I'm all for tech independence. But if you need to be spoon-fed the instructions like this and you don't get what most of it is doing, YOU DON'T WANT TO DO THIS. Best case scenario you'll get locked out of your own stuff or important information.
Yes, you should strive for that, and you start by learning. Contrary to popular belief, you don't need to be a linux ninja to be able to host your own website and calendar.
The stuff mentioned in this article are the bare minimum, and you should want to do it yourself without being spoon fed the steps.
With that aside, this is exactly the kind of guide I would expect a three-letter agency contractor or worker to spread in order to "help you" stay off the grid, then unceremoniously drop a disaster on your head.
Totally agree. Better look for local associations that provides hosting services if you don't have any system administration knowledge. They'll help you more, and you'll waste less time and probably money, plus they may help you physically setting up your devices correctly with your services hosted on their servers.
I mean, yeah it's a minimal step by step guide that just feel to be the poster's own todo list... As there's many like that. To get some entry-point information this is great but this is far from being useful in practice.
Basically it hides everything useful to know behind a big script that the intended reader is not even supposed to understand.
I did not have seen any protection for what's come from WAN, not even basic logging, investigation nor debugging methodology. No real backup methodology as well and the guide seems to not take system upgrades very seriously by saying "oh, it could run so for decades, but if you want you can do system upgrades".
This is obviously false to any expert and a very risky approach. This is not how we are supposed to teach internet-connected services self-hosting.
The author would disagree with you; I think they think it's more like:
Node engineers: "lEt'S bUiLd SoMe MiCrOsErViCeS!!!!! YAY I'M CODING!!"
Chad UNIX architect who won't code in any language that doesn't give you the tools to blow your own foot off just printing a string to stdout: "No let's keep adding functionality to this one codebase until it's as complex as a suite of microservices."
Would anyone ever sign up for a fucking newsletter from the first god damn second they open a website? Why do they do this? What kind of a stupid purpose does it have other than annoying users?
Some context for those wondering: Those are reserved aliases for google. If you send a mail go abuse@company.com and they use google, that mail will be receiced by google (and the company if they have that set up). It's intended for reporting spam sent out by company.com email addresses.
Not entirely sure how it works, but I assume sending newsletters to that causes some automatic sanctions for the company that are a massive headache to resolve.
No, abuse@ is not some sort of Google invention but to the best of my knowledge was an informal convention that then got formalised in RFC 2142 [1] in 1997 along with many other common mailbox names. If Google sets this up automagically for their users it is great, but they are merely continuing this long tradition.
Note that if you close the modal and read the article and then reload the page, it doesn't appear anymore. Which is weird; weird to ask for a newsletter subscription when you never saw any content yet, weird that this modal doesn't exist anymore after this.
Worse yet while browsing with JS off by default: the popup shows up, but cannot be closed (and does not work for subscription, either), only obscuring the page.
In this case, however, a pop-up on your own site costs nothing. In fact, removing it incurs costs in development time, even if it's a simple line delete.
So, I am 100% sure no marketer would ever push for removing it, unless end-users specifically tell them that they are not going to use the site because of the pop-up. The likelihood that they realize that on their own is next to zero because of the difficulties in retention analysis to catch this.
I'd say if their click through rate to the actual article (aka bouncing off the page instead of clicking the close button and continuing to read the article) is low, they'd likely remove it. At least that's how I've been able to convince certain marketers about the inefficacy of their tactics. But other things, like modals to subscribe to the newsletter that pop up after reading the content half-way, simply work too well to ever give up.
Now, that is a different take. You have been able to convince them. It's not like they realized this themselves, or that they deduced something from the numbers.
Again, only my experience at past employers, but in a lot of cases the developers don't get heard when making these suggestions.
At what point is the faulty generalization simply...a true generalization? Just because you don't want to believe it's true doesn't mean it's not true.
