For the curious:

https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/746684/why-does-a-microwaves-faraday-cage-block-microwaves-but-not-larger-wavelength-r

The metal screen on the microwave door is designed to block the specific wavelength being used to heat your food. It isn’t a full cage and isn’t effective at blocking other frequencies.

Absolutely. VMs and Containers are the wise sysadmin’s friends. Instead of rolling my own ip blocker I use Fail2Ban on public-facing machines. It’s invaluable.

That sounds pretty good to me for self-hosted services you’re running just for you and yours. The only addition I have on the DR front is implementing an off-site backup as well. I prefer restic for file-level backups, Proxmox Backup Server for image backups (clonezilla works in a pinch), and Backblaze B2 for off-site storage. They’re reliable and reasonably priced. If a third party service isn’t in the cards then get a second SSD and put it in a safety deposit box or bury it on the other side of town or something. Swap the two backup disks once a month.

The point is to make sure you’re following the 3-2-1 principal. Three copies of your data. Two different storage mediums. One remote location (at least). If disaster strikes and your home disappears you want something to restore from rather than losing absolutely everything.

Extending your current set up to ship the external SSD’s contents out to B2 would likely just be pointing rsync at your B2 bucket and scheduling a cron or systemd timer to run it.

After that if you’re itching for more I’d suggest reading/watching some Red Team content like the stuff at hacker101 dot com and sans dot org. OWASP dot org is also building some neat educational tools. Getting a better understanding of the what and why around internet background noise and threat actor patterns is powerful.

You could also play around with Wazuh if you want to launch straight into the Blue Team weeds. Education of the attacking side is essential for us to be effective as defenders but deeper learning anywhere across the spectrum is always a good thing. Standing up a full blown SIEM XDR, for free, offers a lot of education.

P. S. I realize this is all tangential to your OP. I don’t care for the grizzled killjoys who chime in with “that’s dumb don’t do that” or similar, offer little helpful insight, and trot off arrogantly over the horizon on their high horse. I wanted to be sure I offered actionable suggestions for improvement and was tangibly helpful.

You can meaningfully portscan the entire internet in a trivial amount of time. Security by obscurity doesn’t work. You just get blindsided. Switching to a non-standard port cleans the logs up because most of the background noise targets standard ports.

It sounds like you’re doing alright so far. Trying not to get got is only part of the puzzle though. You also ought to have a backup and recovery strategy (one tactic is not a strategy). Figuring out how to turn worst-case scenarios into solvable annoyances instead of apocalypse is another (and almost equally as important). If you’re trying to increase your resiliency, and if your Disaster Recovery isn’t fully baked yet, then I’d toss effort that way.

This is true! Saying figs is wasps is silly in the same way that saying plants are dirt is silly. Like… Kind of? From a certain odd perspective, “sure”, with caveats. It’s a reductive understanding that’s neither literally nor technically true but who am I? A botanist? No. I’m not.

I do know a lot happens between pollination and the fruit we might eat though and most fig varieties we grow for food or buy from stores aren’t the kind pollinated by wasps anyway. I found a decent write up with more detail here: https://www.treehugger.com/are-figs-vegan-5203202

Dirt is the byproduct of life after its been on a planet for a while. Plants figured out how to recycle life and death’s leftovers. Then mushrooms came along and filled the gaps in weird ways. Animals eat the plants and fungi. Other animals eat those animals. Siiiimbaaaa, right?

We typically don’t think we’re eating our ancestors when having a salad. We aren’t beholden to the idea that we’re eating wasps when munching figs either. Even in the odd case where we’re eating those specific kinds of figs.

🤦

That’s not a reasonable position. The Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, its interpretation, and the monied interests lobbying with millions of dollars to make billions selling firearms are endemic to the socio-political quagmire that is American politics.

Agreed. Check out Grayjay: https://grayjay.app/ https://gitlab.futo.org/videostreaming/grayjay

It’s a client for following creators across platforms while the user retains control. YouTube is one of the platforms Grayjay can access but you don’t have to let YouTube play adverts, track you, etc. It lets users turn the screen off and keep playing audio, bypass intros or sponsored ads, download whole videos, and other quality of life features.

You can also avoid YouTube entirely and only stream from PeerTube, NewPipe, SoundCloud, etc. You just tap the plugins you want and it respects your choices.

