inventor7777

In this case, couldn't this have been avoided by the owners properly limiting write access? In the article, it mentions that they used *.

In my case, I don't currently have any capture software on my main computer at all.

Our routers are Asus, and so I'm able to install tcpdump and log traffic directly without the source device itself knowing anything. This makes it really easy to monitor the traffic of any device, albeit not knowing exactly what it is being sent.

But it is true that I really can't know much more than what tcpdump shows.

That is fair. I do not think anyone could feasibly could detect/extract the exact data sent, because of HTTPS.

However I was more thinking of simple things, such as disabling anything that SHOULD be communicating with the Internet and seeing if any constant traffic persists.

Now of course, some very small (e.g plaintext) traffic might be almost undetectable, however that would suggest that most of the data would not be able to be transmitted due to size.

Agreed. I can definitely see the Minisforum being far more cost efficient if you're mostly doing high speed networking transfers, while the Mac is more cost efficient if you need more raw power.

Yes, I was basing my estimate more on the US price of $600, which is basically the same, if you buy both at MSRP. (However, that means the Mac does not have 10G)

I did not realize the EU versions were that much more expensive.

I do agree about the RAM/storage prices though. It's only worth it if you want the raw power, where the Mac handily beats this.

True. But as detailed in the Jeff Geerling article that was shared here in the comments, it has (at least at the moment) a rather high idle power draw, which seems to negate that, especially over time.

True. However, I've always noticed that ARM has less Linux support than x86, and the main benefits ARM is known for are typically performance/watt, running cooler, and less legacy support.

Since this server seems to have pretty average performance/watt and cooling, I can't really see much advantage to ARM here, at least for typical server use cases.

Unless you're doing ARM development, but I feel like a Pi 4/5 is better for basic development.

$599 seems like a lot to me. You can get numerous older, much more powerful Mini PCs (e.g older ThinkCentre Tiny series) or even a base brand new M4 Mac Mini for that kind of money.

Admittedly, the 10G interfaces and fast RAM make up for some of it, but at least for a normal homelab setup, I can't think of an application needing RAM faster than even DDR3, especially at this power level.

While logging serial number and some of the basic analytics stats might be attributed to stupidity, I tend to think that using a pretty advanced set of system commands and logging output consistently to log files is very sketchy.

I hear this theory being claimed so much, but I don't see any real evidence for it; we have routers that you can monitor traffic on, we have microphone use indicators on mobile, and I would imagine it would be pretty clear if an app was uploading audio with even very basic monitoring tools. Correct me if I'm wrong, however.

I'm not denying that a lot of data is likely surreptitiously collected, but I'm talking microphone/camera in particular.