I’d like to tack on that this point can be used to highlight why this is so. It’s a deep concept that can be explained simply and produces a lasting positive impact.

Everyone has fantasies. Sometimes we want them to be realized. Most often: we don’t. Many people carry internal shame because of their fantasies and some of those people have difficulty with intimacy because of it.

Good sex with other people requires our investment in their comfort and pleasure. This can be emotionally complex and fulfilling to navigate. Masturbation is free of those complications but we often make up the difference via fantasy. This is normal and there’s no need to confuse one space for the other. Masturbation and sex may fulfill similar basic needs on the surface but, in practice, they are very different exercises. It’s normal for one’s preferences to be different for each and for those preferences to shift over time.

Don’t worry about “normal”. Focus on having a healthy, honest, and emotionally aware sex life instead.

Near as I understand it: years ago some dumb engineering decisions were made, acknowledged, and corrected. Is there some recent scandal I’m out of the loop on?

Sure! That’s an SMTP Relay. A lot of folks jumped on the poopoo wagon. It’s common wisdom in IT that you don’t do your own email. There are good reasons for that, and you should know why that sentiment exists, however; if you’re interested in running your own email: try it! Just don’t put all of your eggs in one basket. Keep your third party service until you’re quite sure you want to move it all in-house (after due diligence is satisfied and you’ve successfully completed at least a few months of testing and smtp reputation warming).

Email isn’t complex. It’s tough to get right at scale, a pain in the ass if it breaks, and not running afoul of spam filtering can be a challenge. It rarely makes sense for even a small business to roll their own email solution. For an individual approaching this investigatively it can make sense so long as you’re (a.) interested in learning about it, (b.) find the benefits outweigh the risks, and (c.) that the result is worth the ongoing investment (time and labor to set up, secure, update, maintain, etc).

What’ll get you in trouble regardless is being dependent on that in-house email but not making your solution robust enough to always fill its role. Say you host at home and your house burns down. How inconvenient is it that your self-hosted services burned with it? Can you recover quickly enough, while dealing with tragedy, that the loss of common utility doesn’t make navigating your new reality much more difficult?

That’s why it rarely makes sense for businesses. Email has become an essential gateway to other tooling and processes. It facilitates an incredible amount of our professional interactions. How many of your bills and bank statements and other important communication are delivered primarily by email? An unreliable email service is intolerable.

If you’re going to do it make sure you’re doing it right, respecting your future self’s reliance on what present-you builds, and taking it slow while you learn (and document!) how all the pieces fit together. If you can check all of those boxes with a smile then good luck and godspeed says I.

It’s clear you’re arguing from ignorance as your argument is patently absurd.

The judgement is partisan, inconsistent with established case law, and relies on (at best) specious distinctions between “information service” and “telecommunication service”. Griffin creates a distinction without a difference to manufacture the perception of judicial leverage where none exists.

It’s like arguing the DEA has no purview over cannabis because the Reorganization Plan No. 2 of 1973 refers to “marihuana”. It’s clear what the intention of the law is even if the language is imprecise. To argue that ISPs provide some new class of service that’s legally distinct from all other telecom service and therefore immune to regulation is an argument made out of ignorance, stupidity, corruption, or some combination of the three.

Whichever species, if any, rise to sapience after the age of mammals comes to its close.

Would you elaborate on this concern? I’m not sure I understand but I’d like to.

There’s some good advice in the comments already and I think you’re on the right track. I’d like to add a few suggestions and outline how I think about the problem.

Ask if the vendor has installation administrator guides, whitepaper, training material, etc. If yes: ask that they send it to you. You may also be able to find these on the vendor’s website, customer portal, or a public knowledgebase / PDF repo.

I would want to know three things.

1. How do users authenticate through the application?
2. What are all of the ways users may access the application (local only, remote desktop, LAN only, full server/client model)?
3. Does the vendor have any prescribed solutions for defining who has access to the application, at what privilege level, with access to what features?

i.e. What parts of the user access, authenticate, authorize pipeline do application admins or system admins have control over and how can we exercise that control?

