Hmm, you have uncovered a problem with both of our ideas. Steam’s leverage is reduced after they have deposited sales proceeds, and is gone after the publisher isn’t selling games on the platform any longer.

(I’m griping about Rockstar specifically but my point is still flawed in the general case.)

Deceased users’ estates still haven’t agreed to the new terms, have they?

Now punish publishers who try to change the terms of sale after sale. “Want to play the single player game you bought a decade ago? Agree to this new arbitration clause.”

deleted by creator

Are you going to be hosting things for public use? Does it feel like you’re trying to figure out how to emulate what a big company does when hosting services? If so, I’ve been struggling with the same thing. I was recently pointed at NIST 800-207 describing a Zero Trust Architecture. It’s around 50 pages and from August 2020.

Stuff like that, your security architecture, helps describe how you set everything up and what practices you make yourself follow.

Remove these blank lines.

I’m not seeing unit tests for this.

Unnecessary comment.

BLAM

Ow! Also, this could’ve been a smaller calibur.

s/celebs/weebs/

Fixed :-)

I’ve been ranting about this a lot lately, but as the owner of mspencer.net (completely useless personal domain, but is 199 days older than wikipedia.org for what it’s worth)…

There is sort of a way to do that, but it’s still labor intensive so not a lot of people do it. Movements to investigate are homelab and selfhosted. Homelab equipment is old (extra power-hungry for the capability you get) or expensive. Self hosting requires a bunch of work to stand things up the way you want it.

Biggest barriers to self hosting - or hosting through your nearest nerdy relative - are the following:

Free ad-supported offerings (with the privacy and terms and conditions impacts you describe) are better and easier, so they out compete DIY options. If a nerdy family member offers to host forums and chat for your community club or whatever, the common response isn’t gratitude, it’s “That’s stupid, I’ll just use Facebook.” Without that need and attention, volunteer projects get way fewer eyeballs and volunteers are way less motivated.

Security is difficult to figure out. Project volunteers have enough on their plate just helping users get their stuff working at all. Helping novice users secure their installations is so much extra work.

Many volunteers feel taken advantage of if they produce something that could help companies make money better, when they don’t share any of the money they make through donations or support arrangements. Similarly, many open source projects get taken over by for-profit companies who diminish efforts to make their open source offerings easier to use for free. (They want companies to buy support contracts, even if it means frustrating use by private individuals without kilobucks to spare.)

Looking closer at the image, I’m going with “in this house we use single sideband.” (But, as a Plex user, I love yours too.)

Thank you for your reply, but to be clear, I’m not looking for individual details to be spelled out in comments. What you said is absolutely correct, thoughtful, and very helpful. But emotions are running a little high and I’m worried I’ll accidentally lash out at someone for helping. Apologies in advance.

But do you have any links? Beyond just the general subjects of security architecture, secure design, threat modeling, and attack surface identification, I’d love to see this hypothetical “generic VM and web application housing provider in a box” come with a reasonably secure default architecture. Not what you’re running, but how you’re running it.

Like, imagine decades in the future, internet historians uncover documentation and backups from a successful generic hosting company. They don’t necessarily care what their customers are hosting, their job is to make sure a breach in one customer’s stuff doesn’t impact any other customer. The documentation describes what policies and practices they used for networking, storage, compute, etc. They paid some expensive employees to come up with this and maintain it, it was their competitive advantage, so they guarded it jealously.

I’d want to see that, but (a) a public, community project and (b) now, while it’s still useful and relevant to emulate it in one’s own homelab.

If I can get some of that sweet, sweet dopamine from others liking the idea and wishing for my success, maybe I can build my own first version of it, publish my flawed version, and it can get feedback.

I’ve been struggling to wrap my head around a good security architecture for my mspencer.net replacement crap. Could I bug you for links?

I figured out a while ago to keep VM host management on a management VLAN, and I put each service VM on its own VLAN with heavy, service-specific firewalling and a private OS update repo mirror - but after hearing about ESXi jackpotting vulns and Broadcom shenanigans, I’ve gotten really disheartened. I’d love some safe defaults.

I think this needs to exist, but as a community supported system, not as a commercial product.

Pick a set of open technologies - but not the best, lightest weight, just pick something open.

