@irotsoma@piefed.blahaj.zone

comments

• Yeah, a symptom of late stage capitalism that large companies no longer compete by improving their product or service, but by manipulating the regulatory environment and/or competition, through collusion, legal attacks, or acquisition. It’s much less risky of an investment for larger companies post-mass-consolidation.

  on DoorDash Spent $1.4 Million Trying to Stop Mamdani From Becoming Mayor. Now We Know Why. in c/technology@beehaw.org · 1d ago

• OnStar has existed since the 90s. That system requires a subscription that pays for the cell connection. The old ones no longer work because the cell tech is too old and the towers are gone. But usually the sim is embedded in the device, not replaceable or updatable. But it doesn’t need to because it’s built into a car and rarely would be transferred to another car while maintaining the same owner like a phone sim might.

  There are lots of other devices that have existed over time that the manufacturer negotiates with a cell carrier and because these devices use small enough amounts of data, the initial cost of the device pays for all of the service. Usually the device advertises that it has “lifetime” service, but of course that isn’t the lifetime of the owner or even the device, but more that of the contract between the manufacturer and cell carrier.

  As for the systems that car manufacturers use for telemetry, they pay the cell providers for that. In bulk and with very little data, I’m sure it’s not even all that much and they likely use the promise of selling other services like OnStar and giving a cut to the cell provider to at least partly offset that cost to them.

  on What do you do for a modern car? in c/privacy@lemmy.ml · 5d ago

• If your car has a shark fin antenna, you can sometimes disconnect the leads for the cellular, WiFi, and/or satellite antennas that the car uses to report telemetry and private driving data back to the manufacturer or any other services. You will lose certain functionality, of course, like satellite radio, emergency services if you subscribe to them, etc. But you can then leave the GPS antenna connected.

  I’d recommend disconnecting them at the source rather than the fin of possible, though, as, depending on what kind of signal we’re talking about, just the lead running through the car might be enough of an antenna to still transmit to very close cell towers. But it’s usually easier to find the wires at the fin.

  Not the best solution, but can be useful in some cases. It might be a more targeted solution than some of the others like popping a fuse which may also disable more essential features.

  on What do you do for a modern car? in c/privacy@lemmy.ml · 6d ago

• Yeah and it’s not that I’m blaming the workers, far from it. The issue is the contractors create such strick timelines and quotas so they can pay them as little as possible that they don’t have time to do any of the stuff that government workers did have time for a couple of decades ago. If the companies are going to hold homeowners responsible for so many nitpicky things so they can charge them more, then they better hold themselves as responsible and do the full job that we pay for through taxes and garbage bills.

  on Garbage Trucks Now Have AI Cameras To Score Your House and Clock Code Violations in c/technology@beehaw.org · 17 Sep 2026

• Then they better freaking make the garbage contractors do the rest of their job, not just the pickups, but also keeping things tidy. They make and leave behind such a mess. When they used to be government employees they were actually “sanitation workers” and responsible for more than just collection, or at least would clean up the messes they made and were sure to fully empty the bins every time.

  on Garbage Trucks Now Have AI Cameras To Score Your House and Clock Code Violations in c/technology@beehaw.org · 17 Sep 2026

• Linux so far is mostly exempt and it’s the big corporations like Microsoft, Apple, and Google who actually want it so they can sell that info and use it for ads. For Linux, just consider it one more criteria for choosing your distribution if it comes around. If the distro adds it as a requirement for install, then move to another. Fortunately there are lots of good ones these days.

  on Your Computer Might Demand Your Age Soon, No Matter Where You Live in c/privacy@lemmy.ml · 17 Sep 2026

• I have electrical experience so it’s easy for me, but I can definitely understand not wanting to touch AC power. If you do it wrong you can die or burn your house down. It’s easy and not a lot of variations, but how many people do you know who just can’t follow step by step instructions and the stakes are higher here than just factory reset the device if you mess up.

