I think these days most people use their video card as a sound card because monitors/displays generally have audio out as well.

But yeah. I remember having endless problems getting one of the Splinter Cells to run (I want to say Pandora Tomorrow?). After literally weeks of googling and discussing the issue on forums with others with the same problem, we found out that it had issues with the onboard sound for certain motherboards. Went out to Best Buy, bought the cheapest soundblaster they had, and no problems.

I can’t speak to their Password Management as I use Bitwarden for that

But I am slowly but surely migrating myself away from gmail to (my own email at my own domain routed to) Proton. The webmail is very much comparable to gmail and, if you communicate with like minded people, it has decent support for signing and even encrypting email both to other proton mail users as well as to complete randos with just a password that you can send later. My only real complaint is that (… for some really good reasons) there is no easy to use exchange server and I need to run their mail bridge to use a desktop client like Thunderbird to send and maanage and (one day) back up emails.

VPN? I switched over to this around the same time I decided I wanted to “take control” of my email and it works pretty well. Very easy to get some openvpn credentials that I can plug into whatever setup I want. And no extra fee for port forwarding unlike SOME providers. That said, my main complaint is that the port is semi-randomized which doesn’t play the nicest with my totally legit linux iso torrenting setup… But a quick docker ps and docker logs and then updating the config is pretty trivial and I only have to do it maybe once a week?

The big elephant in the room is that, as you rightfully understand, you are still putting a LOT of trust. But that is actually why I like Proton. Because other companies pretend they are going to knife fight the CIA and the US Government on your behalf all while actively not acknowledging anything until we get a post mortem. Proton are VERY open about just how far they are willing to go to protect you (not very) and what YOU can do to mean that Proton can’t provide much useful information once the appropriate paperwork and legal actions have been filed.

I wouldn’t trust a paid account with anything more sensitive than what really innovative stuff a friend did with a bun in the dumpster behind the Wendy’s the other night. But, hypothetically, if I needed to send an anonymous email? Third party VPN/Tor, clean hardware, and a free Protonmail account works great and I do trust Proton to give the absolute bare minimum in that case.

And just for a bit of context. My “grand plan” is to migrate the vast majority of my correspondence and accounts to email addresses tied to one or more of my own domains. Currently I plan to use Protonmail for the mail server because I don’t want that smoke. But the point is that I control the email address so I can get my Heat on and walk away in 30 seconds (actually more like a few hours but…).

Which is why the other aspect of that is that I want to back up the emails I actually want to save (rather than just EVERYTHING like those of us with older gmail accounts do) via a local client that I then archive to an encrypted volume on my NAS and (REDACTED) after that.

Not sure if google is particularly different but the way this works for the other services is basically low energy bluetooth scanning coupled with the phones providing their location*. So basically all the devices on that scanning/spy network periodically ping/listen for nearby devices/trackers. When it finds one, it sends a quick message to the servers with that phone’s location and the ID of the tracker. Get enough of those pings and you can triangulate the position of the tracker pretty precisely.

Which… is why this fundamentally does not work with “hacker” solutions that allegedly emphasize privacy. Because you just don’t have enough devices listening. This was painfully obvious with tile back in the day and is still an issue with Samsung in some countries.

*: Via a combination of gps, cell tower, and wifi network scanning. The less obvious part of that being wifi networks which is the majority of how interior positioning works.

I mean… bluetooth is literally broadcasting your position (sort of/it depends on the implementation). It is not at all a stretch that you should turn that off if you care about privacy. Same with not scanning for what wifi networks are available or even pinging GPS satellites (because that leaves a log). Hell… cell tower logs are a treat for cops/TLAs for a reason.

Aside from that? Good for you. If you actually follow through on that I can respect it. My point is more that this particular solution seems like the worst of all worlds.

Either you are demolishing your battery with regular phone homes to a server you hopefully control or you are relying on a push via SMS and the hope that you lose your phone somewhere you havea reception. And you still only have YOUR phone and YOUR network to track it which has significant drawbacks if you travel.

If people truly change their lives and focus on it, you can do a lot. But it does not take much, at all, to become compromised to one degree or another and people vastly underestimate the amount of redundancy. Or even the impact of a sibling or partner or even friend.

Instead, the common case is people will tweak one small aspect and think that does anything other than inconvenience them. Or, worse, they’ll watch a youtube and decide to put EVERYTHING through their vpn which… defeats the purpose because they are still one easily collated set of profiles/cookies that can trivially reveal that “Fred Smith in Afghanistan” is really “Fred Smith in North Carolina”

Which is why my approach is that there is data I very much want to protect and data I know I can’t. So I focus on understanding the former while doing what I can with the latter.

And something like this? There are probably specific niche use cases for this. But it is a product/service that fundamentally requires aggregated data. And, depending on the implementation, it is going to fuck with your battery hard.

I guess. But it is really going to depend on where you live and just how frequently it does dial home.

