And some copyrighted shit from Dolby. Granted, header files only.

At first I was… wow, no shit! Open source Winamp!

But then I went through the Github issues (because, 6 hours since first commit and already 5 issues open?). As someone else put it, “This has got to be the most embarrassing open-sourcing i’ve seen to date.”. The licensing is a mess, the coverup is a dumpster fire. By tomorrow this is going to be as viral as Twitter’s “open sourcing” of its recommendation algorithm they did last year. Not sure if I should make coffee or popcorn in the morning.

Those share buttons are trackers themselves. So it’s not about “supporting” those websites by publishing content to them, it’s about undermining the privacy of your readers and doing the opposite of what you preach, and “supporting” those websites by feeding them much more valuable user data. As another comment said, just put a button to copy the permalink and let them paste themselves if they want to share.

As for you sharing a link on the mainstream social media platforms yourself, I’d actually encourage that. Cory Doctorow auto-publishes links (not content) to his articles on as many social media platforms as he can (sorry, can’t find the article in which he describes it). The point is that he still retains control over his content by hosting it himself, he controls the (lack of) trackers and ads, and gaining traffic from these platforms is still to his and his potential readers benefit. Bending your rules a little to reach more people and maybe even convert them to be more privacy-aware is fine.

deleted by creator

For email migration / Proton:

• Proton has an import tool but I think it’s still for paid customers only. You could pay for a 1 month subscription and do your thing.
• The import tool has labels matching, pay attention to them if you want to migrate them too. If you have multiple addresses, create a label for each when importing so you’ll have an easy time identifying/filtering later.
• I would encourage a paid Proton subscription if you can afford it, for its extra features. I.e. unlimited folders / labels; I also use the Export tool from time to time to backup all Proton email messages offline.
• When changing your email address for accounts, you need to make sure all are accounted for in your password manager, and use a status for each of them (ie To migrate, Migrated, Cannot migrate / To delete, Cannot migrate / create new). This is going to be a tedious process, but it will be rewarding at the end.
• Don’t leave your accounts that you cannot migrate in the air (ie they don’t have a change email option), even if they’re not important. Delete them. You might have to contact support on some of them to try to change email or request deletion. Consider this a spring cleaning and make the efort.
• When deleting accounts, use the GDPR option if possible / you’re in the EU.
• Keep your old Gmail around for some time to catch any accounts linked to it that you might have missed. As somebody else mentioned, there might be some for which you used Gmail login and those are easy to miss, especially if they don’t send any emails. You won’t be able to recover them without access to your Google account.
• I wouldn’t bother with forwarding emails (why let Google know of your new identity?). Delete emails already imported. Use the import tool multiple times to import any new ones.
• When you do the email address migration, even if you didn’t have multiple email addresses in Gmail, this could be a good time to separate online identities and have multiple addresses and/or aliases in Proton (ie 1. for personal/official/utilities accounts - your real identity, 2. shopping - still real identity, but these might be spammier, 3. rest/disposable/not tied to your real info/no payment enrolled; even more, depending on your use case). Any Proton paid plan allows you to have multiple addresses under the same login (10 for Mail Plus for example).
• Personal opinion: Proton is awesome. Every year, even on the cheapest Mail Plus plan, Proton awards a 1GB Storage Bonus to all paying users.
• The free plan has a limit of only 1 custom filter (they used to limit them for Mail Plus too, some time ago). To bypass that (Proton even encourages it because it’s more efficient for their servers), learn Sieve Filters, and that way you can group multiple filters into one sieve (or have all of them in one sieve, if on the free plan). You can use comments in sieve filters.
• Proton supports the “+” in the address, just like Gmail does. It’s a quick way of creating aliases.
• The Proton password manager also has some feature of creating aliases (for paid plans) - they call them “hide-my-email aliases”; but it’s limited for the lower tier plans (10 for Mail Plus), and maybe you wouldn’t want to bother with it since you won’t be using it as your actual password manager.
• Something I learned the hard way, don’t use a short 3-4 characters username / email address (probably hard to find any available anymore, as Proton exists for some time); it will attract more spam from spammers randomly generating email addresses / generating them from a dictionary.

For Youtube, on Android:

• I use Youtube in Brave browser, which for the time being can still block the ads, and also keeps playing in the background.
• When I want to avoid Youtube, for Youtube links, I use UntrackMe (F-Droid), which (among others) redirects to an Invidious instance opened in the browser. Initially I installed it for Twitter, but Nitter doesn’t work anymore.

Cloud storage:

• I’d go the self hosted route - NextCloud + DAVx5 (contacts sync), and VPN to access it when out of home (if needed; otherwise, set it to sync over unmetered WiFi connections only, and mark your home WiFi as unmetered). But this is me - I could probably safely use Proton Drive, but wouldn’t have the same flexibility and would force me to a higher cost plan. For you, this means entering homelab territory and it gets complicated. But IF you do, there are other self-hosting apps you could benefit from (ie PiHole, Jellyfin, Home Assistant if you’re into home automation, etc).

