Let’s say you are a graphics designer. You use Adobe Illustrator and you pirate it. You work for Innertrode either as a contractor or a full time employee. You make their new logo.

Adobe’s legal team are bored. They see that new logo. They know it was made with Illustrator because of some of the visual quirks/tools (or, you know, because it is anything graphical so of course it uses Adobe). They know that Innertrode doesn’t have a license. So they call up Lumberg and say “what the fuck?”.

Lumberg then calls the person who was in charge of the new logo and they point at you.

If you are staff? You were given training not to pirate anything. It is all your fault. Innertrode buys a few years of a license and apologizes and fires your ass and makes sure to tell everyone they know about you. Or you are a contractor and you signed an agreement saying you had valid licenses for everything and they just give your contact info to Adobe and move on.

And Adobe MIGHT just want to shake you down. Or they might want to make an example and sue the fuck out of some people.

Also… it is a lot of hearsay for obvious reasons, but there are very strong rumors that some of the more prominent cracks tend to add digital watermarks for the purpose of automating this.

Okay, hear me out: How much of that is a function of ChatGPT and how much of that is a function of… gestures at everything else

MOSTLY joking. But had a good talk with my primary care doctor at the bar the other week (only kinda awkward) about how she and her team have had to restructure the questions they use to check for depression and the like because… fucking EVERYONE is depressed and stressed out but for reasons that we “understand”.

There are two layers to this (actually a lot more but)

What you are describing is mostly supply chain. It is the idea that the package manager’s inventory should be safe. And that is already a nigh impossible task simply because so many of the packages themselves can be compromised. It seems like every other year there is a story of bad actors infiltrating a project either as an attack or as a “research paper”. But the end result is you have core libraries that may be compromised.

But the other side is what impacted OP and will still be an issue even if said supply chain is somehow 100% vetted. People are inherently going to need things that aren’t in a package manager. Sometimes that is for nefarious reasons and sometimes it is just because the project they are interested in isn’t at the point where it is using a massive build farm to deploy everywhere. Maybe it involves running blind scripts as root (don’t fucking do that… even though we all do at some point) and sometimes it involves questionable code.

And THAT is a very much unsolved problem no matter what distro. Because, historically, you would run an anti-virus scan on that. How many people even know what solutions there are for linux? And how many have even a single nice thing to say about the ones that do?

T Swizzle is, funny enough, a big chunk of why things have escalated so much. Like her or hate her, she puts on a motha fugging SHOW with incredibly high production values and comparatively limited dates. That drastically increases the baseline price and makes the scalping market start selling their coke filled labubus to get even more seats.

Which, in turn, makes her contemporaries feel the need to put on a comparable show even though they are nowhere near talented or popular enough to make it work. Otherwise you start having very real discussions about why Famous Astronaut Katie Perry is nowhere near as expensive as the Swizzle Stick.

And ticketmaster mostly is just there to help facilitate that scalping and to add obnoxious (and expensive) infrastructure to prevent every single ticket from being sold to the scalpers who stand in line when the booth opens (80s and 90s kids will remember that).

You can very much see this in the pro wrestling space. In a venue that (company full of racist sex traffickers) WWE is a regular at? Basically everyone but AEW is priced out of even having a show and AEW suffers from needing to not be a laughing stock next to WWE on the ticket prices which results in overpriced tickets and blacked out sections of the arena during panning shots. A venue that WWE doesn’t go to very often? You have a lot more genuine indie shows and you can get ringside tickets to an AEW event for under 200 bucks.

And ticketmaster fucking sucks but mostly they are just there to be vultures on whatever demand is already there. They can’t really do much if you have regularly priced tickets going to “actual fans”.

And this for a $60 perpetual license program that i should buy anyway because it’s for work

Just to pile on: NEVER pirate stuff you use for work. Audits are a thing (especially if said software company gets suspicious for whatever reason) and you WILL be thrown under the bus at a moment’s notice and put on an industry wide shitlist because you are just too much of a liability after you get caught once.

Pirate for fun and hobbyist use. The moment you are getting paid, go legit.

A few reasons.

Part of it is that wealth never really got passed down to us. Boomers got money and houses from their parents. Some GenX got money and houses from theirs. Millennials increasingly have family that live longer because of modern medicine (depending on your family, good or bad) and increasingly have family that burn through all their money because they want to buy mypillows and trump watches. Not to mention how many of us went zero contact because of the aforementioned trumpism.

Which, combined with multiple economic crises (how many of us saw the job market and said “I’mma gonna get a PhD and deal with that later”?) means that millennials have kinda been struggling to even get their lives “started” well into their late 30s. Hard to become a professional politician when you are always a few months away from poverty.

And the last part is… 9-11 kinda fucked us. Basically starting in the early 00s it became a mortal sin to criticize the military. Even today, we are allowed to criticize “the military industrial complex” but NOT the brave men and women who are on our streets oppressing people and helping ice round up brown people and protesters.

