… mostly the other way around?

Theoretically it is possible that a compromised machine could compromise a USB stick. If you are at the point where you are having to worry about government or corporate entities setting traps at the local library? You… kind of already lost.

Which is the thing to understand. Most of what you see on the internet is, to borrow from a phrase, Privacy Theatre. It is so that people can larp and pretend they are Steve Rogers fighting a global conspiracy while necking with a hot co-worker at an Apple store. The reality is that if you are actually in a position where this level of privacy and security matters then you need to actually change your behaviors. Which often involves keeping VERY strong disconnects between any “personal” device and any “private” device.

There have been a lot of terrible (but wonderfully written) articles about journalists needing to do this because a government or megacorporation was after them. Stuff like having a secret laptop that they never even take out of a farraday cage unless they are closer than not to an hour away from wherever they are staying that night.

I think any “privacy oriented OS” is inherently a questionable (kneejerk: Stupid and reeks of stale honey) strategy in the first place.

A very good friend of mine is a journalist. The kind of journalist where… she actually deals with the shit the average person online larps and then some. And what I and her colleagues have suggested is the following:

Two flash drives

• One that is a livecd for basically any linux distro. If you are able to reboot the machine you are using and boot to this, do it. That helps with software keyloggers but obviously not hardware
• One that is just a folder full of portable installs of the common “privacy oriented” software (like the tor browser) supporting a few different OS types.

Given the option? Boot the public computer to the live image. Regardless, use the latter to access whatever chat or email accounts (that NEVER are logged into on any machine you “own” or near your home) you need.

It isn’t about being reasonable.

If you are expected to track your time to this degree (and, to make it clear, the majority of employers actively don’t want you to), there is a reason. That reason usually being different funding sources. Generally a mix of grants and clients.

And if a client or grant source finds out you are lying about those? Maybe you only had enough work to do 34 hours instead of 40 hours in one week. Would you be cool paying extra because the guy repairing your muffler had a slow week?

And if people think being proud of a tool that openly talks about what everyone else silently does isn’t a red flag for employers? Hey, its a great job market so I am sure none of that will matter.

Tracking time is fine.

Normalizing your time to the hours you were supposed to work is a massive no no. Especially if you are expected to break down your hours per project.

I mean, you obviously do it. But you never put it in writing.

Pretending the most important use of bit torrent is Linux ISO’s is the kind of cya that people giggle at.

If a candidate I am interviewing has a tool to change their reported hours to me or clients on their public GitHub? That person is radioactive no matter how many times they say “but don’t do anything naughty wink wink”

So … it is a tool to automate time fraud?

Make sure to put this front and center on your CV

I have sprinted without this being an issue so color me very confused.

Do you wear very loose fitting clothes by any chance?

CEC is pretty amazing for any relatively modern device (console, blu ray player, etc) in a “normal” setup.

The main problems are if you are a bit of a “power user” and have a receiver or something (although I have also heard issues with soundbars) with it not always being clear what audio outputs will be used. And as consoles become more and more glorified computers you can run into issues where a simple workflow like:

1. Start xbox
2. Start download of big game for later
3. Go back to “TV” to watch youtube

Results in the xbox shutting down and not actually downloading the game.

As a “power user” I just got a sofabaton (Just as mediocre and finicky as a Harmony but you won’t have forgotten that because your config is a decade old). but I keep telling myself that I should futz with my nvidia shield to see if I can use my receiver’s remote for everything instead.

That… is a really shitty meme that misses the point?

If you actually look at what the overlay exposes, the User still has the ability to pick specific channels, control volume, power, etc. All they really lose are the DVR (good example) and all of the user friendly stuff related to tv guides and the like (bad example).

I assume this is just AI engagement farming bullshit that someone fell for and posted to lemmy but… I would actually say it would make more sense if the overlay were almost inverted.

Because the Mastodon community did the same thing we do every time there is a chance to get people away from corporations (e.g. Linux vs Windows).

