I had a picture of the device since I was curious, but I spotted at Walmart, and some other stores, a Cellular/Wifi/BT gateway that was branded by some company providing facilities services. As far as I can tell, the device was intended to provide secure connectivity to some service provider. I found a similar device in the freezer section of another store.

I imagine that there is remote control/remote monitoring of all the freezers or other on-premise machinery (which, is a perfectly sound thing to do), but if the central provider doesn’t take security seriously, and stay on top of their systems operations, can easily be the target for any kind of attacks.

More practically, I suspect that everyone involved has insurance whose cost is much less than ongoing proactive security + maintenance of their systems, which is why these incidents don’t seem to instantly put these companies out of business.

This is the pretext for taking away individual’s rights to general computing – because once all the providers have guard rails and are locked out, individual users with local hardware are the last source for ‘illegal content’. “We have to scan everything you do on your local computer, or you could be doing something we don’t approve of”. https://lemmy.world/post/52743759 <-- see this story up on the front page just now. She (foolishly) thought her prompts in OpenAI were private to her, and now she’s charged with “sending a threat in a way that others can read” – we won’t be able to use our computers for private diaries or planning anymore the more they get locked down to only ‘approved’ data and programs.

And remember, it starts with CSAM, and then it moves on to “illegal content”, then “terrorist content” – and how many times has the Trump said “if you are against the president and the laws I’m enforcing, you must be a terrorist?” …

and the dialup speaker needs to be near the ears. The screech lets you know it’s working! https://soundcloud.com/stephthegeek/dial-up-modem-01

Check out AMSAT-OSCAR 7 – Closer to home, but launched in 1974, and still waking up when there’s sun to operate. It’s the oldest “operational” satellite still up there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMSAT-OSCAR_7

I would love a ‘Dont stop the music’ mode that any action that will (a) immediately play another track, or (b) reset/replace the current playlist had a simple confirmation dialog. This is my biggest annoyance with Amperfy (and most other subsonic-compatible players) – while looking for the next track to enqueue; it’s way too easy to accidentally tap a new track, rather than swiping to enqueue something else.

They’re not advocating violence, just reporting a fact. (A hammer is a tool, but also a murder weapon) But you do understand the power asymmetry of an unaccountable police force, right? And just how dangerous this is to civil society? There have been multiple accounts of excessive and incorrect deportations by ICE, with no visible effort to attempt to correct those problems. People are now using the meager tools we have left to try to enforce accountability, before there is only one last tool in the toolbox.

Can you prove that people are breaking the law by the mere collection and existence of this data?

How about those Flock ALPR cameras showing up everywhere? Can we be sure the collected data is being used in accordance with the law?

They just did this to me. How can I tell them they failed this test?

I have a bunch of ESP32’s that … I can update and replace the firmware on, if i reset it the right way with a usb cable. the web site doesn’t explain it any way how this is any worse than that…?

Seconding fetchmail. It’s configuration is quite elaborate for a whole bunch of situations. I’ve used it in a small office situation to pull email from their legacy ISP’s POP into an internal IMAP server, so they could have multiple clients sharing mailboxes. (And so they couldn’t set weak passwords on an internet-connected system :-/ )

The battery turning into a Spicy pillow is always a Concern for using laptop as an always powered on server. So even though you will be away from it, make sure that there is a way for someone to keep an eye on it, once every week or two.

That said, I have been using a dell laptop as a desk workstation (and remote use) with an uptime of 2.5 years at this point.

I also use syncthing. And it works pretty well. There is some turmoil with the android version in light of changes so the underlying sdk. And I am not sure there is an iOS syncthing that would work as well. I actually use it primarily to sync my keepass databases, and before Immich, my photos.

The photo management Immich brings makes it a nice alternative for that use case, but either way I need to have one or more servers elsewhere managing storage so I can get things off of my phone into a system I can control.

I use Immich because I have multiple devices and multiple people uploading photos to it , so we can all organize together.

Self hosting anything also gives you a lot of practice and experience (and confidence) to also self hosting anything for others, an important skill for many to have in order to have a more distributed internet.

/me pines for the days of protocol over interface. NNTP + killfiles were the bees knees. Then we could just all pick our own interface to connect to any lemmy host.

This is the first thing I have heard from her about what she’s working on since she had her “wings clipped”. Hope she is still doing good…

Revolt is kinda “centralized”. You can host your own version, but they seem to actively discourage you from doing so.

https://github.com/jgraph/drawio/blame/dev/LICENSE <-- that’s … a rather specific and recent change. Is there a story here ?

You are aware that draw.io is itself open source and self-hostable: https://github.com/jgraph/drawio ?

At $dayjob I switched from Apache to nginx 15+ years ago. It’s Callback/Event based process model ran circles around Apache’s pre-fork model at the time. It was very carefully developed to be secure, and even early on it had a good track record. Being able to have nginx handle static content without tying up a backend worker process was huge, and let us scale our app pretty well for the investment of time. Since then, Apache implemented threaded + Event based process models, Caddy, traefik, and a bunch of others have entered the scene.

TBH, I think the big thing nowadays is sane defaults, and better configuration, even automatically discovered configuration – traefik is my current favorite for discovering hosts in consul/Kubernetes/simple host definition files, but since traefik can’t directly serve files, I simply proxy from traefik to … nginx :)