  on The Smart Home Wi-Fi Trap: Are We All Being Conned by Convenience? in c/privacy@lemmy.ml · 16 Sep 2026

• If you don’t see the value in defending fascism, especially in an age where elections are often won by the party with the most money since they can control the media coverage, then I can’t help you. I can’t teach you to empathize with the people who they will murder if in power. I’m one of them, but guessing you’re not.

  on Which VPN do you use and why? in c/privacy@lemmy.ml · 16 Sep 2026

• Yeah, but if everyone says that then it adds up. Just like when so many people don’t vote because their singular vote doesn’t really count, but when a lot of people say that, it adds up. And it’s not like there aren’t alternatives that likely don’t fund fascism, so why use one that I know for sure does, even if indirectly. I can’t punish him, but I can take my few cents a month away from fascism and spend it on a more reputable company that doesn’t keep around a known fascist.

  on Which VPN do you use and why? in c/privacy@lemmy.ml · 15 Sep 2026

• Problem is that I now know for sure that by giving him money, that money is going to organizations that promote fascism. So, while I can’t control where people spend their money, incan control how much of my money goes into their bank accounts. Same reason I would refuse to pay for anything Harry Potter. I know the money I would spend will go to royalties that JK Rowling will then give to organizations that spread misinformation about trans people or outright tell people that attacking women who even look too masculine, like Imane Khelif, is not only OK, but virtuous.

  But since I already gave them my money, I’m not going to abandon what I paid for. In fact, if I did that, I’d be effectively giving them more money as they’d have less traffic to route that was already paid for.

  on Which VPN do you use and why? in c/privacy@lemmy.ml · 15 Sep 2026

• Any reason you are looking to leave ivpn? I’m using Mullvad until my time runs out and then switching due to the fascism thing. I was looking at ivpn as one of a few possible options, so I’m curious of people’s experiences.

  on Which VPN do you use and why? in c/privacy@lemmy.ml · 15 Sep 2026

• I’m not going to subscribe to read the article, but I’d be willing to bet they’ll just replace then with another, just as bad company like other cities have done. Flock will likely eventually buy up those companies and rename themselves once the media loses interest. That’s how it usually goes.

  on Boston drops Flock after outside agencies gained access to vehicle data in c/technology@beehaw.org · 15 Sep 2026

• Yeah, but it’s nothing new. VCs have been used for nefarious purposes for ages. For example, there are documentaries about how they’re often used by competing companies to buy up a company that’s foundering (sometimes due to the actions of said competitors), split off a few valuable assets to give to the competing company, and dump the rest onto taxpayers to deal with in bankruptcy.

  So, sure, these are another example of how the VC process is being used nefariously against the original purpose of such organizations, but they aren’t small exceptions to the rule. The system was always designed to do these nefarious things under the guise of “investment”. Without an overhaul so that these organizations are legally required to show how they use their money so that both investors and the public are able to see it, it’s not corruption of a process, it’s standard use of a process designed, in part, to mask corruption.

  on VC isn’t VC anymore — understanding the rise of Cancer Capital in c/technology@beehaw.org · 15 Sep 2026

• Yeah, “AI” is not intelligent enough to even come close to being able to recognize a problematic situation. Just like smart glasses have people doing a lot of the work behind what the glasses recognize or airport xray scanners have a person likely in another country looking at your fully naked bodies to indicate to the security people to let you go or do further patdowns. None of that kind of stuff is automated. Software developers to design that are way too expensive in the short term than hiring actual people at very low pay.

  on Waymo pulls over, calls cops on riders with a ghost gun in c/technology@beehaw.org · 15 Sep 2026

• Get used to work (or school) being separate from personal. Use a different device wherever possible. If it’s not, use a separate web browser at the very least and delete your device level advertising ID, don’t access gmail with Chrome on an Android device since that usually logs you in at the device level, too, and don’t add the login to a personal Android device to reduce some of the links between them. Just understand the risk of not using a separate device. For example, some systems will have the ability for corporate accounts like Google Workspace, Microsoft Exchange, etc., to wipe the device it’s accessed from when you leave, and if that’s your personal device, well too bad.

  on I am required to use Gmail as the email client for my school email in c/privacy@lemmy.ml · 14 Sep 2026

• There are good use cases for swap. I work with very performance sensitive memory hogging applications that tend to process in bursts as incoming batched data arrives. We also have a lot of required background “security” applications.

