• 5 Posts
  • 51 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • Similar to others, I do this but the reverse direction. I have a Pi with HDD at a friend’s house. On a timer, it wakes up at 3am, boots to a VPN and initiates an rsync (pull) with it’s twin Pi at my place. When the sync is done, it powers down or the timer cuts power at 9am.

    Other than clock drift due to power outages, I’ve had no issues.

    I have a directory that i can put scripts into and the remote Pi will execute anything in this directory after the sync and before the shutdown. Logs from the rsync or scripts are pushed back to a different directory on the local Pi.





  • This just means that it’s not about protecting citizens or vulnerable individuals. The fact that the law won’t say the true reason likely means that the real reason is unpopular or at a minimum something that nobody can get behind.

    I saw something in The Oatmeal line ago about pairing abstract ideas with concrete ones. IIRC, the example was to tie Bald Eagle extinction to Twinkies (in the US, presumably) such that if bald eagles go extinct, so do Twinkies. It’d be useful to pair the right to privacy with another right, such as the right to free speech (in the US, for example). That way, if these types of laws pass, so would free speech, something that most people seem to value.




  • 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.



  • 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.




  • 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’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.