Y’all really don’t understand how the money flows

The money flows from Microsoft to schools and universities to condition them them to think MS is the only option and then from Microsoft to non-tech people in deciding positions as bribes and favours so they decide to pay MS a fortune for shitty SAAS. It’s basically corruption used as an investment.

or how expensive it is to run this shit

Oh, you meant that side of the money… Yeah, not expensive at all. There is a reason everybody can get email for free or for very little money if you need advanced functions and active service. And there is a reason the big providers are now basically running with whitelists only, because every idiot and their mom can run their own service. There is a reason why simple office solutions you can also get for free are nowadays –like so many other things– porvided as SAAS: to make money off idiots and paid morons.

I use Radicale for my calendars and contacts as basically every program, app or device can handle caldav/carddav.

Self-hosting email however is too painful. Not that it isn’t easy on principle… but because the basics are simple all the big mail providers have developed a lot of ways to automatically filter out all those quickly put up mail servers mainly used to distribute spam. So having your own mail server while also constantly jumping through all the hoops so your mails are actually received is barely worth it.

“Most respondents use a VPN or reverse proxy for remote access, while 15% still use forwarded ports in some capacity.”

How was this question phrased? A reverse proxy still needs “forwarded ports in some capacity”…

Difficult as in unlikely that the exploit works or difficult to write an exploit?

Difficult as in it’s a race condition that can theoretically be exploited when you get the timing right. But timing, if it’s not on a well-known isolated system right before you in some lab, depends on a million details, some –once we are talking about real-life examples– outside your control.

How much pain you should expect is easily answered: Expect several things to break and having to do a full reinstall. So back up everything first.

It will probably not happen, but you should always expect the worst (out of the realistic at least…) outcome and be prepared.

That reads much too sane for today’s idiot mud fight discussions about AI.

Are PPPoE credentials integrated into your modem and not extractable in plain readable form still a wide-spread thing? I think it has been decades since providers where I live were required by law to provide those credentials so you are not artificially bound to some provided hardware.

but I believe you can get a free domain usually from noip

Up to three, including stuff like mx entries. For the free tier you get a mail every 30 days with a link to confirm that you are still using that name and that’s it.

My “script” to update the blocklist from time to time was literally

curl <blocklist1 link> > templist
curl <blocklist2 link> >> templist
grep '^0\.0\.0\.0' templist | awk '{print "local-zone: \""$2"\" always_refuse"} > blocklist.conf
systemctl restart unbound.service

and an include blocklist.conf at the bottom of unbound.conf (awk to convert it from the “0.0.0.0 <site>” format to “local-zone: <site> always_refuse”).

It literally is a cron job or systemd timer to load an updated blocklist from time to time and I haven’t looked at it for years (well… other an changing a path when I switched from unbound to dnsproxy, because that one is even simpler, doesn’t even need a config other than a few parameters at startup and can provide DoH, DoT and/or DoQ access for when I’m not at home)

If you just want simple ad blocking you don’t actually need pi hole for it’s web interface you don’t ever look at once it runs. Unbound alone can do the job with minimal configuration.

Nowadays I even changed my setup to dnsproxy, which doesn’t even need any config. It’s just a handful parameters when you start it. And it does all the filtering for my home network as well as providing DoH access for when I’m not at home and connected from somewhere else.

I never understood pihole in the first place. It’s just a fancy web interface you do never look at if the thing does its job quietly in the background. And unbound alone is perfectly able to use blocklists with one line of configuration (and an onliner script to convert the common lists into the right format).

I use no-ip because that was one of the few my router back then many, many, many years ago supported out-of-the-box and there was never a reason to change…

That’s generally good advice but not actually security related.

Removing all the stress on your ressources by using a non-standard port is good for your ressources, But those automated scanners looking for unsecured devices and trying out password like admin/admin are not actually a risk. It’s just a case of security by obscurity and never actually serves its purpose.

No, thanks. My “research” is testing AI from time to time. And it is indeed artificial idiocy most of the time.

And when basically all answers I ever get from AI proponents is either “Those local models are just not powerful enough so it’s on you that you don’t get sane results” or “Those models just need some tuning so it’s on you for not running a local one you can optimise for your usecase” you start to realize there might be an entirely different problem…

I get perfectly good search results by avoiding AI, so there is really no need for me to tune anything but the settings on my searxng instance…

I still don’t understand where people are findign these useful AI answers. Every single time I try it seems AI is an acronym for artificial idiocy and I wouldn’t even trust it to tell me the time.

(In fact I just resently tried asking that stupid meta AI in sand-boxed Whatsapp (I still have to keep because of some stubborn examples of humanity) about the time in another time zone… It could tell my local time, in which time zone I was, what timezone I was asking about and what the difference between those zones was. Yet it could somehow not answer the question directly before being led there step by step. And then it still did the math wrong… 🤬)

I have made the completely opposite experience. I tried so many distros and every single time some non-trivial issues came up my search ended in the arch wiki finally explaining stuff and writing out available options in config files instead of just telling my what option in what GUI config tool (that might or might not exist in my distro) I should click, then pray it works (felt very alike to windows actually where you get two dozen guides to solve a problem, each one editing another obscure registry key and trying to find the one actually working with the current version).

So I wasted years listening to the “No, Archlinux is a meme and totally unusable for inexperienced people” before installing archlinux, which is now running for more than 9 years without problems, and will happily point people asking questions for other distros to the relevant parts of the arch wiki that actually spell stuff out properly.

how it affects the temperature

positively… 🔥

That’s what the documentation says. I don’t know if/when that changed as I barely use docker.

Well… it’s the default iirc (192.168.65.0/24). So that’s what docker uses if there is no explicit configuration you could find.