  Having the idle applications move out to swap so that a significant amount of free RAM to allow for the active, real-time applications to expand into is a major boon. RAM is expensive now, so it’s become even more critical to not waste it.

  But even in self-hosting at home I take advantage of it since I have a limited number of servers with limited RAM and a bunch of applications and/or docker containers running, many of which don’t need to be active at all times, but if they were all active, would have trouble with the limited RAM. Swap allows for inactive applications to free up RAM for the active ones and leave enough available at all times to allow an application to quickly spin up new jobs.

  Anyway, sure, for a simple desktop computer without a bunch of junk background applications running for “security” or whatever, and an overabundance of RAM installed, it’s probably not useful. But for high performance, memory hungry applications with lots of background stuff running, it can be a big help.

  That said, there are use cases where the opposite is useful and using a RAM drive is better than writing to disk for cache and temporary logs when you have enough RAM. My opnsense router for instance uses a RAM drive to store cache and logs (logs are mirrored to the NAS for long term storage, so just the local copy is lost on reboot). That system has enough RAM and I’d rather reduce disk wear, and I don’t plan to add too many other applications to that server that it would run low.

  on Stop Doing Swap Partitions in c/linuxmemes@lemmy.world · 12 Sep 2026

• That sucks. It was one of the few GUIs that did a good job with most aspects of Docker Swarm. I knew it was heading in a shitty direction, but I was hoping something else would come along to fill the gap in the mean time.

  on Portainer 3.0 is coming, and here's what it means for you — Portainer in c/selfhosted@lemmy.world · 11 Sep 2026

• I had the 7 pro for a while and then the 10 now. The cameras on those are not good. Not sure if hardware or firmware tuning is the issue, but yeah, I haven’t been happy with the quality regardless of whether I use the google camera app or others like OpenCamera. And yeah, especially concert photos which end up washed out and blurry way more that the 6 pro. And that’s with and without GrapheneOS since I used each device for a short while before the GrapheneOS was stable enough for my tastes for a daily driver. So I don’t think software or OS was the issue.

  on Looking for a secondary cheap phone for travel, any recommendations? in c/privacy@lemmy.ml · 6 Sep 2026

• I miss my Pixel 6 Pro. Best camera I’ve ever had on a phone, especially for low light applications. Best concert photos I ever took were on that phone. It ran GrapheneOS pretty well, too.

  on Looking for a secondary cheap phone for travel, any recommendations? in c/privacy@lemmy.ml · 6 Sep 2026

• I’m enjoying it so much. Started my first relationship post-bottom-surgery and it’s been amazing. Also helped that she’s been bi but never really dated women before me, so there weren’t a lot of expectations with sex stuff and a cis vulva/vagina, so we’re learning at the same time. Not that it’s too different, but I had some surgery complications that make it a little different.

  on egg😯irl in c/egg_irl@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 5 Sep 2026

• Yeah, need to find a way to go after the government to stop using the tech rather than going after a single company. Eventually, Flock will just go bankrupt, the pieces will get bought up and either sold to a competitor or the VC that buys them will change the name and start a new company that’s basically the same and the executives from Flock will join that or go to competitors. There’s not much use attacking a single company these days. But it is good that attention is being brought to the technology in use and how the government is using it.

  on Flock is canceled—and its competitors are profiting in c/technology@beehaw.org · 5 Sep 2026

• I know generally what alistral is, but I’ve never uses it. What does the “sex’ command do or what’s the joke about it? The description is blank in the documentation and I’m too exhausted from work to dig into the code repo, lol.

  on Unix purists bullies another project in c/linuxmemes@lemmy.world · 4 Sep 2026

• I mean all of their products are subscription based and this is only a 1 year subscription. They’re just giving away a free trial to open up a new market is all. Not really big news. If they were making it free for the life of the product, that might be a bigger deal.

