@TheIPW@lemmy.ml

Mainstream tech advice treats cheap Wi-Fi smart plugs as harmless convenience, totally glossing over how much telemetry leaks out to overseas cloud servers by default.

Expecting casual users to set up VLANs and firewall drop rules just to stop a £10 light bulb from phoning home is a bit of a joke.

True privacy means local control without corporate middlemen.

Original content by The Unknown Universe, written by a human and not AI generated!

My feeds have been flooded with it over the past 24 hours, and even some prominent privacy groups have been amplifying the hysteria. The panic claims everyone is about to lose full phone access unless they submit to digital ID checks.

While the actual situation stems from recent Westminster pressure on tech giants around device-level age controls and online safety, the viral framing is completely overblown. There’s no law turning every adult’s phone into a brick tomorrow.

That said, the underlying trend of pushing age-verification and filtering hooks deeper into OS-level infrastructure is still a massive red flag for encryption and digital sovereignty.

My blog has been up and running for a few months now and I wanted to have a better idea of what sort of visitor numbers I was getting but as it is a blog about FOSS, self-hosting and privacy I wasn’t just about to hand data to Google.

I managed to set up a self hosted instance of Rybbit but it was a bit heavier resource wise than other options I have looked at so I had to have a major overhaul in my Proxmox node layout!