2FA app:

• Never tried Authy, but I use Aegis and it’s good. Open source, it has backup, export, custom icons for entries, (bulk) import via QR, etc.

Video player:

• You could try VLC if you need subtitles support.

I follow your blog from time to time and I appreciate it. Just with your recent posts I realized you have an active Lemmy account.

I was going to continue this comment with “But I don’t get…”, then I stopped and read your blog post again and remembered rule #2.

I think I get what you are trying to say, it’s good that there are some mod tools to help with modding, but they’re not enough, and even if racism isn’t as visible on Lemmy, people targeted by racism still exist and get hurt. So I guess your point is be more proactive than reactive. People don’t get that, and even if they are well intentioned, they think of all the defederating and banning examples as “good enough”.

Early adopters are also overprotective with Lemmy and its small community, especially when a newcomer directly questions “how is racism in this community?”. They found their peaceful corner of the internet (relative to major social media platforms), they know it has its flaws, but since the beginning they had to defend to questions like “who owns the data?”, “what happens with deleted posts / comments”, “is defederatation effective”, “what about that Lemmygrad which is hosted by Lemmy developers”, can mods and admins become too powerful", “how long till this gets the same fate as Reddit”, etc.

I’m not defending the behaviour, just thinking of an explanation. Because frankly, I’m also surprised by the downvotes and backlash you received.

So I guess what I was trying to say is, “Hi Jon! Keep up the good work!”

Please don’t go the RaspberryPi route for serious self-hosting, you’ll regret it later when you’ll realize it’s not powerful enough for ie NextCloud. It can handle PiHole for example (minus digging through the historical logs / stats via its interface), but when adding more and more services (Nextcloud, Jellyfin, a VPN, home automation, etc), it will be easier to expand via VMs (Proxmox) / Docker on a single machine that you need to maintain, you’d have easier snapshot backups, single point for firewall rules, etc, than adding RPIs. Buy a mini server, you’ll have flexibility, room for upgrade, and the costs and power consumption will be justified when scaling to multiple services.

‘no immediate timeline’ toward monetization

Soo, starting tomorrow

A hash has a fixed length, including MD5. There’s no reason to cap password (input) Iength. You can hash the whole bible and still get the same length hash. So either they don’t even hash it, they’re idiots, or they try to be unnecessarily cautious to avoid some other limit / overflow, like POST max size (which would still be counted in at least KB, not several characters). The limit on what special characters you can use is also highly suspicious - that’s not how you deal with injections / escaping your inputs.

Lol, Franz is a wimp.

“So anyway, the glass is tough, basically”. Sure Elon, we’ll take your word for it. Is this how they test their rockets, too?

Holy shit, I stand corrected, those graphs speak for themselves. Bookmarked for future stats.

LE: Well, there’s also the section about average age of failure in their newest report: 2 years and 7 months for HDDs, 14 months for SSDs.

True, but it depends from person to person and it counts if you have a small or big drive, how often you watch and rotate your media, how large the media is. If you only have a 1TB SSD, and often download and watch blue-ray quality, 20 movies will fill it. It won’t be long until the same blocks get erased, no matter how much the SSDs firmware tries to spread the usage and avoid reusing the same blocks.

Anyway, my point is, aside from noise and lower power consumption advantages, I wouldn’t use SSDs for a NAS, I regard them as consumables. Speed isn’t really an issue in HDDs.

I use Hard Disk Sentinel, it’s not free, but it also monitors drives in Windows so you have an early warning at the first sign of issues. Also logs historic data (writes, temperature, etc) and displays them as graphs.

Failure rates for sdd are better than hdd

I’m curious on where did you find this. Maybe they have lower DOA rates and decreased chances to fail in the first year, but SSDs have a limited usage lifetime / limited writes, so even if they don’t fail quickly, they wear out over time and at first they have degraded performance, but finally succumb in 5 years or less, even when lightly used (as in as OS drives).

To avoid DOA / first year issues with HDDs, just have the patience to fully scan them before using with a good disk testing app.

From my experience, SSDs are more prone to failure and have limited writes. They are ment for running the OS, databases for fast access, and games / apps. They are not ment for long time storage and frequent overwrites, like movies, which usually means download, delete and repeat which wears the memory quickly. One uses electric current to short memory cells and switch them from 0 to 1 and viceversa, the other uses a magnetic layer which supports a lot more overwrites on the same bit.

If keeping important data on them, I would use them only in a redundant RAID configuration and/or with frequent backups so I wouldn’t cry if one of them fails. And when they fail, there are no recovery options as with HDDs (even if very expensive, at least you have a chance).

