TCB13

TCB13 , 6 months ago to mildlyinfuriating in Sideloading won't be enabled where I live

You’re giving out that apple will fight their case, in what world would they not?

No, I’m giving out they’ll bypass the intent of the law while complaining. Or at least they’ll bypass your interpretation of the law because in mine it doesn’t say anything about against restricting it, about having a vetting process or requiring payments.

TCB13 , 6 months ago to piracy in Region blocked printers

We did replace our yellow with a 3rd party cartridge at one point and you could actually see a difference

I can see the difference as well, on mine the blacks are a bit less black. But we’re talking about a 30$ peer cartridge difference to print stuff that will be discarded at some point so I don’t care.

TCB13 , 6 months ago to linux in Surface Laptop 3 running Kubuntu, such an improvement over what it was "designed" for.

Hold on, I was kind of joking, I’m not saying KDE is slow. GNOME for sure is slow as hell.

TCB13 , 6 months ago to linux in Surface Laptop 3 running Kubuntu, such an improvement over what it was "designed" for.

Everyone does run into a Windows-only app eventually. It’s sad, it hurts but it is what it is.

TCB13 , 6 months ago to piracy in Region blocked printers

printer, colour laserjet, that is from another ‘region’,

What the fuck HP. I’ve been using cheap cartridges from Aliexpress without issues.

TCB13 , 6 months ago to mildlyinfuriating in Sideloading won't be enabled where I live

You’re taking a very pessimistic view of this process.

No, no, I’m taking a realistic view. I know exactly how and why it works this way and it makes it somehow more democratic and productive while appeasing the lobbying efforts and capabilities of big companies.

It just takes a lot of time, and you’ll remember my post whenever Apple finally decides to announce sideloading.

TCB13 , 6 months ago to linux in Surface Laptop 3 running Kubuntu, such an improvement over what it was "designed" for.

Surface Laptop 3 running Kubuntu, such an improvement over what it was “designed” for.

I’m sure it is an improvement until… you’ve to use Wine to run something Windows only or a VM and end up on the exact same spot as initially but with extra steps and less performance. 😂 😂 😂

TCB13 , 6 months ago to linux in Surface Laptop 3 running Kubuntu, such an improvement over what it was "designed" for.

Everything’s about perspective… maybe GNOME became SO bloated that KDE now seems very light. :P

TCB13 , 6 months ago to linux in I feel like I'm missing out by not distro-hopping

There’s Debian and Red Hat Enterprise, everything else is pointless. Enjoy.

TCB13 , 6 months ago to linux in When do I actually need a firewall?

#1 leaves a lot to be desired, as it advocates for doing something without thinking about why you’re doing it – it is essentially a non-answer.

Agreed. That’s mostly BS from people who make commissions from some vendor.

#2 is strange – why does it matter? If one is hosting a webserver on port 80, for example, they are going to poke a hole in their router’s NAT at port 80 to open that server’s port to the public. What difference does it make to then have another firewall that needs to be port forwarded?

A Firewall might be more advanced than just NAT/poking a hole, it may do intrusion detection (whatever that means) and DDoS protection

#3 is a strange one – what sort of malicious behaviour could even be done to a device with no firewall? If you have no applications listening on any port, then there’s nothing to access.

Maybe you’ve a bunch of IoT devices in your network that are sold by a Chinese company or any IoT device (lol) and you don’t want them to be able to access the internet because they’ll establish connections to shady places and might be used to access your network and other devices inside it.

#5 is the only one that makes some sense;

Essentially the same answer and in #3

If we’re talking about your home setup and/or homelab just don’t get a hardware firewall, those are overpriced and won’t add much value. You’re better off by buying an OpenWRT compatible router and ditching your ISP router. OpenWRT does NAT and has a firewall that is easy to manage and setup whatever policies you might need to restrict specific devices. You’ll also be able to setup things such as DoH / DoT for your entire network, setup a quick Wireguard VPN to access your local services from the outside in a safe way and maybe use it to setup a couple of network shares. Much more value for most people, way cheaper.

TCB13 , 6 months ago to selfhosted in Feedback on Design and Firewall Options

Yes, no NAT but the same end result.