It’s still under active development during an ongoing arms race with YouTube but I’ve been using it for over a year and have only encountered two bugs that kept me from using it. It’s been a refreshing experience overall and I find myself watching more of the stuff I care about, more meaningfully supporting the artists I care about, and disallowing Google to abuse those interactions.

I’m not affiliated with them in any way. Just a happy convert.

It is difficult to consider a greater rube than one who interprets open mockery as lavish praise.

It’s a practice at least as old as type itself. It seems the attention Trump garnered, and the highlighting of his stereotypical Boomer typing, have merged the two in some people’s minds.

We’re at a unique crossroad where Gen X and Y grew up with their grandparents mostly refusing to use cell phones and their parents mostly fumbling with them. Now Gen Z and “Alpha” are growing up with grandparents who have mostly been shamed into acceptable text etiquette, and parents who are mostly as tech savvy as the next parent and who were there when the deep magic was written (so to speak).

Mango Mussolini’s narcissism is as pervasive as his parasitism so it’s no wonder the lecherous rapist’s sins against modern digital convention survived along with him. Some spin that as brilliant tactics but I’m not so sure. I’d wager it’s a coincidence he leaned into because it garnered attention.

Most of those now driving online discourse hadn’t had the same exposure to that style of texting prior to the 2016 US Presidential election cycle as preceding generations. So it seems novel to them. It’s history and perspective bring formed in real time.

Weird flex but… Ok.

That makes more sense. Thanks for the response! I’m not sure if can agree with your conclusions. It may be that I’m still missing context you’re working within. My best guess is you’re assuming some axioms that I am not. That doesn’t necessarily mean I think you’re incorrect. We might just be operating with different frameworks.

I agree that strong emergence and weak emergence seem different by your definitions. I’m not convinced strong emergence is a thing. Is there a compelling argument that the perception of strong emergence is actually a more complex weak emergence that the observers have not fully understood?

Something something Occam’s Razor / god of the gaps something. I find these sorts of discussions quite compelling. Thanks again for engaging. :)

Your comment reminded me of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2RXoqB1LjA

A recent ~2 minute video from the ever-excellent Dr. Dan McClellen. The opening sentence is: “Every last attempt to identify divine commands in the Bible that are relevant to anyone today requires negotiating with the text.”

I don’t see how either sentence follows. Rephrasing your comment and supplementing it with context to explain your reasoning may better communicate your point.

Ublock origin is the only way to fly these days. I’ve walked a few family members through using the Element Zapper and explained how the plugin identifies which domain is loading the content and why websites do that now. They’ve all taken to it pretty well.

Having a default backup browser for sites that give too much grief when they can’t get all of their spyware to work correctly definitely keeps me sane and made adoption less stressful for the uninitiated. I give myself three or four tries to make a shitty site work before either abandoning the site and trying an alternative or, if it’s important and necessary, loading it raw in the backup browser.

+1 for LibreWolf too. Dope project.

Well, two, actually.

Your comment makes no sense and helps no one.

The Tea Party was an astroturf’d campaign cooked up by the Koch brothers to realign conservative ideology with oligarchy under the guise of “originalist” patriotism. A very successful farce.

Much like the “right to life”, “Moral Majority” (which is a useful misnomer for Christian Conservative minority), and the rest of American Conservatism. Effective smoke and mirrors. All of it.

I keep seeing this sentiment and I don’t understand it. Are you speaking purely out of anger and ignorance? The recent No Kings protest was either the third or first largest protest in the history of the U.S.A. and some communities have literally been running ICE gestapo out of their towns.

The Christian Conservative minority have gridlocked the American government, silently stacked the judicial system in their favor, and partnered with the American oligarchy to bankroll fascists and create the most pervasive, effective, and enduring propaganda machines ever seen (that’s already worked its way into Australia and had been finding footholds in Europe).

The idea that Americans aren’t doing anything about this or that there could ever possibly be a single unified movement that magically fixes “the issue” is incoherently reductive and impractical. If I see a comrade struggling for air I don’t yell at them to just breathe. I help them remove the pig standing on their neck. What are YOU doing to lend a hand or show lost comrades that there’s still hope?

What’s your point and why do you think it matters in this context?