  But yeah, also F* the SA government.

  on Adobe to offer free access to AI tools in Saudi Arabia in $4 billion deal in c/technology@beehaw.org · 31 Aug 2026

• I’m not familiar enough with TPMS specifically, but with the general technology as I have some experience with older security card technologies that use the same techniques. There are a few issues with trying to do this at long range (even a few yards).

  First you’d need extremely sensitive transceivers that would be difficult to protect from interference.

  Second, it would require enough power to get the transmitter to send the signal far enough to be read. This has multiple problems. One is that, depending on the frequencies involved, you may end up creating a noticeable amount of heat or causing cancer if exposed to it for a significant amount of time. This might be more problematic for pedestrians and animals who stand between the transceiver and the cars for too long.

  Next is time, again not too familiar with the specifics of TPMS, but in similar tech, it would require power to be supplied by the transceiver for sometimes as much as a half a second or so. A moving car might not be in the target zone long enough to power up the TPMS, especially on faster moving roads and highways.

  What they might be able to do to mitigate this is to convince cities to embed the transceivers in the road itself or in curbs or something closer to the car. And if done at stop signs and traffic lights it would mitigate any time based issues. Though they might need to keep then far enough from any of the coils they install for traffic monitoring and triggering traffic lights. Not sure how much interference those would cause for this approach.

  Again, I could be totally off and TPMS might not have these issues. But if we’re talking cars from the 80s, then I wouldn’t be surprised if they had some of these issues.

  on ALPR (Flock etc) & TPMS thoughts in c/privacy@lemmy.ml · 30 Aug 2026

• Well they did lay off a ton of developers in exchange for LLMs. I bet the LLMs are capable of writing secure code anyway. So it’s not even on my radar. But now knowing they also cut implementation of MTE means it’s even less secure. So either they are refusing to admit their mistakes, or they are bowing to the governments wanting a more hackable device, or both.

  Google was being hostile towards open source anyway. So probably good that GrapheneOS skips this one. Maybe even more to a different line of devices that’s is not moving in such a proprietary direction. The last few Pixels aren’t even much of an upgrade and progressively keep falling behind on a lot of hardware, but the price keeps going up. They just aren’t what they used to be, a tech showcase for other companies to be inspired by. So, I’d actually be happy if GrapheneOS moved to another line, though I don’t know which would be ideal that actually allows unlocking and locking the boot loader without voiding warranty or actively killing the hardware out of spite but still has high end hardware.

  on GrapheneOS not supporting Pixel 11s? in c/privacy@lemmy.ml · 29 Aug 2026

• Wish my company held off. So few with any experience left and “AI” not only isn’t going to replace an experienced engineer, only junior ones really, but the things I work on are proprietary and so “AI” has no way to understand them much less interact with them or deal with the proprietary devops, upgrades, migrations, etc. There’s basically 4 people left doing the jobs that used to belong to 20. Sure “AI” is a useful timesaver oncenin a while, but it can’t replace thinking, actually intelligent people, much less all of their experience that’s not documented anywhere for “AI” to even learn it.

  on Employee revolt and failing agents forced Meta to scrap its AI layoff plan in c/technology@beehaw.org · 28 Aug 2026

• Yeah and when teachers or employers use it to reject things outright, it’s really dumb. But if it’s presented as a probability to the user rather than a binary like most LLM results are presented to users, then it is useful. If something has a high probability of being LLM generated then it can cast suspicion and investigation can happen. Unlike how things like facial recognition are used to prove guilt without any investigation when the probability of a match is low, but no better matches were found and the police aren’t told it’s low probability because then the product would look useless in solving crimes for them which is what they want in a product, not an investigation tool. That’s not what they were sold.