People were looking for an alternative. The general consensus was it was hard to really grok federation. So, of course, The Community insisted on explaining federation and why it was good while basically only commenting on the instances that had closed applications. It was the equivalent of insisting someone who wanted to try Linux for gaming NEEDS to use arch and only needs to know twenty command line operations to get up and running.

So… everyone instead just went to Bluesky and Threads where sign-up links were provided rather than directory links and manifestos.

And… I am perfectly happy with that. Lemmy has a LOT of issues where so much of the community is talking about their ex-girlfriend (reddit) all the time and we basically get constant content and engagement farming that makes no fucking sense considering the userbase.

Whereas Mastodon actually IS a really good community that feels very different from twitter/bluesky/threads. It isn’t for everyone but I very regularly have genuinely good conversations with people in the town hall/microblog format. Whereas… I am not sure if I have ever had even a meaningful conversation on lemmy (whereas I’ve probably had maybe ten on reddit over the years?).

Generally speaking, all the major instances are federated with all the other major instances.

The differences are the super tiny instances (which are generally effectively zero traffic) and the controversial instances (mostly tankies). Said controversial instances don’t want to advertise that nobody can stand them and the rest of the instances don’t want to deal with the bullshit from bringing it up again.

I think it would be a nice novelty to visualize this. But I don’t think there would be much actionable information coming out of it and , because this is The Internet, it will likely lead to harassment and brigading.

More drives is always better. But you need to understand how you are making it better.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_RAID_levels is a good breakdown of the different RAID levels. Those are slightly different depending on if you are doing “real”/hardware RAID or software raid (e.g. ZFS) but the principle holds true and the rest is just googling the translation (for example, Unraid is effectively RAID4 with some extra magic to better support mismatched drive sizes)

That actually IS an important thing to understand early on. Because, depending on the RAID model you use, it might not be as easy as adding another drive. Have three 8 TB and want to add a 10? That last 2 TB won’t be used until EVERY drive has at least 10 TB. There are ways to set this up in ZFS and Ceph and the like but it can be a headache.

And the issue isn’t the cloudflare tunnel. The issue is that you would have a publicly accessible service running on your network. If you use the cloudflare access control thing (login page before you can access the site) you mitigate a lot of that (while making it obnoxious for anything that uses an app…) but are still at the mercy of cloudflare.

And understand that these are all very popular tools for a reason. So they are also things hackers REALLY care about getting access to. Just look up all the MANY MANY MANY ransomware attacks that QNAP had (and the hilarity of QNAP silently re-enabling online services with firmware updates…). Because using a botnet to just scan a list of domains and subdomains is pretty trivial and more than pays for itself after one person pays the ransom.

As for paying for that? I would NEVER pay for nextcloud. It is fairly shit software that is overkill for what people use it for (file syncing and document server) and dogshit for what it pretends to be (google docs+drive). If I am going that route, I’ll just use Google Docs or might even check out the Proton Docs I pay for alongside my email and VPN.

But for something self hosted where the only data that matters is backed up to a completely different storage setup? I still don’t like it being “exposed” but it is REALLY nice to have a working shopping list and the like when I head to the store.

A LOT of questions there.

Unraid vs Truenas vs Proxmox+Ceph vs Proxmox+ZFS for NAS: I am not sure if Unraid is ONLY a subscription these days (I think it was going that way?) but for a single machine NAS with a hodgepodge of drives, it is pretty much unbeatable.

That said, it sounds like you are buying dedicated drives. There are a lot of arguments for not having large spinning disk drives (I think general wisdom is 12 TB is the biggest you should go for speed reasons?), but at 3x18 you aren’t going to really be upgrading any time soon. So Truenas or just a ZFS pool in Proxmox seems reasonable. Although, with only three drives you are in a weird spot regarding “raid” options. Seeing as I am already going to antagonize enough people by having an opinion, I’ll let someone else wage the holy war of RAID levels.

