And I think what people really want to avoid is the pre-installed operating system. That has all kinds of stuff in it and no one except the manufacturer knows what’s inside. And Google’s Play services are deeply embedded into the system and will leak lots of personal data and metadata or outright copy them to Google’s servers. For the regular user that means Google has all your pictures, 24/7 location data, your contacts… None of that is E2EE either. We don’t know what happens wit the data from all your contactless payments… It’s really a privacy nightmare. And I’d say security isn’t great either if 2 parties already have pretty much complete access to the device out of the box. They can wipe it, remote install or remove apps… Everything. They do offer secure boot, though…

Hehe. Ja, das würde ich so unterschreiben. Wobei die Lokalpolitik und Kommunalpolitik ja schon etwas ganz anderes ist als die Bundespolitik. Also unser schwarzer Oberbürgermeister tritt nicht in der Öffentlichkeit auf und sagt so Sachen wie der Merz. Und irgendwie machen die Parteien auch andere Sachen, also ich meine mich daran zu erinnern, dass die CDU hier ab und zu auch mal etwas sinnvolles hier in der Stadt auf die Beine stellt. Gut, die SPD verschwindet überall in der Versenkung, und das auch nicht erst seit gestern… Vielleicht wäre ja noch eine Nachfrage da, aber die wollen ja anscheinend nicht mehr… Und so grob der Trend ist ja auf allen Ebenen ähnlich. Und die Grünen…, ja das allgemeine Herumhacken auf denen finde ich auch sehr ätzend und kontraproduktiv für die gesamte Gesellschaft… Für mich machen sie zumindest auf Bundesebene zuviel Personalkrams, liefern zuwenig ab und machen mir persönlich viel zu viel neoliberalen Kram den ich nicht mag anstatt ihrem Kerngeschäft. Ansonsten würde ich die ja gerne wählen. Aber der öffentliche Diskurs geht ja um ganz andere und viel blödere Sachen. Im unserem Landtag saßen ja bis jetzt noch ziemlich viele Grüne. Und naja, die Linke ist viel in der Sinnkriese, ich denke die muss man einfach trotzdem wählen, oder halt nicht. Wenn man auf sowas wartet, wählt man die wahrscheinlich nie.

Ja, definitiv. Wobei es mich echt ein wenig ankotzt, dass alle nur auf die 15% Minderheit schauen, die kriegen massiv viel Aufmerksamkeit. Dann kurz die Erwähnung, dass andere Parteien auch teilgenommen haben, und dann wieder Berichterstattung über die AfD… Irgendwie nehmen die ja doch schon den Großteil des Platzes in unseren Köpfen und der öffentlichen Debatte ein, wobei sie faktisch gesehen nur 15% ausmachen… Naja, so isses halt. Die Linke hat relativ gesehen auch gut zugelegt. Und in absoluten Zahlen gibt’s die SPD und Grüne auch noch. Ich denke die Grünen haben sowieso aktuell etwas verkackt aus mehreren Gründen. Vielleicht gelingt es ihnen ja in Zukunft wieder mehr Leute abzuholen…

Ich befürchte nur Merz guckt jetzt nur auf die relativen Zahlen und plant dann dreimal so rechte Politik…

So Herr Merz, die vorläufigen Hochrechnungen sagen ca 85% wählen explizit NICHT die Politik der AfD. Können wir nun Politik für uns haben?

Oh nice, Friedrich Merz hat was gesagt…

Lol. Ist bestimmt auch richtig bei den dummen Leuten zu graben, offensichtlich gibt’s davon ja mehr als aktuelle FDP Wähler?! Ich frage mich nur ob er denn auch gewillt ist die Probleme zu nennen. Zu 99,5% ist das ja Neoliberalismus. Und die FDP. Der Stillstand nach Merkel (unter Scholz) ist ja hauptsächlich deren Verdienst.

I think you’ll want to factor in the exact use case at that scale. Does speed matter? Is “a ton” really a ton? Last regular computer mainboard I bought has 6 SATA ports. And I think that’s a fairly common amount. If I look at current harddrives, best price per gigabyte should be somewhere around 14TB drives. So given a RAID5, that’s 70TB of storage, or 80TB if you go for 16TB hdds.

I think once you go considerably beyond that, and you don’t want to lose your data, you should think about buying proper hardware. I mean people do all kinds of crazy stuff, and at some point I extended my storage by simply plugging in 2 large external USB disks. And that worked surprisingly well… But these solutions aren’t super reliable. And neither are the cheap port expanders from Amazon.