  Point being. It’s a tool. It’s a metric. And used as such it can be helpful if all of a developer’s contributions get flagged as high probability, then looking more closely at the code can be warranted. Though if LLMs themselves were configured to tell the user how probable that their answer is correct, it might not even be an issue needing investigation. It’s not the malicious ones that they’re looking to stop with these policies. It’s those unwittingly submitting bad LLM generated code with serious consequences. Like all those destructive things that happened at Amazon (and others I’m sure, just Amazon was in the news) when they started replacing senior developers with cheap contractors armed with LLMs and no experience. Even my company has been doing it. It sucks all that we’ve lost and how bad things have gotten.

  on As Ubuntu embraces AI, Debian discusses banning all AI-generated code in c/technology@beehaw.org · 28 Aug 2026

• There are “signatures” that can be detected in code just like universities detect it in student work, online stores detect it in reviews they compensate people for, and some employers detect it in resumes and cover letters. It’s bland, just like when it tells you to remove colorful phrases or adjectives that add emphasis from your text in an email. Things like that.

  That said it doesn’t detect it all, and it does rely on the developer to be honest. But it’s also a good indicator when reviewers post questions to the developer and they can’t answer them because they don’t understand the code and things like that. Also, if the developer did not follow coding standards, which LLMs can sometimes have trouble with. And there’s always been malicious code submissions in open source software, so there are other ways.

  Anyway, it’s more of a policy discussion at this point, and why LLM generated code is bad. I use them for manipulating data, figuring out syntax, and getting examples, but there are always problems with anything they generate, so I never would allow one to write any production bound code. I see use in the technology, but it’s not creative and it doesn’t understand what it’s writing so it can’t write code with consequences in mind. So it can write Jr level code, but not solid code, at least not without being properly trained on only well written code, and that proper training would be too expensive for an LLM company to actually do it.

  on As Ubuntu embraces AI, Debian discusses banning all AI-generated code in c/technology@beehaw.org · 28 Aug 2026

• Yeah, gotta keep your employees poor so they can’t afford to leave no matter how badly they’re treated.

  on Amazon shuts down Mechanical Turk: Why Jeff Bezos once called it ‘artificial artificial intelligence’ in c/technology@beehaw.org · 27 Aug 2026

• Too bad LLM “AI” can’t pick up the slack which is the whole reason it was still around and so active.

  on Amazon shuts down Mechanical Turk: Why Jeff Bezos once called it ‘artificial artificial intelligence’ in c/technology@beehaw.org · 26 Aug 2026

• Oh, yeah, but at least the courts would intervene back then. Now many of the courts have been corrupted and the ones that haven’t are bound by precedent which the supreme court no longer obeys and courts above them that are corrupted. So these specific interpretations are becoming more and more common and not just against poor people who can’t afford lawyers.

  on U.S. Citizen Who Deleted Phone’s Data Says His Prosecution Puts Privacy at Risk in c/technology@beehaw.org · 26 Aug 2026

• I got a smart TV because the dumb ones were more expensive. But I’d never do that with a monitor. A monitor is not meant to be interacted with directly. Just display what the computer says to display. The computer is all that should be running software besides basic firmware for adjusting overall settings like brightness and contrast which computer OSes don’t have enough information to do most of the time. But that’s it.

  on Ads and tracking infiltrated TVs. Now they're coming for monitors. in c/technology@beehaw.org · 26 Aug 2026

• One of several reasons I’m happy I was able to get bottom surgery. I was so tired of tucking in order to wear so many things once the egg broke.

  on egg👗🧥irl in c/egg_irl@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 26 Aug 2026

