So creating an onlyfans account using Grok is profitable?

Finland has similar thing, but it is not capped. There’s a ton of 100 000+€ fines given around here. Obviously with Musk it would be a bit different, since the fine is based on actual income, not some imaginary monopoly money on the stock market.

This does not apply to “installing software”.

So it doesn’t apply when I click the big button which says ‘Install’ on F-Droid app on my phone?

And it does come with risk,

Just like installing software from the ‘secure’ Google Play store.

Installing software is installing software, no matter where you get that software from. That’s it. You can try to twist that with nuances on terminology or invent new ones, the end result is that an piece of software is installed on the system and nothing more. It doesn’t matter if the software came from play store, f-droid, steam, windows store, shady google drive link or the pirate bay. It doesn’t matter if you’re a power user or never seen a smartphone before in your life.

Sure, there might differences in potential security, compatibility, licensing and whatever, but it is still a piece of software being installed.

“installing apps from outside the Google Play Store”

To me that implies it’s somehow different than just installing software. You could say ‘install from play store’ or ‘install from f-droid’ if you need to specify which app repository you should use, as that what it is. Sideloading might be an appropriate term if you need to upload apk to your device via USB-cable from your PC, which the term originally meant.

to make it sound somehow dangerous or complicated in order to justify

[Citation needed]

From the article:

This “advanced flow” is for power users and enthusiasts who “want to take educated risks to install software from unverified developers.” Google says it was “designed carefully to prevent those in the midst of a scam attempt from being coerced by high pressure tactics to install malicious software.”

Sure, the term itself comes from 1990s, but lately specially Google tries to twist that to mean something only ‘power users’ do and it comes with a ‘educated risk’.

Do you consider installing games to you PC from Steam sideloading too? What about downloading Firefox installer? It is installing software on your computer, no matter if that computer happens to be in a cellphone form factor, and always has been. Sideloading is a made up term to make it sound somehow dangerous or complicated in order to justify even bigger walls on the ecosystem garden and control how people use their own devices.

“This is Android’s new ‘advanced flow’ for INSTALLING apps without verification”. Sideloading is such a bullshit term made only to confuse consumers. They can wrap that in sparkling wrapper, but it’s still security theater at best and definetly misleading. Apps from F-Droid or any other app ‘store’ are not any less safe than the ones at googles own offering.

No deduplication, encryption nor support for non-linux operating systems for a start.

Not from my wife if I lose our photo collection which has been building up since we got our first digital camera 20ish years ago.

I have dynamic dns address and a handful of CNAME records on my domains pointing on that dyndns-address so I can use ‘proper’ names with my services. When my public IP changes it takes a few minutes for the records to update, but it usually happens only when my router reboots so it’s been good enough for me.

Also I use two separate dyndns providers so there’s likely at least one working DNS entry to my network.

I’ve always liked the way slashdot handles comment rating. It’s a bit complicated, so maybe that’s why it’s not adopted elsewhere, but it gives a much more fine grained options instead of just up/downvote.

ISP obviously don’t see the traffic inside your own network, regardless of the router used. But as soon as you open any kind of connection over the internet, incoming or outgoing, your ISP has to have some information about it to route the traffic. DNS over TLS doesn’t hide that your browser opens connections to servers, they can see if you use wireguard to access your services (not which ones, just in general that there’s traffic coming and going) and even if you use VPN for everything they can still see the encrypted VPN traffic and, at least technically, apply pattern recognitions on that to figure out what you’re doing. And if you use VPN then your VPN provider can do the same than your last-mile internet provider, so you’ll just move the goal by doing that.

Last-mile ISP is going to be a middleman on your network usage no matter what you use and they’ll always have at least some information about your usage patterns.

ISP can see your traffic anyways regardless if their router is at your end or not. In here any kind of ‘user behavior monitoring’ or whatever they call it is illegal, but the routers ISPs generally give out are as cheap as you can get so they are generally not too reliable and they tend to have pretty limited features.

Also, depending on ISP, they might roll out updates on your device which may or may not reset the configuration. That’s usually (at least around here) made with ISPs account on the router and if you disable/remove that their automation can’t access your router anymore.

So, as a rule of thumb, your own router is likely better for any kind of self hosting or other tinkering, but there’s exceptions too.

We need to pick our battles. I don’t see much difference in paying Google for a service than having a Spotify family plan like I do. I know spotify has its own problems and my money would be more ethically spent on some other service, but with everything else going on life I can’t be arsed to switch to anything right now. For me it gives enough value for the money spent and that’s good enough for now.

I agree. It’s a bit tedious to configure, but rock solid and has all the features you could ask from a proxy.

I’d guess there’s some tools which rely on RSS feeds or something to update seeds automatically, but that’s just a gut feeling. Also it shouldn’t be too difficult to write your own, but I don’t know if anything ‘production ready’ is out there.

Discoverability is one issue and trust for longevity is another. No bigger distribution is going to rely their official download links on an individual home lab which can disappear overnight. Also I guess there’s also guestion if images are provided as is without adding/removing your own ‘extensions’, but that’s what cheksums are for.

And this is obviously on a general level, I’m not trying to suggest that xana is not trustworthy :) But torrent seeding is a helpful thing for community, and easy/safe to set up.

Age verification is one thing, but I routinely verify my id online. Banking, insurance, taxes, various other government things, car registrations, some of the kids school stuff and so on. We have pretty decent infrastructure in place here in Finland and the entities I identify myself online already has my info anyways. I can use either my banking app or mobile verification to securely prove I am who I claim to be and the systems have roughly the same user experience than MFA tokens.

Each of those are roughly zero-knowledge, the website I log in receives just “User with login token xxx is IsoKiero with SSN 123456789” and the tokens expire after a while. Also there’s restrictions in place that my insurance company can’t just sell my data to whomever unless I opt-in for their “marketing” program (not going to happen) and even then there’s some limitations on how they can use the data.

The same system could be adopted to age verification, but that’s a whole another can of worms.

Ah, right. I’m not in star trek scene, but what I’ve seen that might be a probe, soldering iron, welder and a plasma cutter all in one in that universe.

You can see metal changing colours due to temperature, those are definetly soldering irons except the top right one which is a hot air soldering station and (IIRC, I have the same model) it goes up to 550C. You don’t want to hold any of those on the business end when they’re running.

Sound and power consumption. At least in my case those are important if I was going to store data at my mothers house. Power consumption might not matter that much, but HDD sound definetly does. And even with spinning rust hardware cost would be somewhere around 250€ compared to ~20€/month of cloud storage.

YMMV, in my scenario it’s just easier to use a cloud provider.