I know. Guess I mainly wanted to say your given solution isn’t the entire story and the potential tool should decode the parameters as well, they might or might not be important. I’m often at the computer and I regularly do one-off tasks this way… But I’m aware it might not be an one-off task to you and you might not have a Linux terminal open 24/7 either 😉 Hope some of the other people have what you need. And btw… since I clicked on a few of the suggestions: I think the thing called URL encoding is a something different, that’s with all the percent signs and not base64 like here.

Well, the URL is a bit weird.

echo "aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuaG90ZG9nYmlsbHMuY29tL2hhbWJ1cmdlci1tb2xkcy9idXJnZXItZG9nLW1vbGQ" | base64 -d

gives me “https://www.hotdogbills.com/hamburger-molds/burger-dog-mold”. (Without the ‘s’.) And then there are about 176 characters left. I suppose the underscore is some delimiter. The rest is:

echo "c2lkPTY4MTNkMTljYzM0ZWJjZTE4NDA1ZGVjYSZzcz1QJnN0X3JpZD1udWxsJnV0bV9zb3VyY2U9bmV3c2xldHRlciZ1dG1fbWVkaXVtPWVtYWlsJnV0bV90ZXJtPWJyaWVmaW5nJnV0bV9jYW1wYWlnbj1zZmNfYml0ZWN1cmlvdXM" | base64 -d

“sid=6813d19cc34ebce18405deca&ss=P&st_rid=null&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=briefing&utm_campaign=sfc_bitecurious”

And I suppose the stuff after the last slash is there for some other reason, tracking or some hash or whatever. But the things before that are the URL and the parameters.

But the question remains whether we have some kind of tool to do this automatically and make it a bit easier…

There’s base64 -d on the command line.

Yes. Though I think predictive policing is directly ethically wrong. I mean first of all there is no such thing as a thought crime. So I think you can’t make people suffer consequences before they did anything. And it comes with consequences. If you’re living in a poor neighborhood or you have darker skin color or have some records in their databases, for whatever reason… Life will become difficult. And you might not be able to live up to your potential any more. Possibly lots of people won’t. Also mistakes will happen and we have to find a way to minimize the amount of innocent people in jail. Or you might want to become politically active. But then you can’t because that’s going to mess with your job and life. And you can ask these people today how fair the system is to them.

And I’m not sure if it’s a slippery slope either. I mean we have China with a social score system. And several other countries with prevalent surveillance. And we know since Snowden that the US also keeps large databases about all of us. It’s already there.

I think it’s more a salami swindle. In the early days, the internet was relatively free, then we had a corporate takeover. And more recently governments are actually cracking down and we don’t have Pornhub in Texas anymore. The UK is also very eager to restrict freedom, porn and unwanted things. Several smaller forums hosted in the UK were killed last year by the new laws. I had occasionally used some of them. Now they’re gone. Then they want your Social media accounts at the borders these days and small amount of people get sent back home for exercising free speech. Also small things increased like someone wanting to pat me down and look inside my bag before I visit an evening show. I cant take my swiss army knife to some locations any more and 5-10years ago that thing was constantly in my bagpack. Surveillance cameras are getting more and more, and does it make crime actually go down? Or is is just a thing in itself? Private companies do the same. I can barely use a messenger these days without revealing my phone number and letting them track me forever. Google gets embedded deeper in all our devices and lifes each day and of course they don’t necessarily want a dystopia… But they definitely want to manipulate you. That’s kind of the core of advertising.

I definitely feel some of the consequences. Some of the changes happened for valid reasons. Some didn’t. And I don’t think “Predictive policing is here whether we like it or not”… It’s a choice… Just because technology exists, doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to use it. That’s a fallacy as well.

And then we have Palantir and the arms industry. And I don’t think that’s much of a slippery slope anymore. These systems already decide on some abstract and intransparent intelligence if a potential terrorist is worth murdering 30 or 80 woman and children in the process, and that indeed sounds pretty dystopian to me. But nonethess, exactly that was used to kill a good amount of people fairly recently. Until they took the more wholesome approach to level the entire place… I’m not saying war is easy or there’s a right way to wage war. But I don’t think technology like that is justifiable when used like that.

