Innevitably whatever public transportation you use the route will end up in the ghetteo.

This is a mindset that many people in the U.S. will need to get over before the “quality” of public transport improves: that busses, trains, subways are for “the poor”.

I’ve been on the subways in New York and busses and trains elsewhere in the States. They’re gross. Especially, compared to most of Europe (Italy, Denmark, Germany, etc). In Asia, they’re also a clean. The mindset in Asia and Europe is “this is what people (not just the poor) take to get from point A to point B”. There aren’t school busses, the kids just take the same city bus/train/subway that all the other people take to get to work.

I’ve spent 45 minutes in the States on my daily commute staring at (and riding on) the bumper of the car in front of me. I’ve also spent 45 minutes, in Europe, peacefully riding the subway to work. I’m able to surf the web, watch a video, relax. I definitely enjoy/recommend the later experience.

Thanks for the write-up. I think Santa will be bringing me a Firestick Max for Xmas… and I’ve already got a real-Debrid subscription (which I highly recommend). I look forward in trying to plug them together.

I expect to have some website compatibility issues with Firefox/librewolf, as it does have a 3% share of the global browser market - so, website development energy is focused on the chrome/safari experience. However, 8+ years ago I felt I needed to use chrome at least every other day to view certain websites - it was frustrating.

I’m hoping (and willing to try it out) to see if this has improved.

Neato, I’ll check it out. I’m also trying out mull for android (as I’d like to keep my desktop/cellphone bookmarks/browser-history in sync)

Thanks for the comprehensive write-up. It convinced me to migrate back to Firefox.

I was on Firefox (8 years ago), moved to Chrome (I liked the non-admin/transparent update feature and Websites didn’t break like they did with ff), then moved to brave (basically chrome + more privacy), and now I’ll go back the Firefox (I hope I won’t encounter too many non-FF websites)

Microsoft creates thousands of tons of ewaste for no reason…

Of course there’s a reason, you said it yourself: TPM.

With TPM, Software will be able to cryptographically verify that the OS and Hardware are all unmodified. This’ll be an end to piracy and end to unauthorized modifications to your PC (“We’ve detected that you’ve installed an Ad Blocker, please remove it before accessing your banking website”)

This won’t happen overnight, but the forced hardware upgrade is all about control (Microsoft over you) and creating a walled garden to drive profits (like Apple).

You can take a look at Android’s attestation and how it prevents running your banking apps on a rooted cellphone as an example of things to come.

You have a valid point, and if your using this service to download dark web “illegal to possess” content (like CP) - then, yeah, you probably don’t want to use it.

However, if you “find” the random movie/tv-show: The copyright holders are usually chasing people who are distributing content (like you do with torrents) as opposed to the people who may accidentally consume the content. … but IANAL

How invasive do you have to be to ask your users to install a Kernel driver just for a stupid anti cheat that will still get bypassed within a week.

Oh, don’t worry attestation is just around the corner.

Attestation is basically every software companies wet dream: it allows software to cryptographically verify that *everything" from the software to the hardware is legitimate and unmodified. Android has been rolling this out for years (making it difficult to run your banking app on your rooted phone) . It’s the same concept that Google wants to use to know if you’ve been blocking ads in chrome.

… fun times ahead.

… or you could pay approx $2.70 / month for real Debrid. Replace jellyfin with stremio + torrentio and your family can immediately stream whatever shows they want w/o asking you and without needing to wait for the torrent to download.

According to here:

• 64 GB costs $419
• 256 GB costs $549
• 512 GB costs $679

Thank you for the link. I’m looking forward to hearing about their “improved version” in 8 months.

Sounds interesting. Is there a non-paywall link available?

Basically, my company is tightly wed to using outlook and exchange.

We would have liked to have kept all this “on-prem”. Meaning, we have physical machines running in our company network that has paid licenses for exchange.

The “force” that Microsoft has applied, is that we will not be allowed to purchase licenses for exchange (disclaimer: I don’t know if the licenses are not available/discontinued or if it’s not cost effective - I wasn’t involved in those conversations). Long story short: If we want Outlook/Exchange we must use MS Cloud solution. Depending on your organization’s size - this cost us an ungodly amount of money but (and here is where the anti-trust is) you get Office 356, Teams, and the rest of the MS eccosystem “for free” (or at a deep, deep discount).