I personally run Proxmox+Ceph across three machines (with one specifically set up to use Proxmox+ZFS+Ceph so I can take my essential data with me in an evacuation). It is overkill and Proxmox+ZFS is probably sufficient for your needs. The main difference is that your “NAS” is actually a mount that you expose via SMB and something like Cockpit. Apalrd did a REALLY good video on this that goes step by step and explains everything and it is well worth checking out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hu3t8pcq8O0.

Ceph is always the wrong decision. It is too slow for enterprise and too finicky for home use. That said, I use ceph and love it. Proxmox abstracts away most of the chaos but you still need to understand enough to set up pools and cephfs (at which point it is exactly like the zfs examples above). And I love that I can set redundancy settings for different pools (folders) of data. So my blu ray rips are pretty much YOLO with minimal redundancy. My personal documents have multiple full backups (and then get backed up to a different storage setup entirely). Just understand that you really need at least three nodes (“servers”) for that to make sense. But also? If you are expanding it is very possible to set up the ceph in parallel to your initial ZFS pool (using separate drives/OSDs), copy stuff over, and then cannibalize the old OSDs. Just understand that makes that initial upgrade more expensive because you need to be able to duplicate all of the data you care about.

I know some people want really fancy NASes with twenty million access methods. I want an SMB share that I can see when I am on my local network. So… barebones cockpit exposing an SMB share is nice. And I have syncthing set up to access the same share for the purpose of saves for video games and so forth.

Unraid vs Truenas vs Proxmox for Services: Personally? I prefer to just use Proxmox to set up a crapton of containers/vms. I used Unraid for years but the vast majority of tutorials and wisdom out there are just setting things up via something closer to proxmox. And it is often a struggle to replicate that in the Unraid gui (although I think level1techs have good resources on how to access the real interface which is REALLY good?).

And my general experience is that truenas is mostly a worst of all worlds in every aspect and is really just there if you want something but are afraid of/smart enough not to use proxmox like a sicko.

Processor and Graphics: it really depends on what you are doing. For what you listed? Only frigate will really take advantage and I just bought a Coral accelerator which is a lot cheaper than a GPU and tends to outperform them for the kind of inference that Frigate does. There is an argument for having a proper GPU for transcoding in Plex but… I’ve never seen a point in that.

That said: A buddy of mine does the whole vlogger thing and some day soon we are going to set up a contract for me to sit down and set her up an exporting box (with likely use as a streaming box). But I need to do more research on what she actually needs and how best to handle that and she needs to figure out her budget for both materials and my time (the latter likely just being another case where she pays for my vacation and I am her camera guy for like half of it). But we probably will grab a cheap intel gpu for that.

External access: Don’t do it, that is a great way to get hacked.

That out of the way. My nextcloud is exposed to the outside world via a cloudflare tunnel. It fills me with anxiety but as long as you regularly update everything it is “fine”.

My plex? I have a lifetime plex pass so I just use their services to access it remotely. And I think I pay an annual fee for homeassistant because I genuinely want to support that project.

Everything else? I used to use wireguard (and openvpn before it) but actually switched to tailscale. I like the control that the former provided but much prefer the model where I expose individual services (well, VMs). Because it is nice to have access to my cockpit share when I want to grab a file in a hotel room. There is zero reason that anything needs access to my qbitorrent or calibre or opnsense setup. Let alone even seeing my desktop that I totally forgot to turn off.

But the general idea I use for all my selfhosted services is: The vast majority of interactions should happen when I am at home on my home network. It is a special case if I ever need to access anything remotely and that is where tailscale comes in.

Theoretically you can also do the same via wireguard and subnetting and vlans but I always found that to be a mess to provide access both locally and remotely and the end result is I get lazy. Also, Tailscale is just an app on basically any machine whereas wireguard tends to involve some commands or weird phone interactions.

