Huh, who’d of thought Genuine Leather would branch out into the tech industry.

“Western” in this context generally refers to North America and Europe.

There’s also the situation where for a lot of millennials and younger, western society has been moving leftword for their entire adult lives. When economic issues inevitably show up, the instinct is to blame the group that was seen as in charge, and move yourself in the opposite direction.

Wait, a buyer having a choice of sellers, and choosing to go with the lowest price is… communism?

Like other people have said, it’s going to depend on what you want to do with the NAS. If it’s going to be a pure NAS (ie network storage only), then using onboard will be fine. If you plan on doing other things (home assistant, media server, etc), I recommend going the virtual machine + HBA route.

What I’m saying is one step more cynical that that. I’m saying is that you can’t fully trust anyone with your privacy. The best you can do is try to determine who will treat you best based on the motivation involved. VPNs take resources to operate. In our current society that means money, but even in the absence of money, there’s labour, hardware, and electricity costs that go into making it work. Expecting someone to just eat that cost in perpetuity is unreasonable. If the cost is being covered by the users, there is much less incentive for the operator to do anything shady with the data they have access to.

Don’t be bringing your politics into this. Communist, socialist, anarchist, etc, entities are all capable of running a honeypot VPN service. Even if the motive isn’t directly monetization, the user is still the product.

Also, even in the FOSS world, you have to be wary of services with ongoing costs (thinking of things that have a server side component, not software that you can run purely locally) that are offered for free.

Remember kids, if the service is free, you are the product.

Hey, you leave us out of it. You touched him last; he’s yours now.

I used a hodge-podge of chinesium parts and leftover drives to create a DAS system that hooks up to an HBA via DAC. I’m actually kinda surprised how stable it’s all been.

I used to use Spotify, but then I learned that YouTube premium cost the same amount, and came with access to YouTube music, so I switched. Got tired of playing YouTube ad blocking whack-a-mole.

If Google starts enshittifying Premium too much, I’ll go back to sailing the high seas for stuff I’m not going to/can’t get on vinyl.

Does anyone make a 65"+ monitor though?

It’s not a war crime when you aren’t fighting a war. This is a regular, old fashioned, normal crime.

There absolutely is such a thing as a benevolent dictator. The problem is that it’s impossible to tell ahead of time who they are.

At this point, I’ve seen far more people being almost violently anti-rust than I’ve seen people being weirdly enthusiastic about rust. If Rust people are Jehovah’s Witnesses, then a lot of the anti-Rust people are ISIS.

This is equipment that uses all statically addressed devices. And ignoring the fact that IPv6 is simply unsupported on most of them, there are duplicate machines that share programs. Regardless of IP version you need NAT anyway if you want to be able to reach each of the duplicates from the plant network.

We use NAT all the time in industrial settings. Makes it so you can have select devices communicate with the plant level network, while keeping everything else common so that downtime is reduced when equipment inevitably fails.

If you want to play the blame game, the blame falls on everyone. The right is pushing to make things actively worse, the center is willing to just put up with whatever the current status quo is, and the left would rather spend all their time attacking one another for being the wrong brand of left, rather than actually go out and do something productive.

The other side of the coin is that customers aren’t obligated to buy. There’s always a limit to how expensive you can make a product/service before people will simply stop paying for it. Trying to find that balance point can be damned difficult.

Many people do this.

Many people are insane.