My ISP offers unauthenticated SMTP for their customer addresses. It’s pretty heavily rate limited, but well enough for the occasional status email my system throws out. At least around here they are pretty common for residential customers, so that might be an option.

Other possibility is to set up SMTP relay to your network and give it credentials to an actual email account (with SMTP support, which isn’t granted these days). It can take in emails from your network without credentials and throw them to the internet with your account. It’s pretty simple to set up, search for postfix + smarthost. Added bonus is that you can read the replies to that address too via your email provider services.

I have several old but working electronics and I literally haven’t been able to give them away for free.

Few years ago I got a pile of old switches and other network stuff. Unmanaged 24 port gigabit switches, some firewalls and other network hardware you might find in a generic ~50 person office. No one wants them, but I don’t want to throw away working and (potentially) useful hardware either. I suppose I eventually have to as my own network doesn’t really need 200 ethernet ports and they are consuming the already crammed storage space I have.

And no, I’m not offering to ship them across the globe on my own expense. But trying to sell them on our version of craigslist for 15€ (shipping included) doesn’t seem to work either.

OrgAbuseHandle: ABUSE9107-ARIN

OrgAbuseName: ABUSE

OrgAbusePhone: +1-313-516-8908

OrgAbuseEmail: [email protected]

OrgAbuseRef: https://rdap.arin.net/registry/entity/ABUSE9107-ARIN

They have options. No idea if they actually do anything for the reports, but it’s worth a shot.

I’m running Dahua cameras. They can pull new firmware straight over the internet, but they don’t rely on any cloud services. All kinds of flavours available and they do run on POE.

https://thecybersecguru.com/news/lg-smart-tv-spying-investigation/

There are roughly 216 million LG smart TVs in homes, hospitals, offices, and hotels worldwide. Each one maps its local network, fingerprints its content, and logs audio, on or off, whether you’re talking to it or to someone else, whether you’re online or not, and feeds that into an ad engine that sells access to your living room.

They do a lot more than just scan the network.

Mine is several years old by now, I doubt that the firmware on that has all the options enabled. And also I live in a pretty rural area, there’s no open networks around.

But something LG has achieved with this, I’m going to look for other brands when I’m on a market for new TV. Which I hope will be many years in the future, maybe there’s a change on products while waiting and something better is available by then.

My LG TV is blocked from my network and always has been. However, the andriod tv connected to it is a different thing, so it’s more or less lost cause anyways and I haven’t had enough incentive to block the android box from the rest of network since it’d need some tweaking so that casting and other occasionally used features still work. And even if I’d block the android tv box there’s still our cellphones gathering all the data, so I’m pretty much just running things on hopium that EU offers at least some protection on my data.

There’s a better way. Here in Finland it’s pretty common that you can just call/text your boss that you have a common cold and you can be on a sick leave for few days (3 days is pretty common limit) just self-diagnosing it. With longer sickness you’ll need a doctors note, but at least on my company with common cold and other minor stuff it’s taken care of either over text chat or via a call with a doctor.

Obviously if the doctor thinks the whatever you have requires more in depth examination they can schedule a meeting, but for seasonal flu and stuff like that it’s pretty rare you need to see a doctor in person at all. And of course they’ll follow the numbers, so that if you call in sick every monday or whatever the rules are more strict and examinations are done more frequently, but for vast majority a few days laying in bed with a fever isn’t any kind of issue.

You are obviously correct on that but we could also grab pitchforks about the term ‘sideloading’. Everyone knows what ‘installing’ is and ‘sideloading’ (in this context) is just a bullshit term to make it feel like something mysterious and/or dangerous. Installing software from play store is no different than installing from f-droid.