Yikes, you've been breaking the site guidelines so badly that we have to ban the account—especially because we already asked you to stop. It's not ok to be abusive like this on HN, no matter how wrong someone is or you feel they are.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Technical people often complain about popups and other marketing practices, not realizing that the vast majority of people aren't technical and do not complain, much less care, about such practices. They'll click the close button on the popup and move on.
They absolutely care. It's just that they think it can't be helped. People love it when I install uBlock Origin for them. They tell tell me the web just feels nicer, less annoying to use.
"Users don't mind" is nothing but adtech propaganda.
They definitely care. They’re just not empowered to do anything about it It’s ubiquitous and technical solutions are not available to the non-technical.
I can tell you from experience, they really do not care. It's not even something that crosses their minds. You can see for yourself, ask 100 non-technical people you know about stuff like ads and popups. I bet over 50% of them simply do not care. It is a technical person's bias to think they do.
I assume that asking "do you care?" will give you "no" quite often. But asking "do you want to see ads?" will give you an equal amount of "no" if not more. Or asking "do you want to block ads?" will give you a lots of "yes". It's all in the question, as over 50% of all savvy marketeers will know.
That's probably the reason why even the people in the marketing department of my last tech lead gig run adblockers on their Macs. They used to not do that but as one of them recently told me "the internet has turned to shit". I had the feeling the irony of the situation was not lost on him, but he was unable to verbalize it.
I also recall a company where the IT just rolled out an adblocker one day (in 2018 or so) to about a 1000 seats and it was the talk of the week in the cafeteria because the internet had become sooo much better.
Sure, these are individual experiences with little statistical value. They confirm my bias that people, given a choice, would like to see less ads. Most of them don't know they have a choice beyond "seeing ads" and "not using the internet", so they submit. Show them more choices and they gladly chose less ads.
I have done that. Most people go, "oh, cool," then continue on. They really don't care one way or another, and it's more evident when I ask them later about what I just did and how they feel.
> I have done that. Most people go, "oh, cool," then continue on. They really don't care one way or another, and it's more evident when I ask them later about what I just did and how they feel.
They start caring when they use another computer that doesn't block popups.
You say you've installed ublock origin for people? Lovely - go back a month later and remove it, then see how much they care.
People don't care when they think they have no chance to get something, but they do care when something they have is taken away.
Many people don't care about the results of a lottery for a car, but take away those same peoples $1 for a ticket, and suddenly they are very interested in the result.
Your experience matches reality: since you're only executing the first half of the experiment, you don't see any results. The reality is that the results only show up if you complete the experiment.
I've also seen what you described, as some have gotten new computers or started using new browsers (or new profiles in browsers which reset extensions). People generally find it nice to use ad blockers but really don't mind that much when it's gone. The average person tolerates a surprising amount of bullshit, you see it already with the amount of ads people already used to watch with cable and now watch with YouTube ads, for example. What seems essential for you and me is just a little perk for most people, it seems.
That's not my experience at all. I install uBlock Origin on every browser that I use. It's literally the first thing I do. After a while I started hearing people's comments. The web just feels nicer, they said. They know. Even when they can't quite explain why, they know.
Like the sibling commented, have you removed the ad blocker and seen their reaction after some time? In my experience they don't really care after a while. That is to say, they found the ad blocker a nice perk but not a fundamental need.
Then, like the sibling says, you've only done half the experiment. Regardless, I would also never remove someone's adblocker, but I've seen that when it is removed, for whatever reason such as switching computers or browsers, people often don't care enough to install it again.
I'm not a fan of experimenting on people. That's what adtech does with their engagement A/B tests.
In the end it doesn't matter if they care or not. We care. We think it's the right thing. So we install it again for their benefit. Because we care about them.
I don't have access to everyone's computers that I know. I tell them to install and use an adblocker and sometimes they do, sometimes they don't, up to them. Ironic that you say you don't want to experiment on people but then seek to patronize their choices by doing things for "their benefit." People can do what they wish, once the information has been passed on to them.
I don't randomly grab people's phones and install things on them though. I'm talking about the computers I share with coworkers, friends and family. I use the computers too. Since I don't tolerate ads, they won't need to either.
