on Linux, everyone else use that.”