TCB13 , 6 months ago to selfhosted in Feedback on Design and Firewall Options

More or less… have a look at this: www.karlrupp.net/en/computer/nat_tutorial and a tldr at serverfault.com/a/564871/122863

TCB13 , 6 months ago (edited 6 months ago) to selfhosted in So SBCs are shit now? Anything I can do with my collection of Pis and old routers?

I don’t (specially DDR3-era stuff) because old server hardware is way more expensive, won’t be of any particular advantage and older hardware, compared to new stuff, will use a LOT of power.

Instead use regular desktop/laptop machines as they’ll probably be more than enough for homelabs. You can a good 9-10th gen Intel CPU and motherboard that is perfect to run servers (very high performance) but that people don’t want because they aren’t good to play the latest games. Modern hardware = less power consumption, cheaper, more performance.

If you go really low end, let’s say i5-6500, this will probably cost around 80€ second hand with RAM. You can use www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/ to compare CPUs the server hardware you can get with modern hardware if you’re interested.

Most DDR3-era server hardware comes with RAID controllers/cards and other things that nobody uses anymore, people have moved on the software RAID be it BRTFS or ZFS and you will want to do the same. Servers make a lot of noise - impractical for a home - and a CPU from that era will be around 150-200W, you can get a recent i5 with more performance that runs around 50W.

Another thing to consider: you’re trying to build a NAS get a basic motherboard with 4 SATA ports and then add a PCI to 5 SATA port card and it will be much cheaper than whatever server hardware. BTRFS as your filesystem and its RAID if needed. Now you may be thinking something like “I want a faster CPU in order to have fast SMB”, just don’t - your gigabit network will saturate before an i5-6500 or any mechanical drive does and when this happens you’ll be at something like 10-20% CPU usage. Just don’t waste your money.

TCB13 , 6 months ago (edited 6 months ago) to mildlyinfuriating in Sideloading won't be enabled where I live

Why would you assume the legislation won’t stop it, they have iteratively corrected legislation to mandate it’s original intent plenty of times

Because just for starters Apple even tried to argue they shouldn’t be subject to the legislation because they didn’t have one store but multiple stores. Same with iMessage and whatnot.

If you read the legal document about side-loading then Apple could be considered in compliance if they just decided to create a “sideloading program” where you can apply and pay for a special certificate with a vetting process and a lot of restrictions (being a company over a certain size etc). Essentially the same as the current Enterprise program but extended to allow 3rd party stores and distribution of App to random users not part of the same organization.

most recently they’ve begun looking at cookies because the banner wasn’t the intention of the lawmakers.

Yes but do you know what happens? Due to the way the EU works and our constitutions and agreements work we’re talking about at least one year of discussions about the issue and then a 3 year period where countries will have to study what was decided by the European Commission and pass national legislation about it. Then you’ll have a transition period like (2 more years) until such legislation goes in effect (deadline). So we’re talking about around 5 years to get anything practical. We’ve seen this with USB-C - even before there was USB-C the EU was in talks to adopt a single port (at the time Micro/Mini USB) and it all took about 10 years to unfold.

Apple is very good as twisting things and what’s currently written on the proposal doesn’t force Apple to open up iOS to be a generic platform like macOS or Windows - it simply asks them to allow 3rd party stores and sideloading of applications outside their store. Doesn’t say that anyone should be able do it, doesn’t set the terms, doesn’t say it should be free.

TCB13 , 6 months ago (edited 6 months ago) to mildlyinfuriating in Sideloading won't be enabled where I live

Don’t cry over it. I live in Europe so I’ll get it but the thing is that Apple will most likely force people into some kind of bullshit certificate that you’ve to buy in order to be able to sideload.

If you read the legal document about side-loading then Apple could be considered in compliance if they just decided to create a “sideloading program” where you can apply and pay for a special certificate with a vetting process and a lot of restrictions (being a company over a certain size etc). Essentially the same as the current Enterprise program but extended to allow 3rd party stores and distribution of App to random users not part of the same organization.

The legislation won’t stop them from doing this and it will effetely only be used by large companies that can go through the vetting process and pay the ridiculous amounts of money that Apple will be asking for.