It’s easiest to just register a domain name and use Couldflare Tunnels. No need to worry about dynamic DNS, port forwarding etc. Plus, you have the security advantages of DDoS protection and firewall (WAF). Finally, you get portability - you can change your ISP, router or even move your entire lab into the cloud if you wanted to, and you won’t need to change a single thing.

I have a lab set up on my mini PC that I often take to work with me, and it works the same regardless of whether it’s going thru my work’s restricted proxy or the NAT at home. Zero config required on the network side.

This shouldn’t even be a question lol. Even if you aren’t worried about theft, encryption has a nice bonus: you don’t have to worry about secure erasing your drives when you want to get rid of them. I mean, sure it’s not that big of a deal to wipe a drive, but sometimes you’re unable to do so - for instance, the drive could fail and you may not be able to do the wipe. So you end up getting rid of the drive as-is, but an opportunist could get a hold of that drive and attempt to repair it and recover your data. Or maybe the drive fails, but it’s still under warranty and you want to RMA it - with encryption on, you don’t have to worry about some random accessing your data.

The same can be said of all the paper/cardboard being used in the food industry - paper straws, cardboard takeaway containers etc are all lined with PFAS and other “forever” chemicals that leach into your food. We really need a law to force companies to disclose the composition of products that come in contact with food.

This. I mentioned this a couple of times, IMO a Tl;DR shouldn’t exceed 150 words, but the bot’s author disagreed with me. It’s not a TL;DR if it takes up half the screen.

Desktop users exist

So do Desktop tools like Flameshot, which can directly upload to image hosts and copy the URL to the clipboard, and there also exists third-party Desktop web-clients such as Photon, which could be updated with that functionality as well. But with Lemmy itself being open source, it wouldn’t take much effort to modify the code to use a third-party image host.

have a history of deciding to forbid hotlinking

There are plenty of hosts which do allow hotlinking though, like imgbb.com

history of suddenly deleting all (e.g. PhotoBucket) or some (e.g. Imgur) images .

Not a big loss, IMO. Lemmy isn’t an image hosting nor an image-centric site, it’s a text-heavy forum at first instance, and anyone posting images are encouraged to provide text alts for the benefit of blind users, so images not persisting isn’t a big deal.

If image persistence is really that important, there are other services which are better suited for that, such as Pixelfed. But in the first place, I wouldn’t rely on some random Lemmy server, which is vulnerable to DDoS and other attacks and could go down at any time (also why the importance on decentralization), as an assurance of persistence. I mean, when there’s no guarantee that a Lemmy instance will even be there tomorrow, is there really a need to worry about image persistence?

This can be easily implemented client-side, like how third-party Reddit clients have been doing for years, by uploading to the likes of Imgur. Shift the responsibility away from the Lemmy server and onto dedicated image hosts, who have the storage to spare, plus manpower/policies to deal with illegal content.

Or just disable image uploads completely. We got by on Reddit without any built-in image hosting functionality for over a decade, so Lemmy should be fine without it as well - especially considering that we don’t really have many image-heavy communities, besides the NSFW instances. I mean, storage costs money you know, and with Lemmy being run by volunteers, it makes even more sense to get rid of image hosting to save costs.

Nice, but I wonder if they plan to switch to GPL, or stay with MPL. No mention of that on the website.

This is pretty much what I did, although it was coincidental. Felt bad for my boss because he fought pretty hard to get a meaty pay rise for me, and then a month later I quit.

That’s actually a good thing IMO, Microsoft is giving people more reasons to switch to Linux. How kind of them!

I’d trust some random people running an activity pub server just as much as I’d trust Meta with my personal photos: I won’t.

I’m pretty sure Pixelfed wasn’t intended to be a place to share your personal photos - it’s meant for sharing photos you want to share with the public - could be a circle of friends or the whole world. Photos like pictures of your cats, food, landscapes etc. It’s a place to share photos with friends, or a place to connect photographers with other photographers.

NONSENSICAL STATEMENT INVOLVING PLANKTON

There’s always a tradeoff in computing between security v/s performance/overhead, so the value of it depends on your threat model, and the attack vectors you’re expecting.

Anyways, RAM encryption is generally “available” in various forms, depending on the mobo, CPU, software used etc, but it’s not commonly enabled/used. Most AMD boards (at least, mid-range and above should) have an option in the BIOS to enable Secure Memory Encryption (SME). This allows the OS to selectively encrypt memory pages, making use of a hardware AES engine that sits outside of the CPU.

There’s also Transparent SME (TSME), which encrypts the entire memory and works completely independent of the OS and software. Usually only high-end/workstation boards have this, and it also requires a Ryzen PRO CPU. TSME also has a much lower overhead, I recall reading somewhere it’s something like only 5%.

I believe Intel also has something similar, but I never looked into it.

AMD have a whitepaper available with an overview on how this stuff works, if you’re interested: https://www.amd.com/system/files/TechDocs/memory-encryption-white-paper.pdf

It’s the opposite for me, private mode causes more Cloudflare prompts (and Google captchas).

Agreed. It was headed that way but most of us, including me, ignored the warning signs. I should’ve quit when they cancelled Reddit Gifts giving some lame bs reason. I should’ve quit when they launched new Reddit with all it’s ads and tracking crap. I should’ve quit when they started turning the site into more mainstream social media. But I still continued because I was mostly shielded from all that by third-party apps, and sticking to niche communities and staying away from r/all. But the API thing was the last straw for me, if there was any proof Spez was the next Zuckerberg, that was it, that was all the motivation I needed to quit.

Good. Hopefully, at least some of these people realize that Reddit is a lost cause, and that their only option is to migrate to other sites.

What @Yote.zip said.

Also, here’s a much better alternative script that also hardens your system: https://github.com/simeononsecurity/Windows-Optimize-Harden-Debloat

You’d see that a lot on Reddit, on subs like r/pcmr or r/gaming. But not much of that here, presumably because Lemmy has a higher ratio of FOSS-friendly folks.

Problem 4: Rupert Murdoch

I can’t speak for the author but I’ve experienced this issue a few times, with increasing frequency of late, on Firefox and even other apps (not Chrome). Especially if I’m browsing under private mode (which I often am, just because I don’t like any cookies/cache to be saved for random sites). Now, it’s not like it’s some random site who’s Javascript broke or something, perfectly functioning sites would stop working and display that CloudFlare access denied message, when they previously worked just fine.

The other app I’d experience issues with is Tachiyomi, a manga reader and scraper. Whilst it works fine for the most part, every once in a while I’d get blocked by CloudFlare, which prevents Tachiyomi from searching/accessing various manga sites. But if I access the said site via Chrome, it’d work just fine.

It’s not just CloudFlare. Sometimes, when again browsing via Firefox’s private mode and say I needed to run a Google search, Google sometimes throws a captcha at me because it finds my activities “suspicious”.

Just so you know, there’s nothing unusual about my internet setup - I’m just a standard home user, with a static-ish IP from a well known ISP. My public IP has been the same for over an year now, and I don’t run any web/mail servers or anything that my ISP or a website would dislike.

What it is, is just plain discrimination. Just because I have my privacy filters up and blocking all tracking and crap, it’s seeing me as suspicious. If this sort of stuff is going to be the norm, I can only imagine how much more bleak our future would be if Google’s WEI went into effect.