• The current administration has stated that even for US Citizens, border entry suspends all constitutional rights. They’ve also said they believe this applies to allow warrantless searches within 100 miles of a border, which includes most major US cities, thus allowing ICE to search and kidnap basically anyone, not just immigrants. And they have stated that searching an electronic device is not a “search” as mentioned in the 4th Amendment and so you can’t refuse to unlock the device or “destroy evidence”. And that once you give them that access, that you have also “freely given” them access to your private social media, bank, etc., records and so those no longer require a warrant to access. And it’s “gun to the head” tactics because they also believe they can detain you indefinitely in the 100 mile zone without a lawyer or any other usual rights, because you aren’t being arrested, just an extended interview or whatever they call it. All in the name of terrorism prevention, of course.

  Since they have corrupted the Supreme Court, this has been mostly upheld in various court cases so far. But any legal scholar will tell you it’s nonsense. But that doesn’t matter to authoritarians. They don’t work within the law.

  on U.S. Citizen Who Deleted Phone’s Data Says His Prosecution Puts Privacy at Risk in c/technology@beehaw.org · 26 Aug 2026

• The only way to do a truly full backup of apps and their data is to have root access. Unfortunately, many phones these days have “security” features that void the warranty and/or break apps like banking, Google Wallet tap-to-pay, etc. Or even some apps like games that rely on that for anticheat will break. And some security features make that last even if you relock the phone. So be careful to read what your phone has and what you’ll be permanently giving up.

  I have a Pixel 10 and installed GrapheneOS which has some backup capabilities built in, but I can’t use Google Pay, some banking features, a bunch of games, the official UPS app, etc. But if I gave in and went back to Google Android it would all work. Samsung and other manufacturers are often not as generous.

  on Android phone full backup in c/privacy@lemmy.ml · 24 Aug 2026

• Disclosure isn’t “cracking down”. I think it’s becoming common knowledge anyway or the FTC would never even go that far, especially the current administration.

  on The FTC is cracking down on companies that charge you a "personalized price" in c/technology@beehaw.org · 24 Aug 2026

• Instead of spending money on improving the product or mitigating the impact technologically.

  on Take-Two files subpoenas asking Microsoft and Discord for records in hunt for GTA 6 leaker in c/technology@beehaw.org · 24 Aug 2026

• Yeah, but you can also use file level technology like par files for rar compressed files or file system level or hardware level tech that allows for repairing some level of corruption. This often uses a little more space depending on how much corruption you want it to be tolerant of, but again, unless you have a ton of data, even using 1.25x the space needed for the data itself might still be cost effective for most home users.

  on Is there any tape media backup system that works through USB? in c/selfhosted@lemmy.world · 23 Aug 2026

• For me at least, and I love cool tech, so it has to be broken or too costly (in terms of money or privacy) for me not to use it:

  Adaptive cruise control: I live in a medium sized city and there’s rarely a case where I don’t have to be extremely quick to react to people who are aggressive and dangerous, so I need to change speed way too often for it to be useful. But even driving outside the city it’s rare that there are any significant stretches of road where there aren’t people camping in the left lane and causing lots of big groups of cars piling up together. And many highways don’t have enough long stretches of straight road. So it’s rare to be able to drive long enough stretches where I’m of constantly turning it off and on.

  Lane keeping: mine only works over 45 and so only on highways outside the city mostly or for short stretches inside the city. I do turn it on most of the time. But it has one really major flaw. If you’re driving in the right lane and come to an exit and there’s even the slightest bend in the road, it’s about a 50/50 chance that it’s not going to try to pull me off the exit and scream at me when I stop it from doing that. Also, the safety feature that determines the person has their hands on the wheel gets tripped if you hold the wheel in one place for too long. In the places I most would find it useful like long stretches of straight highway, it’s constantly complaining and shutting itself off thinking I’m not holding the wheel just because I’m going straight the whole time.