So I don't see it as patronizing them at all. I see it as leadership. I'm putting my reputation on the line. People trust me with all this computer stuff, if I screw things up they won't trust me anymore. So I make it my responsibility to ensure it works and that they will like it, even though they "don't care". For example, on these shared computers I don't turn it up to the point it breaks pages. I know how to deal with those breakages, they don't. So I ensure they never have to.
If you're sharing the computers then that's a different story. We don't share our computers so we don't all have ad blockers on them. Mine does of course and I add them to my family's but if they switch browsers or reset / upgrade their PC, I'm not often there to redo the install. So I'll tell them to do it but they don't always do it. So I give up, if they know about ad blockers but don't care enough to reinstall them, that's on them at that point. Which leads me to my point that people don't generally care.
I haven’t had to ask. They verbalize their frustrations.e
I think your questioning probably requires a certain level of care, thought, and ability to form a response that isn’t necessarily indicative of whether someone cares to whatever degree. Someone can say, “Oh, I don’t care” and still experience annoyance indicating that they do actually care.
I also think 50% is way too low a bar to claim a class of people does or doesn’t do sometbing like “caring”. If 60% of people “don’t care” and the it’s a really big deal for people who do, it doesn’t seem like a claim that “such people don’t care” is the truth.
I worked at such venues and helped friends who worked at such venues back in the day. What I remember mostly is having to move from one computer to another setting IP addresses and the annoyance of having to restart Win 98 after setting an IP. I still don’t understand why that was a requirement.
Later during Win XP days, most places started having a dedicated set of machines and you didn’t need to lug your computer along anymore, those were actually the days I remember I had most fun, playing UT and C&C Red Alert 2, god damn the music was exciting!
The limiting factor is your browser's performance more than anything. Dynamically loading in a hundred fonts isn't something most browsers are optimised for. The jumping around is the text boxes resizing when a font loads.
The alternative would be preloaded all fonts which would simply crash slow devices and waste bandwidth.
I was thinking something horrible but then I recalled how the US jailed some guys for years due to transporting some lobsters in a plastic bag[1], so yea...
Nice find. I read the Economist piece back then and found it quite wild. Good to know it wasn't as crazy as portrayed. Still, the Lacey Act seems like it could easily be abused, given that old, outdated laws tend to linger.
Funny how disinformation can spread so easily. Reading that stackexchange link throws a different shade entirely.
The article, which is about the real subject of american incarceration rate, present those dudes as innocent bystanders commiting a minor offence which should not even be an offence. On the other hand, these guys have been illegaly exploiting wild life in a foreign country for almost a decade and got jailed.
Oh swish is traceable and actively monitored. A few college friends of mine were organizing a party and they all chipped in a 100 kr to one guy (about 25 individuals) who got a call the next day from his bank for suspicious activity.
Interesting to hear, I've heard of Swish has been a bit on edge trying to upsell people on merchant accounts and I wouldn't be surprised if some of these reports go to the tax office.
Still for those involved they wouldn't probably care too much as long as there isn't real-time reporting to the police to get events shut down (although with laxer laws in that area that'll probably fade as an concern).
It’s not a community in the sense of a small town community or an actual country club.
Most people from that Usenet era were nerdy early 20 year olds who thought they were the shit (and in some aspects the were, but in others they weren’t). Some like Dave Fischer (who probably coined the term [1]) even thinks that they were wrong in preventing “the idiots” from coming in. The elitist attitude is the same whether you want people to conform to a specific etiquette when posting on Usenet or want specific people out of politics or positions of power because “we just don’t do things like that on the hill”.
Yes, you should strive for that, and you start by learning. Contrary to popular belief, you don't need to be a linux ninja to be able to host your own website and calendar.
The stuff mentioned in this article are the bare minimum, and you should want to do it yourself without being spoon fed the steps.
With that aside, this is exactly the kind of guide I would expect a three-letter agency contractor or worker to spread in order to "help you" stay off the grid, then unceremoniously drop a disaster on your head.