irotsoma

There are three points I could make:

1. Most software that is not free these days is also stealing all your private data. The value in these applications is generally greatly reduced, and in many cases, truly free alternatives exist, so the need to pirate should be much reduced from the past.

2. Where the first point doesn’t apply, there is usually a reason. Either the company has used their monopoly powers to force people to use their software in order to do their job or to interact with government agencies (Adobe is one that often comes to mind). In this case, the ethics of the situation IMHO mean that pirating is OK. If the company is doing unethical things to force you to buy something, then doing something unethical to not pay for it is an exception in my opinion. The person would not be buying the software if they weren’t forced to and purchases should not be forced.

3. Access for the poor is another issue where I don’t see this as an issue. The poor will never be able to afford the software, so no one is losing money on the sale and it only benefits the company to have people using it if it’s a locally running application. There may be some concerns if there are essential services involved that require servers or other systems that have to be maintained by the vendor, but otherwise, Windows having been pirated for decades made it ubiquitous. Without that, poor people likely would never have touched Windows and would have learned Linux or Mac or something else instead and Windows wouldn’t have as many people locked in as it does now. So, for the poor, assuming it’s software that runs locally, I see no issues from an ethical standpoint in general.

These are just my opinions, but I’m not alone. And this is not to be used as justification for specific actions, just very general points about the ethics of software piracy. For reference, I’ve done a lot of research on software ethics from both the user and vendor side and used to run a nonprofit on this subject.

There’s a plugin for compose, but podman itself does have some differences here and there. I’m starting to migrate my own stuff as Docker is getting more money hungry. Womder if they’ll try to IPO in a few years. Seems like that’s what these kinds of companies do after they start to decline from alienating users. Just wish that portainer and docker hadn’t killed all the GUIs for docker and swarm was better supported.

The company i work for has also required us to migrate from Docker as the hub and desktop app are no longer totally free. I expect more and more limitations will show up on the free versions as usually is the case with companies like this.

Depends on the carrier and the specific deal. I have a Pixel 7 Pro from T-Mobile. And it was able to be unlocked after one year of service in good standing. T-Mobile has traditionally been pretty good about that, though that kind of thing often shifts once companies have major mergers. And the Sprint merger screwed them up in a lot of ways that are still working their way down to customers losing services and features.

For domain registration? I don’t see much of an issue. I also use their DNS services, but not caching or proxying or anything that would allow them access to any data in flight or info on connections to my servers or anything like that. I’m not trying to be anonymous, though, just private.

Most companies stopped making both the discs and the drives/players. Not a long term strategy.

Really? I have had my legal name in my account and my common name on my shipping address on Amazon for ages. And I’ve shipped gifts from Amazon for over a decade with the name of the recipient.

If the meter is plugged into the UPS, then the UPS has nothing to do with the power flowing into the meter. Power is “pulled” not “pushed” to devices in that a device supplying power can limit the amount of power provided, but can’t increase it beyond what the devices request.

Just like with plumbing. The water company can’t force your faucets to open and use more water. Now they could increase pressure and break pipes, similarly the UPS could provide the wrong voltage and short or burn out wires or devices causing them to draw more, but that is unlikely to be the issue here. As long as voltage is constant, amperage (the other component in wattage) is pulled, not pushed.

What you’re seeing in the input load, if it matches what is flowing out of the meter, is some device requesting more power and thus more power flowing into the UPS to be passed to those devices, not the UPS forcing something to use power which isn’t possible as explained above, or the UPS itself using power because the meter has no connection to what power is being used by the UPS, only things plugged into the meter.

So, there must be something else using the power. Likely the devices, even if they aren’t really doing anything you consider significant, are doing something. Probably maintenance, checking for updates, the monitoring proceses requesting information from the devices since the TrueNAS server is on that end, etc. You’d need to put a meter on each device to determine what is drawing the power specifically.

Also, does the power meter only display power used by devices plugged into it, or does it also display it’s own power usage? Could be that the plug itself is using WiFi or something to communicate with external services to log that data. But that would be quick bursts.