I also wouldn’t touch used server SSDs, their lifetime is already shortened from the start. I had 3 Intel, enterprise-grade SSD changes in our company servers, each after about 3 years - they just wear out. For consumer / home SSDs the typical lifetime is 5 years, but that takes into account minor / “normal” usage, ie. if used as OS disks. And maybe power users could extend that with moving the swap/pagefile and temporary files (ie browser cache, logs, etc) on a spinning disk, but it defeats the purpose of having an SSD for speed in the first place.

If you have media (like movies) in mind, you’ll find sooner than later that you’ll need more space, and with HDDs the price per GB is lower than SSDs.

If you have no issue with 1. noise, 2. speed (any HDD is fast enough for movie playback and are decent for download), 3. concurrent access, or 4. physical shocks from transport, go with HDDs, even used ones.

My two, personal opinion cents.

Not to brag by any means, but english isn’t my first language I knew all of the above.

While I find your implants path very interesting, impressive and Cyberpunk worthy, I would’t use any externally accessible keys / fobs / etc myself. I wouldn’t want someone to unlock my stuff while I’m sleeping. Same reason I avoid face detection unlock. My mind is the best safe out there, I can memorize a very lengthy passphrase and have no problems typing it.

If on Linux and need automatization, GnuPG works, and you can use RSA keys. It’s slower than symmetric for large files, but I had success encrypting several tens of GB database backups with a 2048 bit key with no issue. The higher key length you go, the slower. But it has the advantage that you only need to keep the public key on the machine you are encrypting on, and keep the private key safely stored away for when you need to decrypt. Unlike for symmetric, when if you need repeatable / automatized encryption, and you’d store the key in a config somewhere on the same machine in plain sight, and because it’s also used for decryption, when leaked you’re done for.

Normally you would go with symmetric and generate a good, random AES key each time you encrypt, use AES for actual encryption which is very FAST, and encrypt just the AES key with RSA / asymmetric. This complicates scripts a lot and you end up with 2 dependent files to take care of (the target encrypted file and the file with the encrypted AES key). But this is the sane way of doing it because asymmetric isn’t ment for large data lengths (not just because of slow speed). HTTPS and SSH work the same way: asymmetric for key exchange handshake (through public certificates), symmetric for the actual communication while oftenly changing the key.

If no automation is necessary, use VeraCrypt containers. You can keep multiple files in a container. You have several symmetric algorithms to pick from and you can control the number of iterations for key derivation. Debatable as to the added security, but you can also choose to chain up to 3 algorithms in your preferred order.

The above covers the tools and somewhat the algos. For key lengths, see here. I wouldn’t go with RSA lower than 4096 these days, elliptic curves is preffered (256 bit +), or AES 256+ in CTR mode. And I’d stay away from lesser known / scrutinized algos.

As others have stated, any recommendation depends on your threat model, how powerful and resourceful are the bad actors you are trying to protect from, how often you need to encrypt, how often to decrypt, the time span for which you need to protect the file, etc.

The rush on getting it working the first time is 👌

That’s so true, but what I think keeps us hooked in the game are the failures, the figuring out the "why"s.

Reading as a kid about virus analysis and how they work in a short column in a… newspaper. Yeah, they even listed full Windows Registry paths. Didn’t know what HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE was, didn’t own a computer, only knew about some DOS commands, but I knew I wanted to be able to do that job and decompile stuff (whatever that ment) and see how it worked. Just like dismantling (and ultimately destroying) toys to see the inner workings.

After finally owning a computer and being bored by the few games I had on Windows 95, being limited to Notepad, Internet Explorer (without an internet connection yet; or was it Netscape Navigator?) and Paint (in which I sucked, lacking any artistic talent), when I learned that I can just type stuff in Notepad, I borrowed a book about “programming” in HTML. Then Pascal, the pinnacle being a simple XOR encryption program, with a god damn white on blue “windows” interface with buttons (a la Midnight Commander). Writing TRIVIA “scripts” for mIRC channels made us gods. Then Delphi naturally followed, making my own tool to track how many hours I’ve spent on dialup a month (yes, internet was very expensive) while listening to 80’s music on Winamp. Nothing was more interesting than that. Then got a job and out of a sudden started making my own money by writing Delphi code. Up until then I wasn’t really aware that my passion would also bring food on the table. The rest is history.

Programming in those days felt unreal. Felt like The Matrix. I knew that what I want to do for the rest of my life is look at text on a screen, hit CTRL+F9, see a crash, set some breakpoints, and ponder around the room or while taking a piss about what went wrong and how to solve it. I’m no Einstein, but I understood why science people dedicate their lifes to their work and disregard completely their social life.