Sure. Most of the actual traffic is encrypted by https these days. So they can’t look inside. But they can see to what IP you send these encrypted packets and from where packets come to you.

With DNS they can see what domains you typed in and your computer looks up. Just the part to the .com or something and nothing after. And sure, they’re preconfiguring their DNS server. Because they’re an internet service provider and you pay them to provide services like domain name lookup to you. They’re certainly not going to preconfigure a server of their competitors and funnel your data to them.

With something like Mullvad, if you configure that correctly (!) also your DNS requests go through an encrypted tunnel. Now your ISP can only see you connect to some Mullvad server. And now Mullvad provides DNS to you and they’re now the ones who can see what kind of domains you look up.

You can often just change your DNS settings. Either in the devices or for all your network in the router. But mind that plain DNS on port 53 is unencrypted. You’re connecting to a different setver then, but theoretically they could snoop on you if it’s an unencrypted connection.

Isn’t there some ISP in the US that is kinda trustworthy? I mean Mullvad or all the other VPN services are companies, too. Depending on your use-case and threat scenario, you might want to choose a different ISP if you’re afraid of them… But I’m not an expert on American companies. And I also use third-party DNS servers. I own my Wifi router and I set the DNS to opennic.org and also configured an AdBlocker.

I’m not sure if ActivityPub allows for an extension like that. And I mean if you open up a separate direct channel via TURN… It’ll be incompatible with something like Mastodon anyways, so I then don’t see a good reason for why to bother with the additional overhead of AP in the first place. I mean you could then just send the status updates in some efficient binary representation as data packets directly do the other players. So why use ActivityPub that needs to encode that in some JSON, send it to your home instance, which handles it, puts it in the outbox, sends HTTP POST requests to the inboxes of your teammates where it then needs to be retrieved by them… In my eyes it’s just a very complicated and inefficient way of transferring the data and I really don’t see any benefits at all.

So instead of extending AP and wrapping the game state updates into AP messages, I’d just send them out directly and skip AP altogether. That probably reduces the program code needed to be written from like 20 pages to 2 and makes the data arrive nearly instantly.

I suppose I could imagine ActivityPub being part of other things in a game, though. Just not the core mechanics… For example it could do the account system. Or achievements or some collectibles which can then be commented and liked by other players.

And too obvious and not specific to European c***.

Hmm, you’d think that. But actually health insurance works here. It’s nothing to brag about. I rarely hear people talking about it. At least not more than they talk about their households contents insurance. (I mean guns in the USA also aren’t something exceptional… so you might have a point.)

Probably for European users if Europe decides to force gatekeeping platforms to implement such a feature.

So, what do we Europeans whip out and place on the coffee table to make a statement?

Port forwards in the router + DynDns.

Though those leaks showed they actually did it on a large scale. I don’t think they stopped for some arbitrary reason. Why would they? And technology developed further, surveillance is only getting easier. I’d say even without a tin-foil hat on, it’s more likely they do it than not.

Well, centralization and giving up your freedoms, letting someone else control you, is always kinda easy. Same applies to all the other big tech companies and their platforms. I’d say it applies to other aspects of life, too.

And I’d say it’s not far off from the usual setup. If you had a port forward and DynDns like lots of people have, the Dns would automatically update, you’d need to make sure the port forward is activated if you got a new router, but that’s pretty much it.

But sure. if it’s too inconvenient to put in the 5 minutes of effort it requires to set up port forwarding everytime you move, I also don’t see an alternative to tunneling. Or you’d need to pay for a VPS.

Not really. Contrary to what people say, there is practically no malware targeting desktop machines and the risk is close to zero. There have been a few select pieces of malware during Linux’ history. But as far as I remember nothing to worry about for desktop users. You need to worry about security if you run a server. And ClamAV and such are mainly for scanning for Windows viruses, so noone else in the network gets infected by files they download from your server.

Do backups, though. Loosing all your files is as easy as running ‘rm -rf *’ in the terminal.

And as anecdotal evidence: I’ve been running Linux for like 20 years and I know lots of people who do. Practically no one I know uses an antivirus. And I know 0 people who got their desktops infected. We had our servers targeted though and the website defaced because we didn’t update the webserver for nearly two years. That definitely happens.

Yeah and as other people pointed out: use software from the package repository of your Linux distribution. That’s the nice thing about Linux and a popular Distro, that most popular software is packaged and ready to install with one command/click. Lately some users have adopted the habit of installing lots of software from random sources. I avoid that unless it’s absolutely necessary.

I’ll try to order that next time.

Ah, nice. Alright. Thanks again. I’ll see how I can do it. Unfortunately I’ve already set everything up, joined Rooms and connected a few bridges. I hope it doesn’t break. I’ll do a backup first. Seems reasonable and not that hard to upgrade.

Oh well, seems both reasonable. Maybe I should switch before the projects diverge too much. Conduwuit seems pretty active. Hope it stays that way.

Do you happen to have a link where I can read the backstory myself? Thanks for the info anyways. Seems to be a good call.

I found that. Seems it mainly addresses caching and database performance, adds some admin and moderation commands. I’m not sure if it addresses any of the shortcomings I have.

My main question is: Which one is going to be maintained in the years to come and have the latest features implemented? And secondly: Why a fork? Why don’t they contribute their fixes upstream to Conduit?

Not possible. Almost all mailservers have migitated for this kind of thing. Even if you wrote a script, it wouldn’t work on any properly configured mailserver…

My budget for going out also isn’t that high. But I don’t think there is a strict correlation between price and tastiness of food anyways. Sure it’ll get more fancy the more you pay. And there is some minimum if you want some quality. But after that it’s not necessarily getting more and more tasty. At least in my opinion. I’m perfectly fine with the more affordable food. Some nice Tantanmen ramen every now and then, or those tasty rice bowls with tofu and minced meat. Or middle eastern food. That’s almost always nice. It’s not super cheap, but doesn’t cost an arm and a leg either. Unfortunately my favorite pizza and burrito place isn’t around anymore.

There are some exceptions to the rule though. Some ingredients are just pricey. But I really don’t need those kinds of things on a regular basis. Sushi also isn’t something I get often.

It’s the same argument FUTO and Louis Rossman have to make their apps source-available. If you ask me, it’s a cheap excuse. They could as well enforce their trademark or have Google remove it.

This way it’s just another closed source app that doesn’t grant the users any additional freedoms.

I think that’s fine. You can put mayo and spring onions on every dish and it’ll look more Japanese in my opinion. There is no reason to be cheap with the mayo anyways. Never.

Hehe. Yeah, Bibimbap is Korean. So not exactly the same thing. And as far as I know the word literally means “mixing” and “rice”. I think it’s really tasty. And it comes pretty spicy in the restaurants I’ve had it (Which is far away from Korea.)

Agreed. I think most prominently competitive gaming; development where you need to assure it later on actually works as intended on the target platform; and business stuff where parties are obliged by contract to guarantee something works flawlessly and keeps running that way - are good examples.

That laptop doesn’t look to me like it was intended to do any of that, so that’s maybe why I’m being a bit negative here. It’s cool and a nice idea, though…

(And we already have ARM-based retro machines, FPGA clones if popular processors available. So there is no need for them to do the exact same thing.)