Also, without putting a meter on each device, this is probably cumulative. For example, if the NAS is requesing info for monitoring the network, that would spin up the processors on the RPi an cause the switch to draw more power as it transmits that information across the network. Again, this should only be small bursts, but it’s also possible the devices are not sleeping properly after whatever process wakes them so they continue to run their processors at higher amperage for some time. Tweaking power profiles can help with something like tuned on Linux or similar to make things sleep more agressively. With the drawback that they take some amount of time to spin back up when needed.

Reduce spam bot accounts and other malware, as well as to allow for user discovery so you can find your contacts more easily. It’s not designed to be an anonymous service, just a private one.

Signal isn’t that kind of app. It protects your data in flight, but only has minimal protections after the recipient gets the message. It’s a whole other game to protect data at the endpoint. If you can’t trust your recipients to protect data, then you shouldn’t send them data needing protection. In order to do that you need control over all levels of the device receiving the data, hardware, operating system, file system, and software. Anything else will always leave openings for data at rest at tge destination to be compromised by untrustworthy recipients.

It you’re talking about TOTP exclusively, that only needs the secret and the correct time on the device. The secret is cached along with the passwords on the device.

LLMs are perfectly fine, and cool tech. Problem is they’re billed as being actual intelligence or things that can replace humans. Sure they mimic humans well enough, but it would take a lot more than just absorbing content to be good enough at it to replace a human, rather than just aiding them. Either the content needs to be manually processed to add social context, or new tech needs to be made that includes models for how to interpret content in every culture represented by every piece of content, including dead cultures who’s work is available to the model. Otherwise, “hallucinations” (e.g. misinterpretation and thus miscategorization of data) will make them totally unreliable without human filtering.

That being said, there many more targeted uses of the tech that are quite good, but always with the need for a human to verify.

There’s not a need to have vaultwarden up all of the time unless you use new devices often or create and modify entries really often. The data is cached on the device and kept encrypted by the app locally. So a little downtime shouldn’t be a big issue in the large majority of cases.

Not a new thing, and I can definitely see good uses for this information. What they should have done is made it so that the one being tracked gets a log and real time notification any time someone is tracking them. This would alleviate some of the toxic spying behavior simply by making it transparent rather than covert.

A desktop environment is a waste of resources on a system where you’ll only use it to install and occasionally upgrade a few server applications. The RAM, CPU power, and electricity used to run the desktop environment could be instead powering another couple of small applications.

Selfhosting is already inefficient with computing resources just like everyone building their own separate infrastructure in a city is less efficient. Problem is infrastructure is shared ownership whereas most online services are not owned by the users so selfhosting makes sense, but requires extra efficiencies.

Not really. I can’t think of a major social media software company that isn’t exploitative. If that’s where their specialty lies, then they either learn new skills which takes time, requires partially resetting your career, and money only to have that company then absorbed by an exploitative big company in a decade and do it all again, or just keep your job that started as a decent company and got corrupted already.

See the context mentioned by OP. It was a reply to a post about Recall on Windows.

Unfortunately, not everyone has a choice in who they work for in end-stage-capitalism. Work is about survival, not ideology. The majority of Americans are not far-right capitalists, but the vast majority of CEOs are, and it’s not really possible to survive long enough to start a small business in most of the US without investment from a far-right capitalist or inheritance (usually also from a far-right capitalist family member).

It’s not that you can’t at all, it’s just that you’d either need to give up a lot of the functionality of a lot of sites or at least reduce the usability of many sites and your browser or configure whitelist and such for every site manually and deal with breaking changes when websites update.

Everyone having to prove they’re an adult just means the end of privacy on social media. Tracking everything you do online becomes extremely easy when your real ID is attached to your advertising IDs. And breaches become leaks of more significant data used in age verification.

https://searx.space/

Problem is that if a site gets too popular, then the search engines like google tend to start rate limiting. Before in started self hosting I jumped around every couple of months to a new server.