Yeah, definitely, the intensifying cold war makes me wonder if I’ll ever go back again. Doesn’t feel like tourists will really be allowed back in, in my lifetime, once things start getting really bad.

I wanted to see the great wall while I was studying in Asia.

Bringing your real phone instead of a burner phone into the PRC is just asking for your shit to get stolen. I have never brought my real phone into the PRC.

Self hosting can save a lot of money compared to Google or aws. Also, self hosting doesn’t make you vulnerable to DDOS, you can be DDOSed even without a home server.

You don’t need VLANs to keep your network secure, but you should make sure than any self hosted service isn’t unnecessarily opens up tot he internet, and make sure that all your services are up to date.

What services are you planning to run? I could help suggest a threat model and security policy.

It is illegal in Europe, but not widely enforced.

No shit. These machines are as advanced as a nuclear power plant, they’re gonna have a bit more proprietary software and security protocols than you’d think. Not as simple as just pressing “start” with these machines.

I wonder if asianometry will do a video about the software on ASML machines sometime.

Definitely! If your VPN keeps logs, is in a surveillance-friendly jurisdiction, etc, then details of your internet traffic can be revealed by your VPN. I recommend Mullvad, paid with cash, for the most security. It can also help to pick VPN servers outside of the most egregious jurisdictions, like picking EU servers over US or HK servers.

DoH is meant to hide your internet activity from your ISP/cell-provider since DNS is otherwise unencrypted. If you trust your VPN, then you can trust unencrypted DNS.

The first step in security is to answer who you’re defending against. Someone stealing your phone? A cop with a STINGRAY device? All the security decisions you make are based on your initial threat model.

Generally, home internet, wifi, and cellular data are considered safe against passers-by (assuming your wifi password is strong). However, they are also assumed to be eavesdropped on by your ISP and government. Details of your internet traffic can then also be revealed by your ISP to other people during legal action, such as if you’re being investigated for piracy.

There are ways to further protect your internet traffic from being snooped on, even from your ISP and government, by using things like HTTPS, DNS over HTTPS, and of course, VPNs.

yeah, Id recommend switching on your secondary machine, so you can try it out and use it properly, but not get frustrated if it does something you don’t expect.

It would accelerate the ongoing brain drain in Hong Kong at least, and encourage the stragglers to finally leave for more democratic countries. Banning Google in Hong Kong would be a shitshow for the CCP, but Google doesn’t have any sort of spine or ethics.

The people? Democracy really isn’t that hard.

This is gonna get American tech and American clouds banned from the EU.

Ironic considering they just banned Tiktok for doing literally this.

By default, Linux can take up to 15 seconds to write a file to disk, this is for power saving reasons. You could corrupt the last document/photo you saved, your browser profile, or your nextcloud sync.

Linux usually shuts down immediately if you don’t have any unsaved files and nothing glitches out during shut down. But yeah, windows sucks, corrupt files is probably the least of your problems using Windows.

I guess on Linux, if you run sync to write all cached files to disk, and then pull the cord, you’re probably fine.

Journaling should make sure that the file system itself doesn’t corrupt, but journaling doesn’t magically make all writes atomic. If a program is halfway through writing a file and the power is cut, that file will be corrupt.

It is very easy to corrupt files doing this.

Yeah. I honestly think 10GbaseT was a mistake, since it fragmented 10gbit and made it so expensive.

The sfp+ switches aren’t too bad, here’s an 8 port unmanaged for $150: https://www.amazon.com/MokerLink-Support-Bandwidth-Unmanaged-Ethernet/dp/B09W24RZDC/

SFP+ still pretty much requires pcie cards or home-server style hardware to use, but it’s pretty accessible. And you can buy 10GbaseT adapters for backwards compatibility for $40.

Some wifi routers are even starting to adopt SFP+, even if it’s ungodly expensive. https://www.amazon.se/TP-Link-Deco-BE85-2-pack-Tri-Band-router/dp/B0C5Y46J1W/

It’s an algorithm for determining how fast to upload packets. This article just talks about how to enable it.

Here’s the Wikipedia section about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TCP_congestion_control#TCP_BBR

The gist is that instead of only throttling upload rate based on packet loss, BBR constantly measures roundtrip delay (ping) to determine how much bandwidth is available.

To be fair, it all trickles down to home users eventually. We’re starting to see 10+gbps fiber in enthusiast home networks and internet connections. Small offices are widely adopting 100gbps fiber. It wasn’t that long ago that we were adopting 1 gigabit ethernet in home networks, and it won’t be long before we see widespread 800+ gigabit fiber.

Streaming video is definitely a big application where more bandwidth will come in handy, I think also transferring large AI models in the 100s of gigabytes may also become a large amount of traffic in the near future.

Either that or the risk of extremist terrorism from their far-right.