203 karma · joined January 17, 2022
DoT is the friend of all self-hosters. Self-hosters need to control their own DNS if they want to use SSL within their LANs, within their self-hosted VPNs, and within their own self-hosted VPN subnets especially (I use Wireguard subnets a lot). Secure DNS with TLS, sure, but this control-ability, at the port level (853), is what a self-hoster needs to keep their life sane.
Prosody allows voice and video calls - I have a TURN server all set up with it - but QOS rules (which are beyond my control, and are the fault of the ISPs I use) can sometimes squash calls made.
Gajim 1.9.3 (Flatpak) seems support voice and video calls to Conversations, but then it doesn't work. One Conversations smartphone can make voice and video calls to another Conversations smartphone.
I use Conversations as a client in Android, and Gajim in Linux.
The basics like OMEMO, file attachments, push-to-talk voice memos (in Conversations, but not Gajim) work well. All comms are at least client-to-server-encrypted, and the OMEMO-protected comms are end-to-end encrypted.
Morality/ethics/religion/philosophy can't help but come to bear on any and all technology, once it becomes widespread, systemic and seemingly "too big to fail."
Myself, I needed something IRC-like, which was open-source, and mobile friendly, so I tried Mattermost team server for a few years. What turned me off over time was that it required manual upgrades. I would have preferred something which was a nice, tidy Debian package.
Now I've turned to the prosody XMPP server instead, which is a standard Debian package (and now upgrades itself, if and only if, there are security problems, with Debian's "unattended-upgrades"). It runs on a $5US/month VPS. Setting up all the SSL stuff, and firewalling rules - as it uses multiple ports - did take a few days to figure out!
PS: A similar discussion around merits/demerits of IRC was recently on mastodon here: https://hachyderm.io/@miah/112649146585492861
I made a couple of related comments (WRT prosody, and Mattermost Team server): https://c.im/@sbb/112673859554591548 https://c.im/@sbb/112673727757562126
A few librewolf "gotchas", BTW, should anyone else want to try it: https://c.im/@sbb/112653498580361415
Here are a couple of brief videos on dark psychological strategies - which AI can be taught to have:
"6 Dark Psychology Tricks To Beware Of": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=saEErVMirqc
"My #1 Covert Sign For Spotting Narcissism": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-NlptpY7Ls
I can surf the web, edit LibreOffice files, record audio in Audacity on my nice Rode microphone, watch video files in VLC, remotely VNC in, transfer files in and out over SSH's SFTP, etc.
Pretty much all that's really missing, to fill it out, is Zoom (or some such functional equivalent) with a fast-enough frame rate on video calls. And this is not, strictly speaking, the fault of Raspberry Pi, et al.
"sudo systemctl stop unattended-upgrades.service" ...wasn't able to prevent unattended-upgrades from going on ahead and just upgrading (to this problematic kernel) anyway.
Unintuitively, the "right" way to disable unattended-upgrades is:
"sudo dpkg-reconfigure unattended-upgrades" ...and choose "No" when asked.
No two people will set it up quite the same.
This creates a serious footgun in Ubuntu netplan, leaving a server totally unbootable, but simultaneously not triggering "netplan try" as any sort of parsing problem: