.... like a prophet that has genuinely seen inevitable future !!
smb
joined 11 months ago
i think it should not be too difficult to compete with m$ security, that is at least true for the state of the last 30 years or maybe more.
But something like a non-profit organisation - or a bunch of them- that make self-hosting for essential services (like email, messenger, video calls) a charm could be a big win for billions of peoples.
because the domains tend to be cheaper when they don’t end with “.com”.
did a quick check with a weird domain name to not hit reserved ones etc,.
on one domain hoster .com was the second cheapest, only one other offered was cheaper all others offered were more expensive than .com looking at name.com it showed some bit cheaper ones like .pro or .life but majority seems definitively more expensive than .com also most spam i got (as long as i got spam) was genuinely (spf) from .com domains that days. however i do not really get much spam any more 😁
really i've had that problem once (and only once in > 20years of self-hosted emailling), and guess what? competitors are available, problem quickly solved.
i am sure that only affects the data YOU can ever access, but never the data already stored for later abuse ;-)
better do not hate, just make them irrelevant for yourself.
NOT hating is good for health and not depend on abusers is good for you too ;-)
one does not become dependent on tech giants without a critical loss at some day, no matter whats the "reason" for it and they tend to do weird stuff within or without laws...
For others or for a new start and how to avoid such in the future (maybe "migrate" your relatives to secure services "before" you get ripped off):
- get your own domain like somestupidtext.info make sure the toplevel (.info .com .net or whatever) has laws that let you effecticely reclaim your domain if one of the providers block something or fail to do their job. also make sure you do not fall into only-first-year-very-cheap traps for domain prices. maybe check that the toplevel domain is not one regulary found to be used by spammers and thus maybe blocked by some providers.
- use one company only for DNS related things, maybe name.com, but there are plenty others and lots of generic hosting providers also provide dns-only hosting.
- get some provider to host email for your domain or run your own emailserver and set mx records to that mailserver.
- configure and change valueable services to your email addresses under your domain
- make sure you have a local(!) copy of all your emails that automatically updates itself, if you can, at least daily, offlineimap checked in into a git repo could do a good job
- if one provider sucks, change it and leave the rest as is.
- the setup alone already shows the provider, that only gov (of that toplevel domain) can effectively block you, as when the email provider tries to block you, you find a new one and change MX records (and obviously cancel and stop paying the blocking one), if the DNS provider tries to block you, you get a new provider and transfer the domain to it, if that fails a lawyer could help) also the small providers have usually no way to know what you do on another account at another company, only if you put your whole life into the hands of the few known big evil ones, you are that vulnerable to the chaos they produce.
also setting up recovery addresses (if possible) is a good idea, like when one email is unusable for whatever reason, the provider already has a known email address from you to start a recovery process, of course that second email address MUST be out of reach of the provider of the first one, that is, if you have somemailprovider.com address and one at microshits, then microshit buys somemailprovider.com, you have to change everything from that somemailprovider.com to a new one just to stay secure. due to this, your own domain with a connected email service of a random hosting provider comes in handy as you would not have to change all the email adresses but only that random email provider. also if skype/zoom etc does not work for you, there are plenty of other ways to do video talks on the internet. i prefer to be independent for same reasons even though i haven't been blocked yet, i just saw the signs of possible approaching evil because of the shitflow big evil tech produces all the time just to flush their believers view of what would be possible down the drain and choosed independence ahead of losses. following signs like leaving companies with red flags (like just too big, like already robbed their users, like give a shit on their users security, like give a shit on their bugs and blame users while their own big-tech-company-network is pwned by someone unknown for month and such) a more privacy aligned messenger that supports videocalls would be for example matrix, there are multiple clients to choose from and lots of providers to choose from (also self hosting or becoming a provider is possible while for talking to each other it is NOT necessary to use the same provider, but again self-hosting of course is most-secure) one cannot do things securely without knowing a bit about what it is. to learn more about dns, email, matrix or other topics the internet is full of informations, sometimes wikipedia is very helpful and linux user groups exist for talking about stuff and helping each other. the type of support is different and -as i see it - much more efficient, but different, there is no one to do it for you (or you get into the very same dependency trap again) but you are encouraged to learn what it takes to do so and do it yourself.