We have decades of examples of people standing up for what is right or true.

Journalists get shit on because “fake news” or “they are just writing clickbait” and people actively shit on their livelihood. Activists get the shit beat out of them, are maimed for life, and often go to prison. And people post pictures on facebook where they have a background in solidarity before they take a new duck-face picture and overwrite it.

The purpose of journalists are to seek and speak truth on behalf of The People. When The People have made it clear they don’t give a shit and can’t be bothered to even read the article someone had to go into hiding for?

So why stand up and make yourself a target?

Yup. That is the problem.

Fascism is on the rise around the world. And the countries that have stood firm in the face of it? They are juicy targets for strongman leaders needing an easy win.

At the risk of showing my indoctrinated “american excellence” ass… the US is really a big factor in global security. Because (unless you are on our side) we have a ridiculously large and over funded military and love proxy wars.

The heroic military that are totally going to stand up for what is right regardless of their orders… sat with their thumbs up their asses waiting to see how Jan 6 would shake out when it was painfully obvious that the outgoing POTUS had declared war on the US Government and was attempting to lynch Congress and the VPOTUS

The Army is gonna follow orders faster than the pioneers of NASA did in the 1940s.

Even ignoring the ideological reasons to not want facebook integration: There are only so many hours in the day and so many dollars in the donation bucket. If an open source project is dedicating a disproportionate percentage of that on a feature that a significant part of the community actively do not want: That is exactly WHY you fork a project.

And once we consider the ideological and safety related reasons to not want facebook and giant corporate interests involved?

I have a lot of issue with the people who decide the answer is harassment and hate. But if enough development and organizational energy want to fork this? Fuckin’ A.

Not sure if google is particularly different but the way this works for the other services is basically low energy bluetooth scanning coupled with the phones providing their location*. So basically all the devices on that scanning/spy network periodically ping/listen for nearby devices/trackers. When it finds one, it sends a quick message to the servers with that phone’s location and the ID of the tracker. Get enough of those pings and you can triangulate the position of the tracker pretty precisely.

Which… is why this fundamentally does not work with “hacker” solutions that allegedly emphasize privacy. Because you just don’t have enough devices listening. This was painfully obvious with tile back in the day and is still an issue with Samsung in some countries.

*: Via a combination of gps, cell tower, and wifi network scanning. The less obvious part of that being wifi networks which is the majority of how interior positioning works.

I mean… bluetooth is literally broadcasting your position (sort of/it depends on the implementation). It is not at all a stretch that you should turn that off if you care about privacy. Same with not scanning for what wifi networks are available or even pinging GPS satellites (because that leaves a log). Hell… cell tower logs are a treat for cops/TLAs for a reason.

Aside from that? Good for you. If you actually follow through on that I can respect it. My point is more that this particular solution seems like the worst of all worlds.

Either you are demolishing your battery with regular phone homes to a server you hopefully control or you are relying on a push via SMS and the hope that you lose your phone somewhere you havea reception. And you still only have YOUR phone and YOUR network to track it which has significant drawbacks if you travel.

If people truly change their lives and focus on it, you can do a lot. But it does not take much, at all, to become compromised to one degree or another and people vastly underestimate the amount of redundancy. Or even the impact of a sibling or partner or even friend.

Instead, the common case is people will tweak one small aspect and think that does anything other than inconvenience them. Or, worse, they’ll watch a youtube and decide to put EVERYTHING through their vpn which… defeats the purpose because they are still one easily collated set of profiles/cookies that can trivially reveal that “Fred Smith in Afghanistan” is really “Fred Smith in North Carolina”

Which is why my approach is that there is data I very much want to protect and data I know I can’t. So I focus on understanding the former while doing what I can with the latter.

And something like this? There are probably specific niche use cases for this. But it is a product/service that fundamentally requires aggregated data. And, depending on the implementation, it is going to fuck with your battery hard.