My personal use for these networks is luggage tags. But a friend lost her phone on a hike a few years back and the find my phone stuff was more or less useless due to poor reception and ever dwindling battery.

The real benefit is the low energy bluetooth magic and OTHER devices to do the phoning home. Because maybe I have shit reception but someone hiking a hundred feet away has good reception and updates the ping.

Took a bit to figure out what it was even claiming to do

When enabled your phone constantly sends e2e encrypted your location to the server where you can than access it from a webbrowser.

God no. Just take a hatchet to my battery and be done with it.

Also: Until a month or two ago, sure. But google finally got their shit together-ish and set up a tracking network the same as apple and samsung. And that is what you are sacrificing your privacy for. Yes, you give Big Tech tracking information… that they already have. In exchange you can actually have peace of mind of knowing your luggage is in the same airport or even where you parked. And you can’t really self-host a crowd-sourced network.

Video length is incredibly important to The Algorithm and a LOT of content creators time their videos to the second. Taking away control of that (even if the end result ins the exact same length) is going to ruffle a lot of feathers and lead to a lot of people who want to “be a champion for the viewers who should like, comment, and subscribe and use my referral code for war thunder” as a result.

It was inevitable (and is arguably the “logical” extension of sponsor segments).

As for what it will do to timestamps: The same thing it does to timestamps in podcasts. Some podcast players have a special way to tag the timestamp to adjust with the inserted ads but NOBODY hosts with those. So they are rendered useless.

On the youtube side? They could potentially be auto-adjusted because youtube will know how many ads were inserted . But considering the goal of this is to serve ads…

I guess I am not getting it.

If you can access your files, you can copy your files. If the concern is that you only know how to connect from a full PC, consider plugging a laptop into the switch (or even just set up a VM).

Hard to give much more help without knowing your actual setup. But one nasty solution is to ssh into the server then connect to the running container (or mount the same storage into a different one) if there are some shenanigans going on there.

But yeah. My general rule of thumb is that if something needs to outlive the life of a container then it is being stored on the local filesystem or a zfs/ceph pool.

Always worth pointing out:

People were skeptical of toilet water but after Not Sure et al demonstrated that it was effective, they embraced it.

We have people who were skeptical of… modern medicine. And when vaccinations were demonstrated to be effective they… shoved horse medicine up their asses and attacked medical workers.

We are so far past Idiocracy.

Not sure if they had a third party manage it for them (there has been a LONG history of super vague “secret” dealings) but it was for their kickstarter rewards through backerkit or whatever. So the same survey you get asking how many extra books you want to buy or whatever.

King under the Mountain always rubbed me wrong. They hit right at the tail end of “wow. kickstarter is awesome” and right before people realized how many DF-like colony sims there actually were. And then their kickstarter survey, for a key with no add-ons, required an insane amount of personal information. I think they claimed it was for VAT but saw a few “ask a lawyer” threads that pointed out that was nonsense and could have been done with a checkbox.

And the super duper secret publisher right around the time interest was spiking because of DF-GUI was more than a bit sketchy

I dunno. I know that it is hell out there for indie devs (not so much in 2021/2022 but…) but all that combined with the game never feeling like more than a “unity school project” REALLY raises a massive number of red flags. Probably just a single kid in over their head and trying to act like a “real” studio but… yeah.

Still, good to see it was released as open source and here is hoping the fanbase that glommed onto this can carry it forward.

Yeah. I’ve increasingly not understood vaati’s business model. Feels like he is going for the “maker youtube” approach of just releasing a video a quarter and getting ad revenue from the rest. But so much of his content is dependent on when a From game comes out…

And yeah. Haven’t watched it yet but I would be shocked if this did not cover all three (?) endings. With the majority focused on Ending 3 for obvious reasons.

Ventoy is a tool I want to use and that would regularly fix issues when I am simultaneously provisioning and diagnosing a system.

But it feels like it breaks if you even look at it in an unexpected manner or if any distro updates at all.

So end result is it works once or twice and then I need to reformat the stick to pop on mint or debian server or whatever anyway.

Yeah. I expect basically any publicly available instances to get C&Ds REAL fast.

And a p2p archive.org will basically never work. For the same reasons that the various NSFW lemmy instances get defederated from almost instantly. Because there is room for discussion on sites that highlight nudity in movies. There isn’t much room to discuss when it is nothing but revenge porn, “fappening links”, ripped OF content, and (inevitably) child porn.

Stuff like this… I am sure there are niches but I am not seeing a lot of benefit over either a folder or a notes app that lets me upload PDFs (or even just google drive). But once you try to build a “community” you are going to have the same moderation issues amplified a hundred fold.

I would also add that google very much understands the implications of streaming music.

This is speculated to be why you can’t get Youtube Premium without Youtube Music (in most countries?). Because all the license holders would lose their minds if they weren’t getting a cut (and apparently the ad revenue from music videos isn’t enough).