example prices from a random dns provider: .de 10€ / year .eu 16€ / year
random mail provider imap email 100GB storage 3 € /month
that is having more control over your email than when using big tech, may cost you more or less 4€ per month (and maybe the learning time to set everything up). for matrix server one might use managed services, looking around i found etke.cc with 5€ as a base minimum when you provide your own VPS for it, but with many other options too. maybe the free hosting announced by element.io where i did not look into yet is an option too. i prefer my own domains and servers, but just using separate hosting companies for dns, email and matrix gives a whole lot more control while still beeing a simple and adjustable setup. while matrix does not lock you in into one instance from the beginning (i can chat/call from/to my own account/server to any other account on other servers while beeing able to try this out using a multi-account-client that connects to all acvounts/servers at the same time) they now have bridges so one can use the same client to chat with others on telegram or whatsapp (and others) too, so this is rather the opposite of vendor lock-in. while a matrix hoster could still block your account in error and if you did not use your own domain for your matrix account at the hoster, you could connect to your friends again from another account at another hoster as you would still have their matrix adresses stored in your client. however to securely use matrix one should read about its security mechanisms and what backup keys are and why one should validate new connections.
if you had the loss, at least take advantage of the message/lesson: big tech is too powerful and thus insecure. maybe do three steps in parallel: choose and migrate to smaller providers, more providers each for different things, if one f**ks up, everything else stays in place, thus less stressful on problems. second step in parallel: get yourself into DIY your digital life. every little step into independence is a step more powerful while removing the very same power from big tech to attack the stability of your digital life. third step in parallel: share your problem including the possible solutions, which you choosed and how it went to those you think might take advantage of that information ;-)
that could come in veery handy once microsoft wants to pull some plugs. i guess we can be grateful for the backup that is 1. not 100% in m$ hands any more then and 2nd cannot be as easy destroyed as some backups at archive.org. i actually hoped for someone with enough money to create this type of security after m$ assimilated github and thought like "does nobody see the rising danger there?" but even if china's great fork might be more reliable than m$ over time, maybe it's better to have your own backups of all the things you actually may need in future.
btw did microsoft manage to get rid of the hackers that settled into their network for .. how long??
i guess they'll tell
its amazing how good services can be if some just skip the corporation-obligatory adding of enshittification. i remember an article about a downloadable (but not very legal) DVD with an installer for a (worthless but very popular) OS that included heaps of expensive industry software and the installer was point-klick what you want and then all is done in background and fully usable once done. reading that article it seemed to be a better installer than ever produced by any company for any product.
however as that payed streaming service seemingly leaves huge amount of bank records and ran for such a long time, i guess it would have been easy to stop their customers from paying them. it rather might seem that the real intentions of content corporations might not truely be what they officially claim. maybe we learn in 25 years that the content corporations really were behind such services, maybe like "better get money from ALL markets!" or such.
great, thanks. i'll try it out as i have some spare resources on my server.
🤔 maybe there is a lack of distributed fediversed search engine instances where:
- everyone can host a search engine for their very own pages
- everyone can crawl other pages and provide (maybe with permissions) the crawled data to other search engines (as compressed snapshots, api ...) or provide a search engine by themselves for all.
- such search engines can be ranked or marked with "has anti features xyz" and put into followable 'collections' per topics.
- possibility to add 3rd party rankings and filters, so that one can use only a subset of a search engine list that was pieced together by someone you know or trust, reduced by rankings or filters published by another one you somehow trust to limit the items in the first list.
then: "for software development i use linuz personal 'devel' collection, this way i don't have to manually click through big G's gigabytes of SpaMalAds they always only frustrate you with and i am not distracted with dyo stuff when searching for server administration things like 'puppet stages howto'. for my home projects i use my friends 'home of DYO' collection, i get more results than i need but get new ideas as well without seeing work stuff when looking up how to build a puppet stage for my little one. 👨👧 for kids its awesome, our school provides a collection including specialized search instances that fit learning, while that collection is also peer reviewed by a company that spezialized to ensure it does to not contain search engine instances that also index any unfitting content pages."
oh btw: no i do not have any info about duckduckgo status unfortunately, i stepped over it by myself today 🤷♀️
you could donate one and at the same time claim (somewhere really anonymously in the internet) that you want to destroy that tape with that player for protection. They then might actually 'want' to investigate
(3. possibly also you)
after doing 1 and 2 they then actually have the technology AND the hardware to play that stupid tape.
if they do 3. and ask you who you want to protect, you can truthfully say "law fulfillment"
always think outside the box AND around the corner ;-)
hope that helps