Based on some context I assume that the app is reading from Active Directory using RADIUS or LDAP for user auth and that people are physically logging into the machine.

If this is the only method of authentication then I would gate the application with a second account for each employee who requires access for business reasons defined in their job description (or as close as you can get to that level of justification - some orgs never get there). You can then control who has access to the machine via group policy. Once logged in the user can launch the application with their second account (which would have the required admin access) via “Run as…” or whatever other methods you’d prefer. No local admins logging in directly and yet an application which users can launch as admin. Goal achieved.

This paradigm lets us attempt balancing security concerns with user pain. The technically literate and daringly curious will either already know or soon discover they can leverage this privilege to install software and make some changes to the system. The additional friction, logging, and 1:1 nature of the account structure makes abusing this privilege less attractive and more easily auditable if someone does choose the fool’s path.

I can imagine more complex set ups within these constraints but they require more work for the same or worse result.

Ideally you run the app with a service account and user permissions are defined via Security Groups whose level of access is tied to application features instead of system privs. There are other reasonable schemes. This one is box standard and a decent default sans other pressures.

If other methods of auth are available (like local, social, cloud, etc) then you’ll have more decent options. I would define the security objectives for application access, define the user access objectives from the Organization’s perspective, and then plot each solution against those two axes (napkin graphs - nothing serious). Whichever of the top three is the least administratively burdensome is then selected as my first choice for implementation with the other two as alternatives.

An aside: unless there is only one reasonable choice most folks find one option insufficient, two options difficult to decide between, and four options as having one option too many - whenever possible, if another party’s buy-in is desired, present either three options or three variations on one option. This succeeds even when the differences are superficial, especially when the subject is technical, and 2x if the project lead is ignorant of the particulars. People like participating.

I’d then propose these options to my team/direct report/client, decide on a path forward together, and plan the rest from there. There’s more to consider (again dependent on org maturity) but this is enough to get the project oriented and off the ground.

Regarding FOSS alternatives: you’re likely locked in with the vendor’s proprietary software for monitoring the cameras. There are exceptions but most commercial security system companies don’t consider interoperability when designing their service offerings. It might be worth investigating but I’d be surprised if you find any third party solutions for monitoring the vendor’s cameras which doesn’t require either a forklift replacement of hardware, flashing all of the existing hardware, or getting hacky with the gear/software.

I hope this helps! <3

Not necessarily. You’re correct that we cannot account for intention. Neither can we assert whether we are simulated. Even if we can prove this reality is simulated we cannot be sure if we are part of the simulation or inserted into it (a la The Matrix) from our current position.

I haven’t experienced what you’re describing. Previous experience suggests exposure is the next step for you. If a cooking class isn’t feasible right now then start with watching some videos online (best if they’re home cooks - you want to watch common cooking of foods you like to eat).

You’re not trying to memorize anything or learn hard skills during this time. You’re only trying to become more familiar with people working in a kitchen so it doesn’t feel as alien and maybe not quite as scary.

Do that regularly for a while. If it’s too much for you: dial it back. You do want to push your boundaries but only when you’re feeling ok about it. Small wins will turn into more small wins and eventually you might be interested in trying to cook something.

If that happens, and I suspect it will, know that it is OK to start cautiously and take your time learning how to use the oven and stove top. Try turning a burner on with no pan or pot on top. Let it get hot. Turn it off. Let it cool down. Repeat that across a few days if the first one helps you.

Once you’re comfortable you should do that practice again and add water to a pan until its half full. Once the burner is hot: place your pan of water on top of the stove burner. Let the water come to a boil. Remove the pan from the stove top. Let the pan and water cool down. Note how much water is missing (some of it will have steamed away while boiling). Add that much water back to the pan and practice this again.

You can build your experiences, step by step, with safe extensions and new footholds, until you’re feeling confident about cooking something with the boiling water. You’re going to boil an egg!

