Payment card transactions can be disputed or reversed. Cryptocurrency transactions cannot be easily reversed. Reversal is an important capability because sometimes customers or merchants lie, or they can have problems fulfilling their obligations.

When the buyer and seller are in the same country, or are in countries with legal and criminal justice systems which cooperate, transaction risk is lower so fees can be lower.

Deceased users’ estates still haven’t agreed to the new terms, have they?

Mostly I’m scared I’ll write a firewall rule incorrectly and suddenly expose a bunch of internal infrastructure I thought wasn’t exposed.

Remove these blank lines.

I’m not seeing unit tests for this.

Unnecessary comment.

BLAM

Ow! Also, this could’ve been a smaller calibur.

That does make a lot of sense.

I think I’m feeling embarrassed about not being a perfect ops person, while I was going to school for computer science. Like, part of me wants to create this unrealistic private cloud thing, like I’m going to pretend “I’m still around, where have you been? See your old password still works, and look at all the awesome stuff I can do now!”. I already have my 20+ year old passwd file imported into OpenLDAP / slapd and email is using that already.

It’s not realistic. I feel fondness for the internet of 20-25 years ago, but it’s not coming back. If people can log in with 20 year old passwords and upload web content, we both know what’s really going to happen.

I just feel like such a failure for letting it rot away. Really, any place that accepts submissions requires a live audience and staff to keep it moderated, and accepting new submissions is the only reason to even run original code. What you’re describing is probably the only sane way to do this.

Edit: although I do still feel that the world needs that sort of private cloud in a box. Sure Facebook has taken all the wind out of the sails of many private web hosting efforts - the “family nerd” no longer gets love and gratitude for offering to host forums and chat, they get “that’s stupid, I’ll just use Facebook” - but we still need the capability.

And an open security architecture to clone would help cover the daylight between “here’s a web app in a docker container” and an actual secure hosted instance of it. It would require more inconvenience than necessary for the substantial security benefits it would offer. (A better designed, more customized solution would help that, but one step at a time.) But that would give the average homelab user protection against future attacks that today would feel like wild “whoa who are you protecting against, the NSA?” paranoia.

Last time I went snooping:

15 installs of phpbb, which would require work to put back online as their communities are of course gone. Remove spam, undo defacement, etc.

7 installs of Dormando’s Oekaki BBS Clone

5 installs of WonderCatStudio BBS

4 installs of OekakiPotato / RanmaGuy etc.

and several users who just used php to ‘include’ headers and table of contents page parts.

(Yes I was quite the weeb. Still am, but I was one too. :-) )

I’m part of the problem, a tiny bit. For altruistic reasons - ok more like “I’m kinda weird, maybe this will make people on IRC like me more” reasons - I ran mspencer.net and hosted web pages for people for free. Ended up with web content for around 100 people, and they weren’t all just using it as a drop box. (Older than wikipedia.org by 199 days, woo!)

Hosted on ancient hardware, nothing even remotely approaching a modern security architecture, I eventually left it to run un-maintained until the IDE HDD died. More recently I got the data off of it. (Heads unstuck themselves while in a cardboard box for a decade? Dunno.) But I don’t know how to get everything back online in a safe way.

I’m a proper software engineer now, I can kinda see how work handles securely hosting web services. Now just throwing everything together on one box feels too lazy and insecure. But I can’t figure out a reasonable security architecture to use. I thought I had one, but I failed to account for VM jackpotting attacks. And it feels like it takes me a month to do what a competent ops person can do in a day.

But that’s a discussion for a different comment section.

Advice from most to least certain: If you want very long standby time (a reliably perfect first print after literally months of inactivity) and you have the space for an ugly cube of a printer, laser is the only option. Ink tank printers have unexpected wear parts, like internal ink sponges.

Black and white laser is stupid simple. Color laser “prints” four times in series onto an intermediate transfer belt (ITB) and then puts that onto the paper, still super reliable but bulkier, and your prints get watermarked with yellow dots because FBI or something. I’d go color.

Toner lock-in is becoming more common, not just for HP. If your page count is going to be low, just pay full price for name brand toner. If you don’t want to do that, like your use case could involve printing a single page or entire binders of paper between months of inactivity, read on.

Start your printer research by shopping for cheap off brand toner, get a sense for what they’re selling the most of and what that’s compatible with, and see what printers they support.

Some aftermarket toner just works, out of the box, because the printer isn’t crazy locked down. Those cartridges have normal sounding instructions. Some aftermarket toner requires you to transplant a chip from a first party cartridge, and their instructions include this. Avoid those printers.

