Take some time and really analyze your threat model. There are different solutions for each of them. For example, protecting against a friend swiping the drives may be as simple as LUKS on the drive and a USB key with the unlock keys. Another poster suggested leaving the backup computer wide open but encrypting the files that you back up with symmetric or asymmetric, based on your needs. If you’re hiding it from the government, check your local laws. You may be guilty until proven innocent in which case you need “plausible deniability” of what’s on the drive. That’s a different solution. Are you dealing with a well funded nation-state adversary? Maybe keying in the password isn’t such a bad idea.

I’m using LUKS with mandos on a raspberry PI. I back up to a Pi at a friend’s house over TailScale where the disk is wide open, but Duplicity will encrypt the backup file. My threat model is a run of the mill thief swiping the computers and script kiddies hacking in.

I’ve always been fascinated with the Holocaust and so when there was an interview with a Holocaust survivor on 60 minutes, I had to watch it. The woman said a bunch of stuff, but what stuck with me is that she said that, “people need to be given permission” to act badly. The episode showed previously undiscovered notes and pictures from one camp, showing officers having a picnic and enjoying themselves after a hard day of???

Her point was that these people were given permission. I now see it everywhere. Food fight in the school cafeteria? There were a few instigators who gave permission to the rest. A city protest that turns violent? Again, a few vocal minority of the group started the violence and then the rest joined in. I see it at work and I also see it on-line. Anonymity and lack of accountability also enhances the effect.

Whether the instigators are real or bots doesn’t really matter because they “gave permission” to the rest to misbehave.

Found the episode: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/pictures-show-nazi-life-at-auschwitz-as-jews-died-in-gas-chambers-60-minutes/

I was about to correct you because I’ve done lyft on web, but it looks like it’s not supported anymore.

https://ride.lyft.com/not-supported

You’re doing God’s work!

Over my career, it’s sad to see how the technical communications groups are the first to get cut because “developers should document their own code”. No, most can’t. Also, the lack of good documentation leads to churn in other areas. It’s difficult to measure it, but for those in the know, it’s painfully obvious.

🤔

I haven’t been out there in 15 years. I’ll have to check it out again!

I don’t know the legal side, but employers don’t want you to talk about your compensation with anyone. Maybe it’s legal, but definitely frowned upon.

Garden & walks fix a lot. Also, if you eat it off the plant directly, it doesn’t count against your diet!

I wanted to quit nagging my kids to close the pantry door. It conflicts with the fridge door and they’re both getting banged up pretty bad. I replaced one of the pantry door hinges with a spring hinge (and removed the latch mechanism from the handle) and now the pantry door closes on its own. Sometimes, I hear them fling the door open and hit the fridge anyways, but I giggle just a little when it bonks them on the head.

Consider what would happen if employees across the globe posted to an open database about their employer, position title, salary bonus and health care information. I’m sure we’d all be sued. How is this legal?

In the US, I’ve noticed several places, mostly restaurants that now charge a convenience fee for credit card transactions. Double bonus for cash. I’ve even started using checks again as they don’t have a fee.

You don’t even need to self host. Murena offers up to 1G (I think) of storage for free. I had that on one of my phones.

I use OsmAnd almost exclusively, but mostly as a navigation aid and not for finding places. I like to know where I’m going before I leave so I can plan the route and timing my departure. If there is a place or address that is not in OSM, there are various address to coordinate searches that I’ll add as a favorite.

I am mapping cities as often as I can with StreetComplete, but most of my quests are about sidewalks rather than places. One day, I would like to learn more advanced skills so I can map a neighborhood or business.

Jeff? Is that you, son? I told you that it was nonnegotiable, now get off the internets, I’m expecting an important telephone call and don’t want you tying up the lines.

While there are a lot of good technical suggestions here, I’ve found that a conversation goes a long way. In my experience, when talking with loved ones, explain your emotions. Not “I hate this” or “the governments are listening!”, but those core emotions. “Having a device in my room that is always monitoring me makes me feel anxious and I don’t feel comfortable in a place where I should feel safe.” Make sure that the dialog is calm and remains about your feelings until you know that you’re being heard. If you aren’t, try other phrases or examples.

Once you’ve established your feelings, address their concerns and feelings (active listening). It sounds stupid at first, but it works. “I hear that you are frustrated when I don’t come down for dinner immediately.” Finally, propose some solutions that meet everybody’s needs and that the parties can select one to try out for a week and evaluate it’s effectiveness, trying new things until a mutually beneficial solution is found.

Good luck. Please post the outcome!

I’m not as enraged by this as most, but I think the true test will be to see if this feature is disabled by default in future releases. If they actually do listen to their users, that’s better than any of the other big players.

I read a bit about the new “feature” and it seems to me that they’re trying out a way to allow ad companies to know if their advertisement was effective in a way that also preserves the privacy of the user. I can respect that. I did shut it off, but am also less concerned because I have multiple advertisement removal tools, so this feature is irrelevant.

The fact that it’s enabled by default isn’t comforting, but who would actually turn this on if it were buried in about:config? In order to prove its effectiveness to promote a privacy respecting but advertisement friendly mechanism, this is what they felt that they had to do.

Of course, I could easily be all wrong about this and time will tell.

I don’t know if this applies directly, but in my early days of hosting a server for fun, I installed a telnet server because my phone didn’t have SSH at the time. I forgot to close it when i was done and someone got in and installed a password sniffer. This was a Slackware box, IIRC. My only indication that there was a problem was that the “.” & “…” directories didn’t appear from an “ls -Alf”. I pulled the network cable and booted to a boot image and discovered that many key system utilities were replaced with imposters that would mask that there was an intruder. The '“ps”, “ls” and other utils were symlinked to the “…” dir in /usr/local/lib.

I didn’t trust anything on that server and nuked it. Now, anything that’s internet facing is built from ansible and the config is stored in a repo and the repo is backed up on a drive that’s physically disconnected except when backing up. I’ve messed up the initrd from time to time and it’s usuall easier for me to reimage than try to fix it.

Thank you for a thoughtful post with citations and quotes. After reading the whole page by Mozilla, it seems like they’re taking steps to show advertisers how they can get what they want while preserving people’s privacy. I can live with that. They’re trying to build a win-win scenario.

I’ll still block ads. I’ll still reject cookies, but I feel like it’s a reasonable feature THAT I CAN SHUT OFF. I’m still in control of my browser! Great!

Look at the strangler pattern in microswrvice architecture. Applying this to your scenario, set up a front end to YouTube, cache the results locally (probably host in a place that allows it). Also host videos from other platforms like peertube. Once you have a lot of users, slowly prioritize “free” videos over YT content.

It’s not likely to happen, but it’s the pattern that FB uses to present news. First they showed a link to the story and you’d click through, then they required more of the story, then when all were hooked, they demanded the whole story to be displayed, effectively stealing all the users and the ability to advertise.

Only managers get a phone. You can expense $5 of your bill each month if you spend over a certain number of hours performing after hours support. My app is stable, so I don’t exceed the minimum, but I need to carry my laptop around now so I can at least log in to see the ticket and route it to the correct group.

Also, I’ve been interviewing. 🤞