I thought Debian didn’t include firmware and other binaries by default. I remember having a separate firmware CD for installs on weird RAID controllers. Did that change?

Consumer reports recently added a privacy rating to their car ratings. I glanced at it a little last year. I think it rated if you could opt out and the reach of the sharing.

I do have to say that I’m generally disappointed with the discussion on this topic every tine it comes up. The majority of responses go contrast to the question. “Don’t buy a car” or “fix up a junker” are generally not helpful if you’ve already decided that your top priority is to have a newer car. Another thread actually recommended to move to another country where you could walk everywhere. Seriously.

Most often a car purchase is a complex decision making process where you need to weigh multiple, often conflicting priorities where privacy is only one aspect. I get the impression that if people followed the advice of the majority of these comments, they’d be living in a tent off grid, hunting for food to stay alive, but living their privacy dream.

I understand your point, but there have been some successes in bringing these issues to light: City committee rejects Smart Street Lights surveillance policy in San…

There are others as well, I can’t find them now in the sea of articles. There are also large oranizations that can help to get a community organized.

I think the key is to tone down the message a bit to bring the “normies” into the conversation. Talk about a waste of tax dollars, talk about why you should care about privacy when you have nothing to hide. Talk about how these devices are misused and abused for personal gain and rarely assist in bringing criminals to accountability.

Most people don’t care about privacy but may care if their tax dollars are squandered or if their daughter had a stalker.

There are individual solutions, but of limited success. The most effective method is policy change and the most effective way to change policy is with a collection of people.

Form a concerned community member group, grow the group, approach local politicians and city council members, requesting change.

Check out the deflock and EFF web sites for inspiration.

This is the hardest but most effective method. I was able to change a speed limit in the neighborhood and close a road that was being abused as a traffic light bypass by bringing concerned community members together.

I’ve been trying to learn K8s and more recently the Gateway API. The struggles are that most Helm charts don’t know Gateway (most are barely Ingressroute) and I’m trying to find a solution to one service affecting the other gateways.when a service cannot find a pod, the httproute fails and when one route fails, the ingress fails. It’s a weird cascading problem.

Right now, I’m considering adding a secondary service to each gateway that resolves to a static error page. I haven’t looked into it yet; it cane to me in the brief moment of clarity before I fell asleep last night.

Also, I may be doing everything wrong, but I am learning and learning is fun.

I researched this a little while ago. The new protocol is licensed by Google and has not been released to the public. Also, unless everyone in the middle supports the protocol, messages are routed through Google’s network.

I settled on Signal for people who will switch and SMS for the rest. I do plug Signal when I can, like sending images between Apple & Android are degraded, but not on Signal.

I landed on Tandoor. I had a bunch of recipes on one of those web sites and they switched to a subscription model and locked me out of my recipes. I don’t remember why I chose Tandoor over Mealie, but having full ownership over my recipes is freeing.

I do on all my devices that can as a matter of practice, not for any real threat. I’m interested to learn about how to set it up and use it on a daily basis including how to do system recoveries. I guess it’s largely academic.

Once I switched to linux as my daily driver, I didn’t have a need to do piracy anymore since all the software I need is FOSS.

You’re both right. I’d do the same to jump ship before the enshitification sets in. Often, I’ve seen how innocuous policy and feature changes creep in and before you know it, the switching costs are too high.

I had an app on my phone and one day they removed the export function. I only used it for backing up my data but when they raised rates and started slamming with ads, I wanted to leave but could not take my data with me. I ended to just uninstalling and starring over elsewhere.

Also, this is exactly what happened to reddit. They cut the api first so it was harder to take your communities and saved stuff with you.

I find your parents’ mindset interesting. They trust the big companies but not the government (I assume the list is a government list). Do they know that the big companies harvest data and make it available for sale, even to the government? It’s a loophole.

I’ve been using Noscript on firefox for a while. It basically blocks any JavaScript (and other stuff) unless you specifically allow it. It’s not something that I would recommend for a casual user, because it breaks lots of sites. By using it, I’ve discovered how much nonessential stuff is jammed into your browser. Most of it is analytics and tracking. One home improvement store has over 25 scripts when less than a quarter are needed for a functioning site.

Some of the biggest offenders: offenders:

• home improvement stores
• car dealerships
• some big box retailers

Also, a shoutout to decentraleyes, a plugin to use local copies of JavaScript code so that it’s not downloaded (and reported back to) Google.

You have some good points. I’m curious about the scenario where you need encrypted communications with an untrusted party.

I guess if you are leaking insider information to the press and need to be anonymous, but then use an anonymous account. Why would you need to send information to someone but not trust them to use the information responsibly?

I’ve been wanting to try it for a while now, but I’m too cheap to buy a phone that can run it.

I am interested in compression. I may give it a try when I swap out my desktop system. I did try btrfs in it’s early, post alpha stage, but found that the support was not ready yet. I think I had a VM system that complained. It is older now and more mature and maybe it’s worth another look.

Those are some good points. I guess I was thinking about the hardware. At least where I do RAID, it’s on the controller, so that offloads much of the parity checking and such to the controller and not the CPU. It’s all probably negligible for the apps that I run, but my hardware is quite old, so maybe trying to squeeze all the performance I can is a worthwhile activity.

Generally, if a lower level can do a thing, I prefer to have the lower level do it. It’s not really a reason, just a rule of thumb. I like to think that the lower level is more efficient to do the thing.

I use LVM snapshots to do my backups. I don’t have any other reason for it.

That all being said, I’m using btrfs on one system and if I really like it, I may migrate to it. It does seem a whole lot simpler to have one thing to learn than all the layers.

I’ve got raid 6 at the base level and LVM for partitioning and ext4 filesystem for a k8s setup. Based on this, btrfs doesn’t provide me with any advantages that I don’t already have at a lower level.

Additionaly, for my system, btrfs uses more bits per file or something such that I was running out of disk space vs ext4. Yeah, I can go buy more disks, but I like to think that I’m running at peak efficiency, using all the bits, with no waste.

I am consistently disappointed to see the top posts say to not buy a car whenever news like this comes out.

Your post at least provides an alternative.

Perhaps I’ve been naieve.

I have local incremental backups and rsync to the remote. Doesn’t syncthing have incremental also? You have a good point about syncing a destroyed disk to your offsite backup. I know S3 has some sort of protection, but haven’t played with it.