Yeah. This is totally getting nuked by the admins. Also, Gritty don’t need a guillotine: he got feet.

And the security in DC and on the capitol building is very much going to be the “shoot first, plant antifa flags later” variety the moment there is a sign of ANY mass protesting. And considering there are semi-credible theories that the Fifth is a trap to begin with…

AI mostly lies to us because it is trained on data containing lies, misinformation, and nonsense.

I have no idea why that would feel like a pertinent thing to say. Hmm.

Yeah. This isn’t the first time the news app and the core nextcloud updates have fought each other in weird and mysterious ways (for me or others). I forget how I solved it last time (I think it was a similar case of needing to manually update to bleeding edge and then tweak things) but… I just don’t care anymore.

I don’t know who is right or wrong in how nextcloud is maintained (my instinct is the nextcloud devs because… have you seen nextcloud? but also, most apps don’t have this recurring problem). But at this point, the benefits I get out of it are largely gone. And when so many issues boil down to “We need more people and resources to maintain this”, it kind of feels like getting off the train BEFORE it crashes rather than after.

I’m on the alpha and it still won’t update any of my feeds. And going through the github issues it is basically summed up as “We will do another stable release once we have a frontend developer” which is basically never. So, at best, it will work until it doesn’t and then I have to fix it myself yet again and… yeah.

And if my choice is to run an older version of nextcloud to support one app? Hell no.

No. There is every reason to “defend yourself”. The key is to actually be aware of what research and efforts are out there and minimizing your risk profile any time you are dealing with a black box.

I mean, it is known that people can pick locks. Do you plug your ears every time you hear someone talk about how doors can be compromised? Or do you give up on everything and remove every single deadbolt in your home?

Or… do you do a bit of research and figure out what you can do to make your home harder to break into. Whether it is sturdier screws, a reinforced doorjam, or other methods?

I can’t speak to monero specifically

But:

• Why aren’t they catching more criminals? They are. They just are finding alternate sources of evidence. Dick Wolf shows love to talk about how cops need to protect themselves from any poison fruit and blah blah blah. The reality is that they immediately go to the poison fruit and use that to make a plausible excuse for why they investigated something else that can confirm information they got from the illegal source. If you’ve ever wondered why they would think to investigate a random unrelated company that ends up being the smoking gun…
• Why didn’t anyone claim the bounty? Because the CIA and the like don’t want people to know they compromised it?

Back in my pure research days it was always fun to guess what the latest “big thing” was actually about. It was especially fun when you would be looking for funding opportunities and see really weird stuff that made no sense for the org sponsoring it but would have made perfect sense for a different 3LA.

It was ALSO real fun to totally never notice when certain funding opportunities dried up and then there was a big push in the news about how we need to outlaw technology those opportunities totally didn’t already compromise.

Like, for the better part of a decade The Big Thing was graph analysis techniques. And the number of kids who had no idea they were basically writing algorithms to process social media (especially twitter) was downright sad. And the people who DID realize what their work was geared toward? They applied for jobs where they got paid a lot more to do exactly that without needing to pretend it is actually about data storage technologies or optimizing cell tower load.

And… let’s just say that most of those algorithms ALSO apply toward cryptocurrencies and transaction logs (since they had great applications for bank transactions…) and even doing a number on tumblers and so forth.

While I agree this definitely feels like more of a threat than an action, it IS worth understanding the many times that tor nodes have been compromised. Exit nodes are a well documented mess (and have many of the same vulnerabilities normal VPNs do) but eavesdropping and traffic analysis are also probabilities based upon how much of the network any given org has access to.

If that NGO was doing hinky stuff or just doing a sloppy job? Those cops might actually have a LOT of actionable data that just needs a bit of processing.

Which is why it is always important to understand what your risks and benefits from a privacy related tool are. People often think “I’ll just put everything through a vpn/tor” which DRASTICALLY increases their risk profiles. But they also don’t understand how tor works well enough to even know what it gives them over a traditional vpn (as opposed to “Dark Web” stuff which is a different mess).

