I used to participate in (what was then) the largest and most active automotive enthusiast forum for a specific brand. They had forums for each major model run, and classifieds, etc. I’d go there for how-to’s, detailed info, reviews, tips and tricks, and of course, to tall with like-minded people. Meet ups even spawned from these groups, and friendships were forged.

As it really picked up steam, though, the forum creators decided to monetize, as every large website grapples with how to sustain their growth. Unfortunately, they decided to implement ads, subscription/pay wall, and within a month, there were five competing websites. The majority of us left in the first two weeks.

Now that forum still exists, but the content is gone, deleted by users who didn’t appreciate their content being monetized (sound familiar, June 2023?). The replacements? Some struggle on, and one or two are vibrant, but mostly, it imploded. There was one glorious pair of years though, when I (and thousands of others) spent hours every day on the forum, and every topic was covered.

In hindsight, the downfall was more than just the advertisements and pay walling. It was a few non-admins that were treated as defacto mods, and they had bad attitudes. Flaming anyone who asked questions that were asked before (this was before Google made searching easier), and also holding their own practices as the only way to maintain their cars.

The reddit versions of the forums were not remotely the same, with people coming and going and not really sticking around. The best place for the info is still forums, though I think they struggle with server upkeep and costs. It’s sad to me, but all things change. I’m glad for archive.org.

Can proton know what I’m browsing?

Absolutely. Your VPN provider is in a position to know what you’re browsing. It’s up to us to determine if their track record and public statements align with our values. Ideally, the VPN doesn’t log this info.

In the case of the ideal VPN, the rights holders would likely not even have access sufficient to determine if the VPN is connecting to “illegal” sites. That would require the ISP to provide this information to rights holders. In this case, it would seem the onus would be on Proton to take the report and look at their logs – which don’t exist – and then report the clients (found in their nonexistent logs) connecting to that service to Italian authorities.

My understanding is that this changes nothing for VPN users. The real question is how Italy can enforce it. It seems they would need additional legislation to block access to non-compliant providers, likely at the ISP level. Slippery slope.

My reading of the article is that providers are “made aware” by the rights holders, not by general monitoring of communications on their network.

It’s true that Article 15(1) of Directive 2000/31 prohibits the imposition of an obligation on an ISP to carry out general monitoring of information that it transmits on its own network.

Sounds to me that, in practice, rights holders will notify providers of suspected infringement, triggering their requirement to report to authorities, and it goes from there.

I’m not sure how this would work for a VPN provider. It seems that rights holders could only notify them of suspected piracy websites, as client traffic would be invisible to them. I also wonder how Italy can enforce their laws on the providers outside their jurisdiction, beyond compelling IP blocking to all non-compliant VPN servers in the world.

I have only performed a cursory, sleepy reading of the article, and I didn’t follow the links to the relevant legislation. Happy to be corrected.

Works fine for me on free, but I created an account separately and later logged in with proton, IIRC. Might be related to the timing, as they were in transition between being owned by proton then.

Kodi on my 2015 Nvidia Shield doesn’t stutter for me playing back 30GB+ 4k files on a 1Gb network from an ancient (2012) AMD Athlon TrueNAS box. It could be network related, but you can test this from another machine (laptop, desktop, etc) or by using local playback on the pi. I have cheap network hardware, and have never needed better. All this is to say Kodi mounting NFS shouldn’t need much bandwidth or high end gear. Perhaps the issue is on the playback side. Good luck!

Edit: and an

Holy shit, the backend was Wordpress

Of RDHO, not RDHN

Thx. I’m dabbling rn with a 2015 Intel i5 SFF and a low profile 6400 GPU, but it looks like I’ll be getting back to all my gear soon, and was curious to see what others are having success running with.

I think I’m looking at upgrading to a 7600 or greater GPU in a ryzen 7, but still on the sidelines watching the ryzen 9k rollout.

I still haven’t tried any image generation, have only used llamafile and LM studio, but would like to did a little deeper, while accounting for my dreaded ADHD that makes it miserable to learn new skills…

I’m reminded of this blog/article on Ars about ripping out OLS and reverting to NGINX. There’s some good info there, and also links to other of his posts on the subject and references. Good read.

Details on your setup?

This is a great post! I don’t use immich; I use ente.io and I don’t host it, but I do know they use OSM, as confirmed in #14 of their privacy policy:

Open Street Maps

• Use-case: Maps and geodata
• Privacy Policy: https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Privacy_Policy
• Contact: privacy@osmfoundation.org

I don’t self host presently, but if I get my server hardware back (moved out of the country a while) I want to dabble with a self hosted photo solution, so I’m glad to have found your post that keeps this fresh in my mind.