And consider used printers. I have a used HP LaserJet Pro MFP M477fdw that I love, but I would never ever buy another HP printer, especially not one made later than this one. Be very careful before buying any HP printer, especially one made in the past 6-8 years. Even wear items (like the ITB) have modules with firmware and compatibility requirements, and I’m worried I could be one replacement component away from suddenly having a locked down printer.

I use a USB BD-R burner and disks for this. I don’t have a solution for Bad USB protection though unfortunately.

I self host, on a personal domain I registered in June 2000. Mostly followed a 13?-part tutorial at I think linuxbabe dot com, was the first one that seemed to genuinely be trying to help you set up a good environment, not just as a way to say “doesn’t this sound difficult? Impossible even? Coincidentally you can pay us to do this instead.” Except I put everything on its own VM instead of all on one. (Even a VM for just opendkim, which was maybe not necessary.)

Mostly iPhone mail app and/or Roundcube webmail.

Yes highly recommend it, for receiving email. Greylist blocks like 99.8% of spam. Sending works fine for me, because it’s an old domain with history. I don’t think brand new domains have the same experience.

I think I was in favor of this four months ago. https://programming.dev/comment/8513741

Oh. That’s why they do that. Ok good to know.

Hey no botting!

NEW

I think this was asked in good faith, but is unfortunately unlikely to produce useful discussion. The down-voters are right but the original poster shouldn’t feel bad for asking.

Short answer: it’s ok to say “maybe, we have no way to know, moving on” when something is unknowable like this.

Longer answer / topic hijack: as voters there are many contradictions in our system, and important and necessary information is often hidden from us. Doing the best we can might take various forms:

• choose government ran by the least-evil people possible and trust the imperfect system formed by the structured interactions of those people

• choose government that follows policies that align the best with your values or your ethical understanding of the world

• choose government that is best able to reduce harms and injustices, in a practical and realistic way that anticipates the acts of other factions

• choose government led by people you hate the least — no, this one is toxic, lazy, easy to manipulate with lies. Manipulators know the longer they keep people hot with emotion the less time people spend learning.

Please do not reply to this with hatred or calls for strong emotion. Leaders at any level can be deliberately evil, sure, but it’s never helpful to dehumanize entire clusters or demographics.

Also, the development and evolution of these open technologies relies on human interest and attention, and that attention can be diminished, even starved, by free, closed offerings.

Evil plan step 1: make a free closed alternative and make it better than everything else. Discord for chat, Facebook for forums and chat/email, etc.

Step 2: wait a few years, or a decade or more. The world will largely forget how to use the open alternatives. Instant messengers, forums, chat services, just give them a decade to die out. Privately hosted communities, either move to Facebook, pay for commercial anti-spam support, spend massive volunteer hours, or drown in spam.

Step 3: monetize your now-captive audience. What else are they going to use? Tools and apps from the 2000s?

What? Did I turn it off and on again? I’m a very smart technology person, of course my big brain already thought of that. I develop software for a living. It couldn’t be that simple or I wouldn’t be calling you.

. . .

Turning it off and on again worked. My shame is immense and I have wasted everybody’s time.

(And that is how I learned to embrace my own idiocy and do the recommended, simple troubleshooting tasks without questioning them.)

So I’m curious . . . what reference am I missing that helps me understand what menu settings cause exactly which pieces of personal data to be shared with which Apple services? I want to RTFM, and while I appreciate people wanting to be helpful, comment replies are not themselves documentation.

(I switched from Android to ios in 2020 and haven’t really figured out details beyond turning icloud sync off for specific apps. I’d like to add more devices and learn to trust that sync method but I don’t understand where crypto is used and how the keys are handled.)

Plagiarism should be part of the conversation here. Credit and context both matter.

How much stock ownership remains with the nonprofit Raspberry Pi Foundation? And will that be enough to hold off shareholder complaints that they aren’t being evil enough?

God that sounds awful in headline form.

Pride month is absolutely not an excuse to say “current homophobes will never get better, so they all need to blah blah”. Their current behavior is intolerable, but through continued exposure and humanizing influences, the people can be reached. It’ll go from hatred to extreme discomfort to mild discomfort to … something more normal.

Unfortunately I’m a crappy communicator and I can’t figure out a way to reduce that to a headline without making it some kind of division-promoting reductionist garbage. Sigh.

I think crucially it has the potential to show moderate voters that President Biden is not one to abuse the legal system for his own personal gain. If the outcome is supported by evidence and precedent, obviously some won’t be convinced by even that. But some will be.