So by the time a good chunk of millennials reached the point where we are stable enough to fight and the world isn’t going to villify us for doing so… we also have responsibilities. In your teens and twenties you can talk about burning it all down and quitting your job to live in a tent for 14 months while you smoke weed and protest and smoke weed. You might have kids that you need to give a chance at a better life. A partner with medical concerns. Or just a cat that would slit your throat in your sleep if you moved into a tent.

So all the pushes for progressive politics and the like get us labeled as "traitor neo libs’ by the kids who want to live in tents and film tiktoks and protest and film tiktoks. And when you get told “okay boomer” when you are in your 30s… it is REAL fucking demoralizing (this is where some jackass replies “okay boomer”).

No.

The problem is that so much of the world just looks to others to think for them. Whether that is elders, celebrities, or mythical creatures.

God wants you to attack brown people, and wear a hat, is no different than God wanting you to accept that others will go to hell because they are wrong, and to wear a hat.

For a (first) NAS, I generally discourage this.

Office liquidation desktops are great for home servers (if you aren’t paying for power). But they generally are very limited on storage. Limited bays to install hard drives and limited SATA ports. So you rapidly end up with drives just sitting on the bottom of the case and real jank pcie boards to extend your storage.

Which then becomes a HUGE issue when you have a drive failure. Because now you need to actually identify which drive is the failed one which involves reading off serial numbers and, depending on the setup/OS, making sure you get the order right when you plug them back in.

Whereas a 4-bay NAS generally has dedicated hardware and hot swap bays which make this trivial. You might never actually use the hot swap capability, but it makes checking which drive is the bad drive fairly trivial.

Also, a good 4 bay NAS is REAL easy to unplug and put in the trunk of your car during a disaster. Don’t ask me how I know.

I don’t have direct experience with them, but my understanding from youtubes is that the ugreen NASes are specifically designed for you to just ignore their OS and install your own (so truenas or proxmox).

Hardware tinkering is more limited but… there is very much a question of how much of that people actually do.

Raspberry pi: No. Or, at least, not without doing something to make sure you have a real storage backend and aren’t just running it off an SD card. The wear on SD cards is exaggerated and largely minimized if you use an OS that is configured to be aware of it but you are also increasingly relying on a ticking time bomb.

Mini PC/NUC? I am a huge fan of these and think they are what most people actually need for stuff like home assistant, adguard, etc. Just understand you are going to be storage limited sooner than you expect and you can oversubscribe that CPU and memory a lot faster than you would expect.

My general suggestion? Install proxmox on the mini PC and deploy on top of that. If/when you decide you want something more, migration is usually pretty easy.

And if you just want a NAS? It is really hard to go wrong with a 4 bay NAS from one of the reputable vendors (which may just be ugreen at this point?) as those tend to still come out cheaper than building it yourself and 4 disks means you can either play with fire with RAID5 or not be stupid and do RAID1.

Sounds like they are letting the klan off the bus an hour or two north in Oakland instead, last I heard

Presumably most of those services on the same physical host are running in containers? So just add tailscale as a sidecar to that. Each container will be its own host as far as your tailnet is concerned and have its own internal IP. The official tailscale youtube has tutorials on that because it maps much better to a portainer based setup and more or less requires clients to have the tailnet running constantly (which, in my opinion, defeats the purpose of selfhosting but you do you).

Or do a mess with SRV records and… good luck with that

Wait… if you JUST want your domain to point to the tailscale IP and to only work when the client is on the tailnet, this is… super duper easy?

Just install tailscale. Go to your dashboard, and get the IP. And point your domain at that. No tunnels or reverse proxies needed.

This is one of the big problems with tailscale for home users. For people who only access a system remotely (e.g. a corporate VPN) it is amazing. For people who are both on and off network… yeah.

What I actually settled on was NOT using one of my domains and to instead just use the tailscale FQDNS in all situations. Mostly because I saw they added more human readable names so it is now like foo.happy-panda.ts.net instead of foo.tb12415161613616161616.ts.net

• Externally? I just activate the tailscale app and I can see foo.sad-hamster.ts.net with zero additional config. Which is good if I am using an app on my phone or helping someone I trust set up their own machine without needing to drive/fly out there with a laptop.
• Internally? I actually just added a simple DNS override locally (I use unbound via opnsense for this but you can also do it with a pihole if you really want to). So foo.sad-hamster.ts.net goes to foo.localdomain which goes to a 192.x IP seamlessly

End result is that I don’t need any special config in any devices or apps and everything just uses the tailscale FQDN regardless of whether it is a “client” connected to the tailscale itself. Which ALSO avoids issues where things stop working during an internet outage.

I’ve seen alternative setups that specify their own DNS server in their tailnet and… that is a lot of effort if you ask me. Also it seems to be the leading cause of “When I connect to my tailnet I can’t see the outside internet anymore”.

The big drawbacks to this are that it makes assigning actual certs rather messy since the same FQDN goes to multiple very different IPs… at least one of which being a potential security vulnerability since it is assigned by whoever controls the LAN you are on at any given moment. Not the end of the world and, truth be told, I am less likely to bother with proper certs for fully internal resources (unless I am getting paid to do it). So no NEW risk vectors.