They also don’t always keep the metadata in the same archive (zip or tar) with the pictures they belong with, and that can throw off imports with tools that process Google Takeout archives directly. Its a pretty nasty solution, for real.

I moved about 140GB to ente.io before they had their newer takeout process, but some destinations can enable third party apps (like rclone) to do cloud to cloud. Nor sure which work best, since I couldn’t go that route myself.

I personally believe that the campaign against tiktok is more an issue with rich people ensuring that they remain rich in the future then it is with any actual national security concern.

I agree, and the evidence is pretty clear about who started the panic, and who benefits from it. That said, it’s clear that Tiktok does have security concerns. They’ve been caught spying on journalists. But that’s a problem with what’s legal in the US of A, not what one company does.

And Bytedance worked on multiple initiatives to make US regulators happy, like moving all data operations to Texas (IIRC, sleepy brain can’t find the links this early) and other acquiescences that actually served security needs, but were inexplicably forgotten and abandoned by people in our end, not theirs.

They either want to force tiktok to play by the rest of American companies rules

They already do. Facebook and Google and Apple have all been complicit in genocide, oppression and domestic spying, but that benefits US law enforcement, who lobby against reforms that would prevent it. Those are the rules: hoover up the data and use it however the f#@k they want, selling access to all bidders.

or to take it out so that American companies can vacuum up the user space and AD revenue.

Exactly. Even at the cost of an entire generation of voters’ goodwill. If “security” is the concern, why doesn’t Congress care about repeated breaches like this?

But who are we kidding? If we cared about national security, would we permit a felon and proven fraud to be elected president? Would we be lying naked with bedfellows such as Saudi Arabia? And look at who is putting up the money to buy Tiktok.

It’s very Randian.

Indeed. Government intervention in the economy, crony capitalism, and economic nationalism. A Randian trifecta.

It’s performative posturing by politicians who want to look tough on China and/or have been (or are pretending to be) convinced by TikTok’s competitors that they are a national security threat because they gather lots of data, just like every other app does.

If law makers really wanted to prevent the data being vacuumed up, they could pass meaningful privacy laws, but they own stock in companies that compete with TikTok and that also profit by vacuuming up everyone’s data, so they pretend that it’s just Chinese apps we have to worry about.

Except, since we have no privacy laws, if China wants to get the data, it’s perfectly legal for them to buy it from data brokers. We could enact laws that make what they (and Facebook, and Google, and…and…) are doing is illegal, but data brokers make billions, and politicians enjoy enabling billionaires in their exploitation of the general public. So the ban doesn’t stop China from bring able to get data on American citizens.

What the ban really does is (try to) force TikToks owners (Bytedance) to sell/divest to US companies that will enrich lawmakers and those lobbying the lawmakers.

Ars Technica has some good write-ups on the situation, and Techdirt has far more, and they don’t pull punches. I suspect EFF has something written on the subject too.

EoL? They’re releasing betas regularly and announced 13.3 for Q2. You mean how they’re sort of winding down with scale taking the bulk of dev cycles? Not much to change with the platform, and security fixes will be backported to CORE. I think SCALE still doesn’t fit my use-case, hut when it does, and jails go away with CORE, I’ll shed a tear and pour one out for my homie.

In that case, I’d probably be thinking of a standard power supply with molex output (they make bricks like this) for a 5.25" fan controller that ties in thermistors on the control side of the equation. I know that’s not the typical, “I just use a raspberry pi and…” answer we’re used to here, so take mine with a grain of salt.

If you mean running the fans in 240vAC, Comair Rotron make fantastic fans for this voltage. If you mean a regulator circuit and any old 12vDC fan, sorry for misunderstanding.

What tease! This great map begs for my close scrutiny. Alas! It will not bear it.

Edit: Here is a decent hi res map of the watershed. Boy, do I want to read every detail of that map you shared, OP. I’m going down the rabbit-hole!

Edit2: Another mid/low res map of the basin, but its awfully MS-Paint.

Edit3: found this digital version, but no better, really:

EditFinal: Here’s a depth and elevation profile that I found that’s clear and fairly detailed. I am too busy today to get further sucked in, but I could spend the rest of my day staring at these maps…

Love jails. My server didn’t move with me to Central America, and I miss Free/TrueNAS jails

Fun! I want I Google Earth version of this with a time slider.