If only there were email communications that all but prove the allegations.
The allegations are presumably true but that is almost irrelevant. The question is what the world would be like in the opposite situation. The lessons of history suggest it would be pretty much the same world as the one that we got. A big enough pile of money in one place will never be left standing. For the article’s narrative to mean anything, it has to argue otherwise, and it makes no attempt at that.
It’s a narrative whose connection with reality is hard to discern. One could instead say enshittification is an emergent and often unstoppable force, carried out by whoever happens to be in place at the time. The Zitron piece is more like the “great man theory” in reverse. It evokes a shining counterfactual picture where without the evil villain Raghavan messing things up, Google Search would be wonderful (let’s ignore Google’s perennial other failures, privacy invasions, etc). If only that one specific electron had gone through the other slit, everything would be different! Reality is rarely like that. All roads tend to lead to the same place.
25 machines at say 100W each is about 2.5KW. Can you even power them all at the same time at home without tripping circuit breakers? At your mentioned .12/KWH that is about 30 cents an hour, or over $200 to run them for a month, so that adds up too.
i5-4560S is 4597 passmark which isn’t that great. 25 of them is 115k at best, so about like a big Ryzen server that you can rent for the same $200 or so. I can think of various computation projects that could use that, but I don’t think I’d bother with a room full of crufty old PC’s if I was pursuing something like that.
Tbh I sometimes sshfs mount a vps onto a home machine but doing it the other way around doesn’t seem worthwhile. The idea of a vps is that it’s in a data center, has tons of bandwidth, backup power, you can set up a failover scheme if you need high availability, etc. Stuff like media is on your home server so you can use it locally, and maybe it’s backed up remotely just in case, but doesn’t need to be live mounted. That said, I’m used to home internet being unreliable compared to VPS, so mounting it to a vps sounds flaky.
If you want more storage on your vps, just get a bigger one, I would say. Or if you want tons of remote storage, get something with better connectivity.
Google drive is also privacy invasive, look at that guy who got banned for sending medical photos of his kid to the pediatrician. i’ve been using a self-hosted nextcloud instead of google drive, but these days back up to my laptop through rsync from termux over a usb cable. i’ve noticed with nextcloud, if I upload a folder with lots of photos, a few of them will fail and keep spamming notifications with retries. That is mostly on my old phone though.
Maybe I’m missing something but how is the host ip known? The server has a maybe-known range of addresses, but I don’t announce which address has an sshd listening. There are 2**64 addresses in the range, so scanning in 1 second doesn’t sound feasible.
Now, you need to log in to your password manager, which requires either OTP on email or TOTP. You don’t have access to the TOTP app because the backup is stored in cloud storage, whose email login also requires OTP.
The mind wobbles. Don’t do what you are describing.
Imagine that the xz exploit actually made it into your server, so your sshd was vulnerable. Having it on another port does seem helpful then. In fact i sometimes think of putting mine on a random secret address in the middle of a /64 ipv6 range, but I haven’t done that yet.
it occurs to me, the xz exploit and similar is a good reason not to run the latest software. It affected Debian Sid but not the stable releases. I’m glad I only run the stable ones.
I think this is not doable. You don’t have access to the voice codec to start with, and the phone at the other end generally won’t receive the bit stream coming out of it anyway. With a non-rooted phone it’s hard to even get to the voice stream. You might be able to send subliminal encrypted text messages through a voice channel and that could be kind of cool, and hard to detect. That idea has been around for a while but I don’t know of existing software that does it.
With VOIP, of course there are many encrypted systems available.
Added: also I assumed throughout that you meant present day mobile phones. With land phones at both ends, it may still be doable using dialup modems, but that was a 1990s thing and was pretty awful when you got down to it. It existed though.
I’m not against commercial web activity obviously. It’s just that the commercial community rightly takes its own side and does a good job of it. Mozilla should correspondingly be only on the users’ side, instead of trying to be on both.
And yes I know which side supplies Mozilla with money. But a pro-user approach to the web’s evolution would IMHO have resulted in browsers staying much simpler than they are now, and therefore less expensive to maintain.
14 minute video. Ok I’ll try to view it later. The culprit is Mitchell Baker’s manifesto or whatever it was called, ditching the end user principle and putting predatory companies on an equal basis, instead of trusting that they would look after themselves perfectly well. The browser should instead be 100% on the user’s side. I’ll look for some links when I get around to it.
The allegations are presumably true but that is almost irrelevant. The question is what the world would be like in the opposite situation. The lessons of history suggest it would be pretty much the same world as the one that we got. A big enough pile of money in one place will never be left standing. For the article’s narrative to mean anything, it has to argue otherwise, and it makes no attempt at that.