creesch's recent activity

  1. Comment on Statement from Mozilla's new CEO in ~tech

  2. Comment on The Windows 11 crisis in ~tech

    creesch
    Link Parent
    Sorry. I did have a look around but can't find the article. So take my comment with a grain of salt, it is possible I am misremembering something.

    Sorry. I did have a look around but can't find the article. So take my comment with a grain of salt, it is possible I am misremembering something.

    1 vote

  3. Comment on Twenty years of digital life, gone in an instant, thanks to Apple in ~tech

    creesch
    Link Parent
    For what it is worth, I personally haven't run into services out right refusing custom domains. I am having a hard time any service doing that (that I also trust to actually register for). But, I...

    For what it is worth, I personally haven't run into services out right refusing custom domains. I am having a hard time any service doing that (that I also trust to actually register for). But, I am EU based and we aren't following the latest trends in enshittifaction I see in some other parts of the world.

    And to be honest, I still use gmail as a backup. I personally consider not needing gmail for the majority of my mail a win.

    1 vote

  4. Comment on Tildes Minecraft: What do you want to see in the next season? in ~games

    creesch
    Link Parent
    On the season2 server I had a village and just build a dungeon under the church with loads of beds. This did center them around town center. I also made sure to concentrate the work blocks towards...

    On the season2 server I had a village and just build a dungeon under the church with loads of beds. This did center them around town center. I also made sure to concentrate the work blocks towards the center as well. Going as far as to create a "maker space".

    1 vote

  5. Comment on The Windows 11 crisis in ~tech

    creesch
    Link Parent
    I thought I read recently that they are finally taking action against windows activated like this. It was very recently, I'll see if I find the news article on it.

    I thought I read recently that they are finally taking action against windows activated like this. It was very recently, I'll see if I find the news article on it.

  6. Comment on Twenty years of digital life, gone in an instant, thanks to Apple in ~tech

    creesch
    Link Parent
    That's fair. Though I don't think most people were responding from a place of schadenfreude to be honest but rather a desire to make other people aware that you should have backups combined with...

    That's fair. Though I don't think most people were responding from a place of schadenfreude to be honest but rather a desire to make other people aware that you should have backups combined with various ways to achieve it.

    And to be honest, the author of the blog post "should" have known better. The fact that they and many other people don't is all the more reason to have discussions about it as much as possible. Even more reason to talk about alternatives, ways to mitigate the risks, etc.

    Some people, in that process, suggest solutions that are not for most people. Other people make reasonable suggestions. Like, for example, having a local copy of a bunch of your data. And yes, not all data can always easily be covered. But, and I can't keep stressing this enough, having some of your data backed up is better than having none of your data backed up.

    I am still not sure where the hyper focus on self hosted solutions came from. That, to me, seems a distraction from the fact that it is actually fairly accessible to get the basics right for a lot of people's data.

    9 votes

  7. Comment on Twenty years of digital life, gone in an instant, thanks to Apple in ~tech

    creesch
    Link Parent
    It's the doing it wrong part that makes it tricky. In principle it isn't all that difficult to edit records as it is just a few text fields for each entry. In practice it isn't always entirely...

    It's the doing it wrong part that makes it tricky. In principle it isn't all that difficult to edit records as it is just a few text fields for each entry. In practice it isn't always entirely clear and having a bit of knowledge about DNS records is nice to have.

    So I can understand it being somewhat daunting for people.

    3 votes

  8. Comment on Twenty years of digital life, gone in an instant, thanks to Apple in ~tech

    creesch
    Link Parent
    You ask why people seem to take a hostile tone, but I feel like you did set the tone here. Just pointing it out. Also, like I pointed out elsewhere, there are plenty of in between solutions. Most...

    Doesn’t sound like you eh? You know better. You set up vulnerability alerts, auto updates and what the hell, you even know enough to set up a deadmanswitch alerting system for when these stop working.
    Well congratulations then, because you’re a systems engineer. Most people can’t do this stuff.

    You ask why people seem to take a hostile tone, but I feel like you did set the tone here. Just pointing it out.

    Also, like I pointed out elsewhere, there are plenty of in between solutions. Most of which can be used as reasonable assurance you will not be locked out of data without having to be a system engineer. Mitigating the risks of being locked out doesn't mean you need to fully self host ALL THE THINGS yourself. This seems to be the result of you yourself moving the goalpost entirely in that direction. And to be completely honest, I am not sure why?

    If you are really not sure what I mean, here are some examples of you taking it to one extreme spectrum.

    And I know you guys have enough knowledge to know we’re not going to pretend it’s a good idea to self host the actual email servers.

    Email hosting by a variety of well established hosting providers is a thing. This ranges from extremely easy by using their domain to slightly more complex and coupling your own domain. Which involves setting a few DNS entries once using instructions from the mail provider.

    What about apple’s password manager? Gonna have to put this somewhere else too. I use 1Password which does local backups and is resilient to 1P being a bad actor — Apple doesn’t, to my knowledge, implement that. And 1P isn’t self hostable, so… keepass with syncing? I’ve done that before. It’s annoying as hell. But whatever, it’s just syncing to your drive…

    Again, no need to self host. You already have local backups by using 1Password. Risk mitigated, you have provided the solution yourself.

    Shit, right, the “drive”. It’s not enough to set up a NAS, you generally want something you want to share. If you used iCloud for this, congrats all your share links are gone forever and it’s not like there’s any backup of those.

    If someone takes care to have backups of important things elsewhere, they can still use most things Apple during daily use. Those links you shared being gone does suck, I agree. But the data behind those links will still be around. The original comment you replied to basically suggested just having a local copy of all that data. They didn't even suggest that it needs to be a NAS or even accessible over the internet.