  Automatic braking: mine doesn’t actually brake, just screams at you and flashed a huge warning. Problem is it triggers when someone is turning and will be out of my way significantly before I get there because I don’t tailgate, so there’s no need to slow. Or it will suddenly trigger when there’s an odd narrow shadow across the road from something above the road like a pedestrian bridge, and it mistakes that for a car or something. Haven’t figured that one out. It’s not too common, but the fact that the car has both camera and radar my wild guess is on hotter days, the areas of asfalt in the shade are giving off less heat and possibly the air above has slightly different density than the areas in the sun. Wild guess though, but if the car did have auto braking, it would be braking randomly for no reason and causing accidents or near accidents too often.

  Voice assistants: screw LLMs

  Augmented reality: I don’t have that, but I might understand that being a distraction. I’m ADHD so I’m not sure how that would affect my distraction especially commuting when I’m too tired or not enough stimulants in my system.

  Massaging seats seem possibly distracting or too relaxing which then causes distraction. I don’t have it, but font blame buying a car with some feature and not using it since a lot of cars have packages of features and it might not be an option to not have that but still have some other useful feature like heated seats. I do love my heated seats in winter so if it was both or neither I’d choose both and ignore the massage feature.

  Remote start: I’d be afraid of opening it up to theft vulnerabilities and I don’t like wasting gas and generating pollution for some minor convenience.

  Backup cameras: I use mine in the daylight, but there’s no night vision so the quality is really poor at night if there’s not street lighting or if there’s too much glare from a bright light, basically useless in a lot of conditions.

  Driving Mode: I think this refers to the modes that change the sensitivity of brakes, acceleration, power steering, struts, etc. My partner’s car has 3 modes and I can definitely see switching being distracting. It would be like getting used to driving three different cars. Just choose one and use that. Might be useful if it’s an off road mode that increases the shock absorption and gives more torque while off road and gives more “feel of the road” while on well paves roads.

  on One In Five Drivers Switches Off The Safety Tech Meant To Save Their Lives in c/technology@beehaw.org · 23 Aug 2026

• Devs should be “dev managers and executives”. Real developers know LLMs are basically just a tool for finding examples and helping with syntax. Sure they’re useful, but I’d never let them write code, much less compile it. Who knows what they’d inject into a build.

  on Ken Thompson Hack 2.0 in c/linuxmemes@lemmy.world · 22 Aug 2026

• If the tape drive attaches with SATA like a regular DVD drive or HDD then just get an adapter that connects USB to SATA. USB is unlikely to be a bottleneck with how slow tape is anyway, so having it internal isn’t that important.

  But tape drives are only worth it if you need a heck of a lot of cartridges or absolutely need 30 year storage rather than maybe 10 years for an offline physical hard drive (assuming they’re both stored properly). Though I have drives decades old that still have readable data. But even if you copy out the data every 5-10 years to a new HDD, you’re likely to spend less than just the tape drive itself. And drives get larger over time so you’ll need fewer of them whereas the tape drive will have a set maximum storage space. And what if the tape drive dies and the company is out of business? You may end up not being able to read your tapes. SATA on HHDs has continued backward compatibility for decades.

  Anwyay, for a home user with a few hundred TB to store, I’d be surprised if the cost would be better for tape. It’s really useful for places that store a few hundred TB per day, though. That’s where tape can be a boon. The primary advantages are it takes up a lot less physical space per TB and lasts longer. And once you do get past the cost of the drives, it does eventually start to be cheaper.

  Also, remember it’s way slower than a physical HDD much less an SSD. Even an HDD connected via USB.

  on Is there any tape media backup system that works through USB? in c/selfhosted@lemmy.world · 22 Aug 2026

• Should specify, I need it exposed to the internet as well so I can sync it to those multiple devices when I’m at my partner’s place or traveling and so my partner can use it from her place.

