irotsoma

I use a local unbound DNS server on my router with Quad9 as upstream. I actually have google DNS entirely blocked/rerouted on my router because google uses it for advertising tracking, but I get creepers out by targeted ads showing up in random places when I do do something on a totally unrelated site. Most important thing, though, is to use DNSSEC or DNS over HTTPS to reduce middlemen from using your DNS info to track what sites you visit and sell that data. Of course ISPs still see the destination of all of your data for tracking what sites you visit unless you use a VPN or similar tools, so you can’t hide it from them that way.

Matrix isn’t more secure/private than Signal. Both have advantages and disadvantages. Signal has a centralized server, but has no access to the keys to decrypt any of the data flowing through them. Matrix chat rooms live on servers that would theoretically be able to access the data in the rooms, so you need to trust the server owners. Advantage is that multiple servers are involved so no one sever can kill your chat room. With Signal, the disadvantage is if you join a chat room, you can’t see any past messages because those are encrypted with keys you don’t have access to. Similarly if you move to a new device, that device won’t have any of your past conversations because the new device doesn’t have the keys for those messages. (though migration is now somewhat possible but done poorly IMHO).

So, they address different concerns. Is your concern keeping your conversations private, or keeping your conversations from being censored? Signal is more secure and private, but more centralized and easier or to fail. Matrix can be secure if you host your own server or explicitly trust the owners of all servers that house your chatrooms to keep them secure and to not sell their servers in the future. Matrix is more distributed, so more difficult to be censored or have your data lost by a single point of failure.

Is it “secure enough” depends on what your concerns are. If you host your own, then it’s as secure as you are technically able to keep them secure yourself. Otherwise it depends on the server owner.

Servers are always going to be owned by someone. But the data is encrypted with keys not available to the server. Signal isn’t perfect, and I don’t like some stuff they do, but it’s the best design out there that is also relatively user friendly and doesn’t have holes that are easy to exploit by the server owner.

Yeah, the system was on a single server at first and eventually expanded to either a docker swarm or Kubernetes cluster. So the single server acts as both a docker host and an NFS server.

I’ve had this happen multiple times, so I use this pattern by default. Mostly these are volumes with just config files and other small stuff that it’s OK if it’s duplicated in the docker cache. If it is something like large image caches or videos or other volumes that I know will end up very large then I probably would have started with storage off the server in the beginning. It saves a significant amount of time to not have to reconfigure everything as it expands if I just have a template that I use from the start.

Most advertising links are routed through click tracing sites so that they can add some tracking information about what advertising campaign brought the user there and what that user does while on the site among other tracking data. In the rare cases i want to see something from an email, I never click on links, I always copy the URL being displayed and paste it. You can get email clients that have settings to warn you about this or that will automatically use the displayed link and ignore the anchor link.

For what it’s worth, I actually had a lot easier time with NVIDIA graphics on Ubuntu and Fedora than Mint. And Kubuntu with the Plasma desktop was the easiest to get my partner converted from Windows without much tweaking.

You could try the booting the live CD and see if you’re able to get the graphics working more easily. And I’ve never seen that second issue on either Ubuntu or Fedora, so not sure what’s up there.

I’m not too happy with the direction Canonical is taking Ubuntu right now, but it typically has the most documentation for when issues come up and has a very healthy development cycle, so I still recommend it to most people as a starting place. To me, Mint has always been a little too opinionated and catering to the less technical and thus harder to tweak. Ubuntu kind of does it in a way that makes it easier to override the default easy-mode kind of stuff. Just a general observation from decades of Linux use, and may or may not be as true for the current versions.

I use Fedora with Plasma desktop on my other desktop/laptop devices because I prefer RHEL to Debian based stuff, probably just got used to it using CentOS and now Rocky for all my servers over the years.

Unlikely at least in the near future. The remnants of Dodd-Frank and anything that Biden did are high on the list for Trump’s chopping block.

I use NFS shares for all of my volumes so they’re more portable for future expansion and easier to back up. It uses additional disk space for the cache of course, but i have plenty.

When I add a second server or add a dedicated storage device as I expand, it has made it easier to move with almost no effort.

Also Canonical has added a lot of problems to promote their monetization strategies lately. Mostly aimed at business rather than regular users, but still causes problems for home users.

I generally prefer RHEL based distros over Debian based ones, so Rocky Linux for servers is my current go to and Fedora for desktop, though Fedora is heading in a similar direction as Ubuntu I feel…

Yeah, probably best bet is to uninstall and purge settings. Depending on the district you’re using and it’s package manager, you it may be as simple as apt purge vim. And just to be sure remove all vimrc files from all user home folders including root.

Did your keyboard mapping get changed? Try running this to check the current locale:

localectl status

Other settings are generally dependent on the distro you’re using.

I think mailcow only supports Pushover for notifications, but it may have changed.

Signal is the easiest with true end to end encryption with keys stored on the endpoints only.

Yeah, they now no longer censor things like saying that LGBTQ+ people are mentally ill or that women are “household objects” or that all immigrants are criminals (regardless of immigration status). So, yes they stopped censoring hate-speech that far right people don’t consider hate speech because they consider those things as accepted facts.

This issue is more likely about the perception that anyone with an interest in technology is a cyber criminal. Same reason that the Bush administration’s NSA flagged subscribers to the Liinux forums. Knowledge is power and they believe anyone who wants knowledge is a threat to their power. They’d prefer to go back to the dark ages and die of dysentery than accept women as equal, gay people as human, or brown people as neighbors (which is even more ironic when coming from other brown people).

Not OP but I left because of the proposed change in moderation policy to allow “free speech” that basically would negate the anti-hate-speech policy.

There’s some concern now that Startpage is majority owned by an ad company. The company says they want the ad revenue rather than the user data, but it’s hard to trust that. I used to use it but moved to Searxng.

I’d love to see your implementation specs, code, pr any other technical details you’d like to share. I’m setting up home assistant and one of the things I want it to do is replace the functions of my thermostat and add some additional details.

I used to have a Nest Thermostat, but my furnace needed to be replaced a couple of months back and I got a Mitsubishi heat pump, but their thermostat sucks, and it isnt compatible with Nest because it’s all wireless. I installed the WiFi add-on to the furnace so I can use the app, too, but it also sucks pretty bad. Plus I miss the functionality of it turning down the heat when I’m away to save money and turning it back on before I get home.

So I’m planning to implement my own solution and documenting and open sourcing everything. But it’s going to be several months before I get to doing it due to other more urgent projects. So, I’m looking at everything available. I definitely will be setting up a small display to replace the thermostat and having motion detectors to turn on the display when you approach it to see the temperature and such and to supplement the home/away detection.

Anyway, I would love to see your implementation to see how you did this piece of it.