Complete your practice again but instead of taking the water off right after it boils: leave it on the burner for 6 minutes. Then remove it and let it cool. Success? Do that again using a pot instead of a pan. Pot half full of water. Grab a serving spoon or similar item. Once the water comes to a boil:

1. Lower the burner temperature to half / medium. The water should be moving and steamy but the bubbles should be very gentle or cease. Dropping the egg into actively boiling water may cause the egg to crack prematurely.
2. Use the serving spoon to gently place the egg in the center of the boiling water.
3. Wait six minutes.
4. Remove the pot of water from the burner.
5. Turn the burner off.
6. Use the serving spoon to lift the egg out of the hot water.
7. Run the egg under cold water (this helps it from over cooking and helps make peeling easier).
8. Enjoy your egg.

You can absolutely boil any kind of pasta, lots of vegetables, and almost all starchy foods. Boiling is very safe because the water regulates the temperature for us. So long as there is water in the pot the pot is unable to meaningfully exceed 100 degrees Celsius (the boiling point of water / ~212F). It is very difficult to burn anything or start a fire while boiling water.

Best of luck my friend.

laughs in home lab

Not that I’d buy it but, if I did, that power button might get used twice a year. Likely less since I wouldn’t be able to upgrade or maintenance its hardware.

That’s a problem. Absolutely. It’s not the problem though. I’m not sure the problem can be summarized so succinctly. This is the way I’ve been putting it:

These are the top reasons humanity needs successful, decentralized, open social media platforms:

1. Collecting and selling user’s private data is dangerous and unethical.
2. Using that data to intentionally and directly manipulate user’s thinking is even worse.
3. All of the major centralized social media companies have been proven to either allow these illicit information campaigns or coordinate them directly. TikTok is the focus right now but Sophie Zhang exposed Facebook for doing exactly what TikTok has been exposed for recently. Can you recall any meaningful consequences for Facebook? Do you think Facebook is now safe to use?
4. It’s clear that most political leaders are either too ignorant, too corrupt, or too inept to meaningfully legislate against these problems.
5. The concerned public can’t shut Pandora’s box. No one is coming to save us from big tech or the monied interests and nation-states that wield it.
6. The concerned public can’t easily and legally audit the platforms big tech builds because they are closed and proprietary.
7. Personal choice is not enough. Not using centralized social media increases personal safety but does little to curb its influence otherwise.

These are listed by order of intuitive acceptance rather than importance. I find it aids the conversation.

The best reasonable answer to these problems I’ve seen proposed is for the public to create an open and decentralized alternative that’s easier to use and provides a better user experience.

Will that kind of alternative be a force for pure good? I’m not sure. To your point: I’m not convinced social media of any kind can be more than self-medication to cope with modernity. Then again I’ve had incredible and meaningful conversations with close friends after passing the bong around and spent time on Facebook/Reddit, and now Mastodon/Lemmy/etc, doing the same. Those interactions were uplifting and humanizing in ways that unified and encouraged all involved.

I think the truth lies somewhere in the middle. We need to take care of each other, refuse pure hedonism, and protect the vulnerable (and we’re all varying degrees of vulnerable). At the same time: humans aren’t happy in sterile viceless productivity prisons. Creating spaces for leisure which do no harm in the course of their use isn’t just a nice idea… It’s necessary for a functional and happy society.

That’s a fair take. Silver Blue is great and, in the spirit of the thread, if I were helping an interested but hesitant lifelong Windows/Intel/Nvidia user migrate to Linux today I would:

1. Buy them a new SSD or m.2 (a decent 1tb is ~$50 & a good one only ~$100).
2. Have them write down what applications, tools, games, sites, etc they use most often.
3. Swap their current Windows OS drive with the new drive and, if needed, show them how and why that works or provide an illustrated how-to (so this choice is not a one-way street paved with anxiety. If they want to swap back, or transfer files, or whatever else; they can. Easily). Storage drives are just diaries for computers. The user should know there’s nothing scary or mystical about them.
4. Install Fedora Kinoite on that new drive.
5. Swap them from Fedora’s custom Flatpak repository to Flathub proper. A decision that should be given to the user on install IMO but I digress.
6. Install their catalogue of goodies from step 2 so they’re not starting from scratch.
7. Install pika and configure a sane home directory backup cadence.
8. Ask them to kick the tires and test drive that Linux install for at least a month.