  And I’d prefer something that allows some type of SSO or external authentication mechanism so it can handle multiple logins with different calendars and I can put some layers of security in front of it. Radicale requires addon applications to do that and most aren’t maintained.

  Supposedly Radicale can do it with a WSGI server, but I never found one I got working.

  Only one that came close was Baikal, but it had some issues and development has been really slow on it. It’s been quite a few years though, maybe I will try that one again.

  on Selfhosted Calendar Server that works with the G? in c/selfhosted@lemmy.world · 21 Aug 2026

• Definitely easy, but not really a relevant response given the community we’re in. Plus there’s a lot of use in having your calendar synced to multiple places, not just your phone.

  I never found an easy solution to set up for caldav and carddav yet personally. Most are either very complex to set up or they are no longer maintained which is bad for security vulnerabilities. So, I’m still stuck with Google because I need my reminders everywhere I go…ADHD.

  on Selfhosted Calendar Server that works with the G? in c/selfhosted@lemmy.world · 21 Aug 2026

• Free is rarely free. As the saying goes, “if you’re not the customer, you’re the product”.

  on Google account & Social account needed to join in c/privacy@lemmy.ml · 21 Aug 2026

• Yeah getting rid of windows solves many issues, LOL. I have always refused to run any server with windows, outside of being forced to at work. 😁

  on What is your weirdest self-hosting problem you've had to solve? For me: Mouse inside the server. in c/selfhosted@lemmy.world · 19 Aug 2026

• Apple has never embraces privacy. They’ve been selling user data as long as it’s been profitable to do so just like all the big tech companies that people give their private information to.

  on Is Apple beginning a privacy reset? in c/privacy@lemmy.ml · 19 Aug 2026

• Traditional conservatives don’t like it, the problem is that most of the parties that call themselves conservative or liberal (in US terminology or the equivalent terms in other countries) are actually all just right wing authoritarian parties with slightly different tactics to convince people to support them. Authoritarianism needs to control the narratives and to do that have an easy way to crack down on dissenters. Heck the term “rednecks” used to originally refer to left wing, labor rights activists. They just got manipulated into becoming sheep for the far right using single issue politics.

  on East Tennessee commissioner says Flock CEO should be hanged in c/privacy@lemmy.ml · 18 Aug 2026

• Yes, but no identification to tie that to. Sure they know the things some individual happens to search for, but they don’t have my google login or advertising ID or Facebook token or any other tracking tokens to link those requests to my identity outside of that silo of the IP address, and that changes as it’s sent over an anonymizing proxy. It’s not perfect and if they really tried they could probably track it down, but it’s rare enough and enough obfuscation that I doubt they’d care enough to do it.

  on Alternative search engines to Google in c/privacy@lemmy.ml · 18 Aug 2026

• True, I was oversimplifying a bit. It’s not a full VM, but often it is a full OS depending on how the container was created. I’ve seen crappy containers that start with a full desktop version of Ubuntu for instance. They are often optimized installations for running virtually, but more for things like the base for VDIs, not individual application containers.

  on Why is my home server using so much RAM for cache + buffer? in c/selfhosted@lemmy.world · 18 Aug 2026

• Based on a quick read it sounds like the issue will be that the bad actors won’t get dropped immediately. Meaning whatever servers and services are in front of the firewall that fail2ban configures, will still receive the performance hits. But your backend services will still be protected.

  I have a server specifically set up as the ingress server. That runs fail2ban and Traefik and I have crowdsec set up with a Traefik bouncer plugin. So fail2ban runs in front of everything to catch the worst, most obviously bad stuff and drop the traffic very quickly and efficiently so it doesn’t get any further including things trying to access services other than the web services. Then crowdsec is focused on more complex threats as they flow through the reverse proxy. Seems to work the most efficiently for me, but I haven’t had a chance tondo any real analysis on how much improvement it might be over any other configuration.

  on fail2ban behind reverse proxy (nom) in c/selfhosted@lemmy.world · 18 Aug 2026