The other is that you are kind of at the mercy of tailscale corp changing their business model entirely and suddenly having to deal with the fqdn that points to your plex server now actually being used for the latest dating app and everything catching on fire until you remember you did this. But that is a problem that is multiple years down the road…

Also, depending on what DNS/network shenanigans you do, this could cause other issues. But that is why you always test things yourself.

Two parts to this:

The first is Reddit (or any site) being able to identify you. And that is not a hard problem. Either they fingerprint the browser so your cookies tell who you really are or they just analyze your traffic and realize this user in Istanbul is constantly looking at the Cleveland subreddit. Its why VPNs aren’t really (at all) useful for privacy unless you are combining it with burner accounts and even browsers. VPNs mostly are just useful for accessing region/network limited resources and spinning up a true beater.

As for the ban? They probably changed VPN, got an IP that a known “bad” user used, and got immediately caught in the same automated banwave. Don’t use VPNs with accounts you actually care about. Partially because of the risk of data leakage but also because you don’t know what the last person using that IP did. See also why you wear a condom before you stick it in the glory hole.

Obviously nowhere near that extreme, but I know a shockingly large number of millennials (and not just the Asian babies) who, for one reason or another, had soy or nut milk as a baby, dairy milk almost our entire lives, and then realized we were lactose intolerant like late 20s/early 30s.

It, again, is obviously not that extreme. But there is very much the idea that being gassy and having “weird poops” was normal because… it was. In the sense we were constantly poisoning our bodies.

It always makes me wonder about a friend who talks about how peanut butter “makes me puffy”. Is it just a body reaction to the high fat content or is it a mild allergic reaction?

I still wouldn’t be shocked if this is his excuse to be POTUS out of mar e lago. “I can’t live in the white house while all this construction is ongoing so I’ll use my bathroom as a SCIF” (just much more incoherent and racist). Lets him massively bill the government and secret service for all the lodging and so forth. But yeah… this is generally not what you do when you are planning to leave in 3 years.

“Biden and Barack Hussein Obama ruined the economy and the liberals insist on taking all your money to fund DEI and protect immigrants who just want to rape your pets”

I’ve (presumably) seen that article in the past. It is very much something that every company needs to evaluate for themselves but my experience? That (scaling for company size) premium is usually within discussion range of being worth it. In large part because… finding the kind of staff who gets within even a Three Nines range of uptime is a major undertaking and something you generally only can test when shit is hitting the fan.

So you tend to get analyses both ways. “If everything goes right, X is much cheaper than Y”. Which falls apart when you realize that it is someone else’s problem to make Y viable and you can always sue the fuck out of them if they screw up badly enough. So it ends up being “Well, our forecasts are that X would cost 4 million a year and Y would cost 6 million a year… but we save N on compensation and we don’t have to deal with staffing or HR… Eh, we’re probably out a million but our revenue can handle it and then we don’t have to deal with it”

fire your sysadmins and hire DevOps Engineers at 2x the salary

If you aren’t managing your own hardware you need far fewer sysadmins.

And while I was fortunate enough to work at a place where the sysadmins understood they were in the service industry, the vast majority of orgs do not have any meaningful communication between the departments which invariably becomes adversarial over time.

DevOps is inherently inefficient because you are paying people to do two jobs (which is why so many companies don’t and instead just add more and more responsibilities to the devs who are dumb enough to reveal they have basic linux skills…). But it is also, time and time again, one of, if not THE, most effective ways to actually have “IT” be aware of the needs and use cases of development.

raise a ticket with AWS and wait every time you need more than 5 instances of the same compute type

There is definitely a range where that can bite you and my experience is that the various cloud providers are very good about giving you special service if you are constantly hovering there. But the vast majority of companies either don’t need to scale past that or do it “once” during the initial deployment.

pay a premium for the same amount of CPU & RAM you could’ve gotten from your classic VPS provider (…) oops, our biggest DC got knocked offline, here’s some compute time credits

You’re paying extra for the stability and uptime as well as the customer service. And, speaking from experience, the vast majority of “traditional” VPS companies “guarantee” Five Nines by having a skeleton crew with a pager app on their phones who may or may not even be awake during their shifts. And the best you get is an acknowledgement and stalling until the main staff come back up.

Skimming down detector? The worst of it was around 0300 east coast time with large mitigations by 0700. It looks like it is spiking again as of 1000 though.

By all means. Rake Bezos’s shitty face across the coals and get a massive credit on your bill. But if we are judging a company by their service at their worst? This is NOTHING compared to potentially multi-day outages and needing to manually migrate our own services because “We can’t get anyone out to the data center until Wednesday” and so forth.

VPSes are spectacular for hobbyist use and company websites even for places in The City. But if you are providing a nation or even world wide service? You want a proper data center with support staff which more or less means “the cloud”. And while I think a LOT of companies should take that into consideration? Pretty much everything on downdetector et al that actually impacts people have very good reasons to not just buy a few nodes and manage it themselves.