Kinoite is going to feel the most like Windows and, once configured, stay out of the way while being a safe, familiar, transparent gateway to the things the user wants to use.

My personal OS choices are driven by ideals, familiarity, design preferences, and a bank of good will / public trust.

I disagree with some of Red Hat’s business model. I fully support the approach SUSE takes. I’m also used to the OpenSUSE ecosystem, agree with most of their project’s design philosophies, and trust their intentions. I’m not a “fan” though and will happily recommend and install Silver Blue or any other FOSS system on someone’s computer if that’s what they want and it makes sense for them! Opinionated discussion can be productive and healthy. Zealotry facilitates neither.

That said: Aeon has been out of beta for a while. The latest release is Release Candidate 3 and they’re closing in on the first full release. Nvidia drivers work after a bit of fiddling. 🙂

I’m going to edit my previous post to add the Kinoite suggestion for posterity’s sake.

Check out Aeon and Fedora Silverblue. I’m installing Aeon on Desktops and MicroOS on Servers. My computer needs to be a reliable tool. Immutable distros make it exactly that.

The last thing I want to do in my free time or during my work day is be forced to fiddle with some poorly documented and/or implemented idiocy on my personal computer because I forgot to cast the correct incantation prior to updating something. I’m not a masochist.

EDIT To the hesitant but hopeful Windows+Nvidia user: give Fedora Kinoite a try. Check my reply to @independantiste@sh.itjust.works below for details.

I was taught something different growing up and had to check myself with a quick read. Holy shit. You’re right. Thanks for sharing.

That’s not true for all sites. If the page is static then it’ll have no clue. If it’s dynamic and running a client-side script to report this info back, and if that information is collected, then I can see how that might be a useful supplement for fingerprinting if the server owner is so inclined. At that point though I’m wondering why a security-conscious user is raw dogging the internet and allowing scripts to run in their browser without consent (NoScript saves browsers).

Even then it’s unclear when/how altering the page to render it differently is commonly communicated back to the server, how much identifying information that talk-back is capable of conveying, and how we might mitigate those collections (wholesale abstinence and/or script control aside). What are the specific mechanisms of action we’re concerned about? This isn’t a faux challenge for the sake of hollow rhetoric. I’m ignorant, find the dialogue interesting, and am asking for help being less dumb. :)

I found some brief and useful discussion in this Privacy Guides thread. Seems like the concern is valid but minimal for all but the most strict/defensive postures.

Trying to validate this myself for Dark Reader without breaking out Wireshark and monitoring some big tech site while I toggle color modes (which I might do later if I think of it and find the time) I see Dark Reader is open source, an Open Collective member, and seems to engender little hand-wringing. The only public gripe I can find is this misguided Orion Browser feedback thread.

Thanks for the interesting diversion!

How so?

This is admittedly a bit pedantic but it’s not that the risk doesn’t exist (there may be quite a lot to gain from having your info). It’s because the risk is quite low and the benefit is worth the favorable gamble. Not dissimilar to discussing deeply personal health details with medical professionals. Help begins with trust.

There’s an implicit trust (and often an explicit and enforceable legal agreement in professional contexts (trust, but verify)) between sys admins and troubleshooters. Good admins want quiet happy systems and good devs want to squash bugs. If the dev also dons a black hat occasionally they’d be idiotic to shit where they eat. Not many idiots are part of teams that build things lots of people use.

edit: ope replied to the wrong comment

I’m excited to see they’re going fully open source. Looks like the last steps to making the sync server self-hostable are in the works. Do you use their paid service? If so: any complaints or caveats?