Yup.

It is not an exoneration of the average soldier. A lot did some really heinous shit… like all soldiers in all wars. But a lot were also just there because they were drafted and had no choice. And that is what investigations are for.

People like the black and white of “You wore a uniform, you are pure evil”. And governments ESPECIALLY love that and a lot of media has been funded to specifically reinforce that so it is super easy to Other the other guys (We have always been at war with Eastasia and all that). But when you actually think things through? What is the difference between a conscript terrified in their bunk at night and a civillian who gleefully makes shells and tanks in a factory?

All of which is kind of moot. Because, to reference the great dril: You do not “gotta hand it to them” to ISIS, Nazi German, or Stalin and his cronies in the USSR.

While there is a lot of argument (in both directions) on the culpability of the average german soldier to the Nazis: The way you punish that is through trials. I hear Nuremburg had a few of those.

This was russia abducting enemy combatants and using them as slave labor for a decade. And, like most of stalin’s purges and enslavements, had very little to do with whatever crimes the slaves were accused of.

Except they aren’t particularly well known. I am not even sure how many people even remember “Leave Britney alone” anymore. Let alone the name of the person who was in the video (if they ever knew). If you were to look up whatever Scumbag Steve’s legal name was, I would stare at you and be confused. If you say “Scumbag Steve” I instantly remember that picture.

So, in this case, “Cara Cunningham went into pornography after her viral Leave Britney Alone” video would be the non-transphobic version of that headline. It conveys all the information required.

A good example is Elliot Page where things get murky and there often is a need to acknowledge he transitioned because, otherwise, it makes portrayals like Juno and Shadowcat and the like confusing. So the common phrase I hear, when it is relevant, is “Elliot Page, in work prior to his transition, portrayed a teenager who made the mistake of letting Michael Cera stick it in her…”

But here? It adds nothing.

Shit on people for what they do, not for what they are.

jonathan majors is (allegedly?) a domestic abusing piece of shit. Yet I didn’t see a massive swarm of people insisting we need to start calling him the n-word.

Yet when a trans person is in the media (also I am not sure how Cara is an asshole in this situation, but I have not followed her in the slightest), everyone suddenly decides it is their civic duty to be as transphobic as possible.

Which mostly just says a lot about them.

Pronouns are independent of using someone’s deadname.

I do admit I probably should have checked to see what Cara’s pronouns are (apologies if they are not she/her). But my general rule of thumb is that if we are talking about someone transitioning and people being weird about it: Assume they use whatever pronouns they present as until told otherwise. Because in that context, using gender neutral-ish pronouns (because “they/them” very much highlights the limits of the English language) implies they are something in between.

I was going to go into explaining how there is a very big difference between “Hey, remember Steve? We hung out together a few years back? She is Susie now” and “Hey this random person none of us ever met used to be a dude!”

But you have made it abundantly clear that you think there is an obligation for people to warn people about who is trans and who isn’t. So… go fuck yourself, transphobe.

I don’t because it is not my place to tell.

That said: porn star Cara Cunningham was the star of the leave Britney alone meme.

The one circumstance where it is okay is when you want to deadname someone?

The only interesting fact here is that someone transitioned into who they actually are.

This thread is already “guess who’s trans” and is the definition of deadnaming.

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.

Also: As long as your battery is not dead dead (which, barring the freakest of freak occurences, comes with a lot of warning), just having a jump starter in your emergency kit covers it. Pop the trunk (which can be REALLY annoying on modern cars with only partially dead batteries…), grab it, and jump your car. Bonus points is you don’t need to frantically leap into the driver’s seat before you crash into a parked car.

If you truly must use your wired headphones with your cell phone? They make some really nice small form factor USB C to audio jack adapters. Hell, saw a few that were cable+adapter+AudiophileApprovedDAC for what that is worth.