I think policing is a complex issue. And the US for example has almost ten times the homicide rate of the average European country. They have a lot of gang violence, school-schootings and everything is more extreme in the USA, for the better or the worse. I’d say it’s likely a comprehensive approach. Police needs equipment and good training. They need to be staffed. They also need good guidelines and strict oversight. We can’t have bad people or power abuse. And lawmakers and courts need to facilitate an environment in which things go into the right direction. Everything from the local to the national level. Then society has to agree to pull in the same direction. And it’s kind of an investment into all kinds of things. That will certainly pay off later, big time. But includes things like invest in healtcare for mentally ill people, invest in integration with immigrants. And invest in the proper solution for online crime. And then there’s neoliberalism and our overall concept of a society we want to live in. Of course people are more likely to commit crimes if they’re miserable or hungry or don’t have anything to lose. So we need a society where everyone has some decent living conditions, also feels alright and is integrated into society in some form. And for me it also includes some fairness and individual freedom.
I’d say it’s solvable. I mean not a 100% “perfect” world, but we can have a look at different countries and see how they do things and what it does to them. And there will always be crime, and always room for improvement.

The question is unclear to me. You mean phone apps to access it? Other server projects with the same idea and they’re Free Software?

I’ve moved my instant messenger onto a VPS and that has a good uptime. And I’m somewhat okay if my Nextcloud and calendars don’t sync. Most important data is synced anyway.

Other than that I’ve called my ISP a bunch of times to give me a new router, they refused, I canceled the subscription and made a new one and got a new router. And that one is better. And in doubt I’ll call a family member.

Ja ich denke manchmal ist man geneigt Kindern irgendwelchen Ramsch zu schenken?! Es gibt ja auch Haufenweise richtig doofes Plastikspielzeug und irgendwer scheint das zu kaufen. Letztlich würde ich aber auch versuchen mir zumindest etwas Mühe zu geben.

Oh, richtig, ich hab ganz vergessen dass das hier ja auch 50ct kostet… Das macht es in der Tat unfair. Also wenn die beiden Konzepte sich gegenseitig ausgleichen sollten, müsste es schon gleichviel kosten und gleich aufwändig sein. Vielleicht könnte/sollte man ein Kontingent einführen, jeder Benutzer kann soundsoviel gleichzeitig haben und wollen und ab irgendwann kostet beides extra?! Ich meine zumindest für Kinder/Jugendliche sind 50ct ja auch Geld. Und bei Erwachsenen… Naja, zumindest an mir kann man ja erkennen, dass diese Unfairness nicht jedem auffällt.

I think judging something really depends on the requirements. No one said using technology was going to be simple and easy. We should make it as easy as we can do, but no more than that. There’s still a lot of room for improvement. But in the end the commercial services are geared towards convenience. And they’ll always outpace us. We have to set up servers and jump through a few hoops so it’s us in control of the network. There is no other feasible way to do it.

Though I really wish we had some messenger that makes encryption foolproof. And rock solid, and with a resource footprint of IRC when concerned with text messages, but not limited to that.

Normalerweise wird das gelöst, indem andere Leute das dann auch mit einem Klick vorreservieren können, und dann ist Schluss mit Verlängern für die Person, die das gerade hat. Ist zumindest hier so. Ich denke das klappt ganz gut. Sicherlich ist das irgendwie ein systemimmanentes Problem, dass ein geliehener Gegenstand nur an einem Ort gleichzeitig sein kann. Entweder ist es unterwegs, oder steht in der Bücherei auf dem Regal rum… Ich hatte letztes Jahr für 4x4 Wochen ein Akkordeon aus der Stadtbücherei, das war ziemlich nice.

We’ve had the discussion a while back here in selfhosted. You can find it here: https://awful.systems/post/5029223

Main points: Continued drama around people, and tuwunel is tied to a single, (paid) developer and I figure once there’s anything wrong with that, tuwunel might die instantly. While continuwuity is a community effort and maybe that’s a bit more sustainable. Though I don’t own any crystal ball and I don’t know how things will turn out.

Sure, I believe that is supposed to be uWu or maybe some kind of puppy talk. It’s certainly originally started by June, who turned conduit (which is a sane name) into conduwuit.

I figured I’ve lost all shame anyway, back when we discussed nerd topics in the school bus or the 5 'o clock train, like Linux lore, anime, Star Trek concepts and technobabble. I mean people were staring and I’m aware of that, but I’ve really lost all F*'s to give. And that turns me into the person who I am today, and I’ll happily write sentences like the one above. Or still talk about Star Trek in a crowded train. And these days it’s the mycelial network and that really makes people question my sanity. 🫠