I wonder what you are securing against?

OK, you’re familiar with vulnerability scanners and port scanners right?

The threat model here isn’t really attackers specifically targeting your home network for any particular reason (unless you’re a LastPass engineer working remotely while running an exposed Plex server). They’re not looking for you, they’re looking for anything useful.

The threat model is attackers using scanning tools to discover vulnerable systems connected to the Internet. All they need from you is an active connection and a system that can store data, from which they can host malware files for distribution to other targets or conduct attacks or just run a cryptominer (if you’re lucky and they’re not very ambitious). They can find this by scanning for open ports and then running a vulernability scanner to figure out if there’s some exposed hardware that can be exploited.

An unsecured system is a hazard that could land you in jail when someone else starts using your device and network connection to commit crimes.

Now, as long as you’re behind a standard residential network service, and your ISP is in control of your gateway device, you’re relatively safe from this. Most ISPs will block any traffic like that very strictly. If your ISP is in control of your gateway device then they’re responsible for its behavior (demarcation matters).

But, most self-hosters run into limitations with their ISP blocking a lot of ports by default, because they want to access their personal server from outside their home, and so they take control by running their own gateway device or paying for a business connection which gives them complete control over which ports are open. This is where the risk comes in. You are assuming the responsibility for properly securing your connection to the public Internet, taking it off your ISP’s hands.

If you’re going to do this, you should know exactly which ports you have open to the outside and why, and a general idea of what traffic you expect to see on them when and how much. Monitor that traffic at your firewall. Every other port should be closed and your firewall (on your router, gateway device, or better yet a dedicated OPNSense firewall) should be configured to drop packets received by closed ports (“stealth” mode). You don’t want it to respond that those ports are blocked, you want it to appear to not be there at all.

Every other security implementation is a secondary concern for a home network. Yes you should patch your software regularly and you should practice deny-by-default and least-privilege as a matter of course, but you’re going to mitigate 90% of your risk by just not accepting incoming connections for anything you don’t need. Most vulnerable systems are discovered by automated scanning, so the less your system responds to external connections the better. If you’re going to worry about configuring, securing and patching one device, make it that front line firewall. And be very selective about which internally hosted services you expose externally.

“Why would NATO do this?”

Moving to another country is complicated and difficult even under normal, stable circumstances. Doing it successfully (not ending up broke and homeless with no support) requires a lot of planning and money, or else a lot of help from someone else.

Even if the other country is willing to let you immigrate, and you have good prospects for a regular income and a stable living situation, you have to leave friends and family behind. That means leaving your support system. If you have children that’s going to be very difficult. If you have aging parents that you support, or other family with medical issues, it may be impossible.

Really, the only people who think picking up and moving to another country is something you can just do are young, single, above the poverty line, and have no dependents.

“Ethnic unity” is a euphemism for ethnic cleansing.

I feel like the “supposed to be competent” qualifier excludes that.

Well, credit to Wikipedia and the people who spend so much time maintaining the articles there.

One other note I’ll make, just to avoid misinterpretation: repeating this information in this context might make it seem like I am particularly critical of the US, but I am not.

Very few other nations have such a legislative history of various groups being explicitly enfranchised. This is because in most other nations, disenfranchised groups are rarely if ever enfranchised throughout the nation’s entire history. The fact that the US has so many such instances in its legal history puts it in front of other nations in this context, not behind.

Dealing with bigotry in the US has been a long and violent process, and we’re not done, but at least we are dealing with it.

I recently watched the series Falling Skies and there’s a scene where they set off an explosion indoors. The characters black out and wake up with hearing loss, blurred vision and their ears bleeding. They still recover unnaturally fast, but, like, that’s OK were doing a TV show. I was happy to see some realistic consequences play out on screen.

There’s a different scene where one of the characters has to actually deal with being concussed due to being near an explosion. Overall the series does pretty well with the basic concept that the characters get wounded in combat and are not action heroes. If they survive, they’re still wounded in the next episode and it affects their actions in the story.

In any film or series where the characters are carrying guns regularly I immediately notice muzzle discipline. If the actors actively keep their weapons pointed away from everyone except enemies, you know they had someone competent on staff who gave them some basic weapon handling training before filming. If the characters are supposed to be professional military or law enforcement and they have bad muzzle discipline it immediately takes me out of the scene. If the character is supposed to be competent but waves their gun around like a moron it’s very immersion-breaking.

In very well produced media, the characters who are supposed to be amateurs show bad muzzle discipline and sometimes it’s even a plot point, and I appreciate that kind of attention to detail.

Stealing the work of artists is not moral in any culture.

My favorite is when someone sets off a grenade indoors and then everyone remains fully conscious and continues having normal conversations immediately after.