This means the cost of Cloud Exchange (which includes Teams, O365, etc) . Was about the same (maybe a little less) than what we paid for “on-prem” exchange, plus Google docs, plus slack, plus Zoom. However, since “on-prem” exchange isn’t available - our only other option would be to ditch exchange for Google (which costs a lot more) or some open-source solution (which probably won’t integrate seamlessly into outlook).

Wow, 12 - you’re living the dream ;)

Could you share your setup? I’m on Linux, but I’ve tried both Edge and Brave. Both only show 4 people.

When a 5th person joins, I need to switch to the “group view” (?), which has a auditorium background and crude attempts by Teams to “crop” people from their background.

It’s such a perfect summary of my Teams experience : you want something simple (ie: see 5+ people) and MS delivers the most useless feature… I cannot even call it half passed, cause I’m certain the “group view” took far more engineering effort than it would have taken to just show 5 or more people on the screen.

Oh, it’s worse then that: you want to scrape some content, cut and paste content, save an image, save a stream of music/video - "oh… sorry, you can’t do that Dave cause the command line tool/3rd party website/gui isn’t trusted, but if you subscribe to our ultra premium package you can have some of that functionality unlocked (but just for our site) or you can watch some ads. "

I absolutely agree : our company used slack, Google docs, and self-hosted exchange.

Eventually, MS forced us to replace our self-hosted exchange for MS’ cloud solution. This was basically a ramrod for shoveling O365 and having it replace Slack with Teams and Google Docs with O365.

The migration was painful… going from “I have the exact tools I need for the job” to “jebus, this is the best MS has? On Teams I can only see 4 people at the same time? What was MS thinking”.

Yup, it’s kinda annoying when Google offers links to Reddit that won’t work.

I’m curious, how would you do this in such a way that it wouldn’t come at the expense of effecting your high availability?

If the server were on-prem or in the cloud… and the system crashed/rebooted, how would you decrypt (or add the passphrase) to the encrypted drive?.. cause the likehood of the kernel crashing or a reboot after and update is higher than an FBI raid… and it would get tiresome to have the site being down, while we wait for Bob to wake up, log in, and type the passphrase to mount the encrypted hdd.

You could use something like HashiCorp Vault, but it isn’t perfect either. If the server were rebooted, it could talk to Vault and request the passphrase (automatically) , but this also means that the FBI could also “plug in” the server (at their leisure) and have it re-request the passphrase. … and if Vault were restarted there’s quite a process to unseal (unlock) a vault - so, it would be as cumbersome as needing to type in the passphrase on reboot.

My point / question is: yes, encryption (conceptually) is easy, but if you look at “the whole life cycle / workflow” - it’s much more complicated and you (as an administrator) might ask yourself “does this complexity improve anything or actually protect my users?”

As others have mentioned use a credit card instead of debit.

But if you need/want to use a debit card, then take a look at services like Revolut or Wise (non-referal links included).

Both provide you with debit cards that you can enable/disable instantly within their app. Revolut gives you “virtual cards” which can be used for online subscription, so you can create a dedicated virtual card for each subscription (minimizing the impact if/when one of your cards is leaked). Revolut also has “one time use cards”, so a new debit card number for a single purchase. In practice, more and more vendors are disallowing “one time use cards”, but you can create a similar effect with the virtual cards.

Both platforms also allow you to set up dedicated (monthly) spending limits on either the physical or virtual cards. So you can limit your exposure that way too.

But the nice thing about email is it’s decentralized, and everyone already has it.

That is true, but in the case of email as an issue tracker: only the people who have received it will know of its existence (unless it’s mirrored on public facing websites - like Debian does with their issue tracking).

The thing we’d lose is the “ease of access”. Tbh, I’d see Usenet being a better distribution medium than email for OSS apps… but I really appreciate the intention behind solutions like git-issues: move the issue tracking into the same tools used to track code changes. It, in my opinion, is more in line with K. I. S. S.