I dropped it in favor of Jellyfin some time back, but this was a good excuse to go ahead and delete my family’s accounts.

I just emailed 404 Media about this.

There is a cost to convenience ratio. Each individual has to decide based on their own ethics and preferences whether they’re willing to sacrifice their own personal experience for the right of ownership. I personally chose to cancel my Spotify subscription some time ago and start buying digital downloads and CDs again.

That I don’t know. I mean you could always just use something to record the sound played by your PC, but at that point A) You’re not getting as good of quality as you would from an actual download of the source material and you’d have to manually assign metadata, make sure no notifications or other sounds played, make sure your recording settings were optimum, etc. It’s easier, right now at least, to just buy what you want on CD or from a store that sells digital downloads legitimately.

Blue usually indicates USB3 and the black are probably USB2. USB3 is “supposed” to be backwards compatible, and is most of the time, but I’ve ran into a few instances where USB2 devices don’t quite work as well or as reliably when connected to a USB3 port, so a lot of motherboard manufacturers still include a couple USB2 ports for things like keyboards and mice that don’t need the extra speed and may be finnicky on newer ports.

Buy and store your own music. HDTracks and 7Digital both sell high quality DRM free downloads, or you can just swing by your local Walmart or Dollar Store and grab some CDs to rip.

Or you could go sailing, that’s always an option…

Guess it helps differentiate the USB3 from the USB2.

I’m already hosting my own PiHole and using Quad9 as my upstream, so I have DNS filters already in place. Some apps however if you use a restrictive DNS will just use Google DNS all on their own, so I like having the option to just disable network connectivity altogether for apps that don’t need it.

I’m trying out LineageOS. It seems to have most of the user facing stuff I care about. I did have to manually install F-Droid, then add the repo for microG and install that, then manually install Aurora, so some more manual work was required, but it seems fine. It has options to deny network access to apps, though it’s a bit hidden in the network settings for each app instead of thru a “Firewall” app. It also comes with SeedVault so I was able to import my CalyxOS backup and get my apps and settings restored. My banking app (USAA) works fine too.

You can’t survive around here (eastern Kentucky) without owning your own car. The nearest Walmart to me is a half hour drive at 60mph and we don’t have taxis in any of the towns around me. That’s 7 hours of walking, each way. No buses or trains either. The closest store of any kind to me is a Dollar General and is about 2 hours each way if I walk.

It is the command line interface for libvirt/qemu/kvm on Linux. I usually just use virt-manager remotely via SSH to create and manage my VMs, but virsh can be handy as well.

If it is from Meta assume it’s compromised.

I got it from F-Droid for free.

Concersations.im. It’s my backup because it supports OMEMO and OpenPGP.

Besides that, Element (Matrix). I use it for its public rooms.

Pocket is one service of theirs I did use from time to time. Save an article you want to read later without committing it to a bookmark.

Generate a unique key for each client or device. SSH keys identify devices, not people, so I do not recommend sharing the same key between two different devices.

I generally do a few things to protect SSH:

1. Disable password login and use keys only
2. Install and configure Fail2Ban
3. Disable root login via ssh altogether. Just change “permit root login” from “no password” to just “no”. You can still become root via sudo or su after you’re connected, but that would trigger an additional password request. I always connect as a normal user and then use sudo if/when I need it. I don’t include NOPASSWD in my sudoers to make certain sudo prompts for a password. Doesn’t do any good to force normal user login if sudo doesn’t require a password.
4. If connecting via the same network or IPs, restrict the SSH open port to only the IPs you trust.
5. I don’t have SSH internet visible. I have my own Wireguard server running on a separate raspberry pi and use that to access SSH when I’m away, but SSH itself is not open to the internet or forwarded in the router.

So far I haven’t seen any attempts to change their user agents. I’ve seen one or two other bots poking around, but nothing to write home about so I’ve left them alone.

I have heard however that changing user agents is a tactic they do indeed employ, especially Claude, so it may be that I’ll eventually have to adapt my defenses.

I’ve been fending off AI bots the last week or so; wrote about it here:

https://gerowen.substack.com/p/the-ai-data-scraping-is-getting-out

Why did they get removed? I feel like I’m missing a whole backstory here.