Come up with a security architecture that’s reasonably safe and only adds a moderate amount of extra annoyance, and build out a really generic “self-hosted web hosting and VM company-like thingy” system people can rally around.

Biggest threat to this, I think, is that this isn’t the 90s and early 2000s any longer, and for a big project like this, most of the oxygen has been sucked out already by free commercial offerings like Facebook. The technical family friend offering to self-host email or forums or chat no longer gets gratitude and love, they get “why not Facebook?”

So… small group effort, resistant to bad actors joining the project to kill it, producing a good design with reasonably safe security architecture, that people can install step by step, and have fun using while they build and learn it.

Married, we both work from home, and we’re in an apartment.

First, all of my weird stuff is not between her work and living room pcs and the internet. Cable modem connects to normal consumer router (openwrt) with four lan ports. Two of those are directly connected to her machines (requiring a 150-ish foot cable for one), and two connect to my stuff. All of my stuff can be down and she still has internet.

Second, no rack mount servers with loud fans, mid tower cases only. Through command line tools I’ve found some of these are in fact capable of a lot of fan noise, but this never happens in normal operation so she’s fine with it.

Separately I’d say, have a plan for what she will need if something happens to you. Precious memories, backups, your utility and service accounts, etc. should remain accessible to her if you’re gone and everything is powered off - but not accessible to a burglar. Ideally label and structure things so a future internet installer can ignore your stuff and set her up with normal consumer internet after your business internet account is shut off.

Also keep in mind if you both switch over so every movie and show you watch only ever comes from Plex (which we both like), in an extended power outage situation all of your media will be inaccessible. It might be good to save a few emergency-entertainment shows to storage you can browse from your phone, usb or iXpand drive you can plug directly into your phone for example.

Oh boy, Michael Spencer Jr., the ghost of GitHub past! With a bio as empty as your follower count dreams, you’ve managed to accumulate a whopping three followers—congratulations on that ambitious social life. Your repos are a trip down memory lane for those still stuck in 1982, complete with assembly language nostalgia. It’s like you’re interviewing for a job in a museum of coding flops.

Your “BenedictionGame” is a masterpiece of zero stargazers—truly a testament to your extraordinary ability to create absolute nothingness in a world craving entertainment. And let’s not overlook your “CaseSwapper” that swaps cases. Wow, riveting stuff! At least your repos prove you can follow the lead when it comes to forking other projects, though I’m disappointed to see you haven’t pirated the skill to write something original.

In summary, your profile is a stark reminder that not everyone is cut out for coding fame. Maybe it’s time to swap some skills instead of just cases.

—————

Ok that’s pretty funny :-) I was hoping it would detect notable positive things and roast them like negatives, though.

I use a USB BD-R burner and disks for this. I don’t have a solution for Bad USB protection though unfortunately.

You were supposed to delete \windows\system32\drivers\crowdstrike\C-00000291-*.sys, not all of \windows \system32. I know the buttons are right next to each other and all, but come on…

:-)

Hey no botting!

NEW

I think this was asked in good faith, but is unfortunately unlikely to produce useful discussion. The down-voters are right but the original poster shouldn’t feel bad for asking.

Short answer: it’s ok to say “maybe, we have no way to know, moving on” when something is unknowable like this.

Longer answer / topic hijack: as voters there are many contradictions in our system, and important and necessary information is often hidden from us. Doing the best we can might take various forms:

• choose government ran by the least-evil people possible and trust the imperfect system formed by the structured interactions of those people

• choose government that follows policies that align the best with your values or your ethical understanding of the world

• choose government that is best able to reduce harms and injustices, in a practical and realistic way that anticipates the acts of other factions

• choose government led by people you hate the least — no, this one is toxic, lazy, easy to manipulate with lies. Manipulators know the longer they keep people hot with emotion the less time people spend learning.

Please do not reply to this with hatred or calls for strong emotion. Leaders at any level can be deliberately evil, sure, but it’s never helpful to dehumanize entire clusters or demographics.

Plagiarism should be part of the conversation here. Credit and context both matter.

How much stock ownership remains with the nonprofit Raspberry Pi Foundation? And will that be enough to hold off shareholder complaints that they aren’t being evil enough?