Anyone with any sense objects to the use of all forms of generative machine learning models because they are all based on theft. Whether you’re talking about generating images, audio, video, prose, or code, all of the models were trained on source material which was acquired illegally.

Framing these objections as “fear” is intentionally disingenuous and is an attempt to dodge the criminal aspects of how the training data used to produce the models was collected.

You cannot be a moral person and a generative AI user at the same time, they are mutually exclusive.

Sort of?

Script kiddies have been around since the first code languages. Machine learning is just script kiddies with a high-powered search tool.

Bigotry was not one of our founding principles.

You say that, but…

1790: The Naturalization Act of 1790 limited citizenship to “free white persons.”[23] In practice, only white male property owners could naturalize and acquire the status of citizens, and the vote.

The 1828 presidential election was the first in which non-property-holding white males could vote in the vast majority of states. By the end of the 1820s, attitudes and state laws had shifted in favor of universal white male suffrage.

It was not until the passing of the Fifteenth Amendment that men of all races were allowed to vote:

1870: The Fifteenth Amendment prevents state governments and the federal government from denying the right to vote on grounds of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude”.

And it would be another 50 years before women were granted the right to vote:

1920: Women are guaranteed the right to vote in all US States by the Nineteenth Amendment. In practice, the same restrictions that hindered the ability of poor or non-white men to vote now also applied to poor or non-white women.

There’s some other interesting bits in here:

1943: Chinese immigrants given the right to citizenship and the right to vote by the Magnuson Act.

1948: Arizona and New Mexico became one of the last states to extend full voting rights to Native Americans, which had been opposed by some western states in contravention of the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924.

1965: Protection of voter registration and voting for racial minorities, later applied to language minorities, is established by the Voting Rights Act of 1965. This has also been applied to correcting discriminatory election systems and districting.

1966: Tax payment and wealth requirements for voting in state elections are prohibited by the Supreme Court in Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections, under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_rights_in_the_United_States#Milestones_of_national_franchise_changes

So… it seems like the bigotry has kind of always been part of the system, and had to be specifically legislated against ex post facto.

Start giving them chores.

You might get some work done for free, or you might make them bored enough to leave.

Or you’ll get a shitty, half-done job that you’ll have to spend more time fixing, while the kid practically begs you for approval.

You are running into the ultimate, and ultimately unavoidable, limitation of self-hosting, which is the self.

You should run a VM on the VPS for Vaultwarden, with no other services in the VM except whatever you need to connect to it remotely. Keep it simple. Run an exact copy of the VM on your local server. Have the VPS instance push its database to the local instance regularly, to keep up with any changes that your users make. Make regular backups of the local instance.

When you need to update the software, freeze an image of the local VM and then update the local VM, then when you’re sure it’s stable, copy the updated local VM to the VPS. If either the local or VPS instance crashes out, you should be able to recover (or reproduce) one from the other.

In the end though, it is functionally impossible to ensure reliability by yourself. Hosting Vaultwarden on a VPS shifts the responsibility for running the underlying server and network connection to the provider, and probably removing the dependence on your residential network connection will be better for your family/users.

You are still the weak point in your system. You need someone else who can log in to your local server, and into the VPS, and perform recovery if needed. There is no technical solution for this. You cannot be the sole admin, and also ensure reliability for other users.

They will probably sell them to private prison companies.

Cold turkey.

Read a fucking book.

Retrain yourself to be patient and not require immediate, bad answers in favor of good, but slower answers (by reading books, and not skipping to the end).

Understand that anything worth doing takes time.

Recognize that the effort you make to solve problems for yourself is itself valuable for the experience that you gain. Also recognize that if you do not understand the tools that you are using, your capabilities will always be limited by those tools.

Realize that the journey is just as important as the destination (if not more important).

cyberpunk distopia

[It’s all inside of me, it’s all inside of me

It’s all inside of me, it’s all inside of my head](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gmmi2SvMMk)

Rosen misses what he considers to be a bygone era of elite dominance. Lamenting the current state of democratized influence, Rosen says “the old gatekeepers were political professionals who could count cards; small dollar donors today are amateurs yanking the handles of ActBlue slot machines.”

Abundance adherents often bristle at the suggestion that the project is orchestrated by Silicon Valley elites. But as the leaked documents demonstrate, Rosen and his colleagues clearly view it as such, and even frequently use the word “elite” by choice.

ROSEN OPERATES AT THE NEXUS of tech titans’ “hostile takeover” of San Francisco politics through a “grey money” network, documented in reporting from The Guardian and Mission Local. The Phoenix Project has dubbed this overlapping set of organizations and campaigns the “Astroturf Network” and detailed its operations in a set of reports and a pair of influence maps.

These people are villains.