    So you used nextcloud for this because you know better than that. When you did all this setup three years ago you tried to install the version provided by your synology only to find it hadn’t been updated this century and you did a custom install.
    Of course you never updated this since then, completely missing there was a major vulnerability to update for, so now in good conscience you check and oops … people uploaded illegal porn to your drive and now the police is at your door Just Asking Questions. Not to mention that access wasn’t configured quite correctly by default so your private files were visible to everyone who knew how to access them.

    This is an oddly specific, somewhat fear mongering hypothetical. Unless this is an example from personal experience, in which case I feel for you. I agree that fully self hosting critical things is a pain, even more so if you want them to be accessible from the internet. Which I generally advocate against with anyway. But this also comes back to what I already said, you can have both a local backup (potentially on a NAS if you like) and use iCloud.

    Regardless of where you are sharing your files from, you still want a backup anyway. Like... backups are a good idea. To be frank, you seem angry at the idea of setting up backups in the first place.

    12 votes

  9. Comment on Twenty years of digital life, gone in an instant, thanks to Apple in ~tech

    creesch
    Link Parent
    Okay, we have no moved from "they might have done more than they let on" to you now assuming they must have done something fishy. I might be reading it wrong, I think it is not a good mindset in...

    Okay, we have no moved from "they might have done more than they let on" to you now assuming they must have done something fishy. I might be reading it wrong, I think it is not a good mindset in general, but it also still isn't all that relevant.

    If you've got all your eggs in one basket maybe it's smart to not do things that look extremely fishy to the owner of your basket?

    Like buying gift cards the owner of the baskets offers themselves for sale in stores? To you that seems like something people shouldn't do, based on knowledge you already have. Personally I can come up with a few benign (sometimes silly) reasons why someone would top up their account like this, none of them with any malicious intend.
    Even if I agreed it is potentially fishy, doing something that looks fishy is not the same as doing something rule breaking.

    Which, brings me back to this all being not all that relevant. You seem to agree that companies will lock you out of accounts based on vibes. Which also means that nobody should put their eggs in one basket, regardless of them doing fishy stuff or not.

    3 votes

  10. Comment on Twenty years of digital life, gone in an instant, thanks to Apple in ~tech

    creesch
    Link Parent
    Ah, that is different from what I thought you were talking about. And to be honest, just shitty behaviour on the side of those services and not really to do with mail traffic itself being the...

    Ah, that is different from what I thought you were talking about. And to be honest, just shitty behaviour on the side of those services and not really to do with mail traffic itself being the issue.

    Of course, if you are job hunting and need to use those specific services that doesn't really matter. But, I'd also happily use my Gmail account as a backup in those instances.

    People often tend to approach this as an "either or" type of deal. I just am happy to greatly reduce my dependency on Google services for things I consider critical.

  11. Comment on Twenty years of digital life, gone in an instant, thanks to Apple in ~tech

    creesch
    Link Parent
    Because it doesn't really matter, at least not in the way it is being discussed here. If you look at the discussion you can see that most people aren't really siding with the author other than...

    and I don't really understand why people haven't cottoned onto it.

    Because it doesn't really matter, at least not in the way it is being discussed here. If you look at the discussion you can see that most people aren't really siding with the author other than generic "yikes" type comments. What is being discussed is the fact that if you have all your data stored in one place outside of your control that it is a liability.

    Maybe the author did more than they are letting on, maybe they didn't. Fact of the matter is that they put all their data eggs in one basket and had that basket taken away from them. Every now and then you hear similar stories from people having used Microsofts cloud offerings, Googles cloud offerings, etc. Also in those cases we don't know if more has been going on. What we do know is that these companies sometimes lock people out and what is also without question is that it is exceedingly difficult to reach anyone within those companies for any type of sane support if something is happening.

    In that context it also makes sense that people focus more the type of discussion that focusses on keeping your data safe from such eventualities.

    6 votes

  12. Comment on Twenty years of digital life, gone in an instant, thanks to Apple in ~tech

    creesch
    Link Parent
    That is somewhat of a risk, but mostly comes down to using a good reputable mail hosting provider and having set up the proper DNS entries. So far I have been using mailbox for a few years now and...

    That is somewhat of a risk, but mostly comes down to using a good reputable mail hosting provider and having set up the proper DNS entries.

    So far I have been using mailbox for a few years now and a custom domain. In that time I haven't had a single issue with not receiving mail or mail not arriving on the other side.

  13. Comment on Twenty years of digital life, gone in an instant, thanks to Apple in ~tech

    creesch
    Link Parent
    I have domain registration setup to automatically renew and am using a fairly reputable registrar that has been around for many years. Of course, that is no guarantee that nothing ever happens....

    I have domain registration setup to automatically renew and am using a fairly reputable registrar that has been around for many years. Of course, that is no guarantee that nothing ever happens. But generally speaking there are often signs a company is in trouble and transferring domains these days is really easy as it just requires a transfer token.

    Overall though I feel like it is worth the risk compared to having all my eggs in one FANG basket.

    1 vote

  14. Comment on Twenty years of digital life, gone in an instant, thanks to Apple in ~tech

    creesch
    Link Parent
    I agree that having any backup is better than no backup. Certainly if the data is also stored locally. But, the latter often isn't the case and even there I do think you can mitigate the risk even...

    I agree that having any backup is better than no backup. Certainly if the data is also stored locally.

    But, the latter often isn't the case and even there I do think you can mitigate the risk even if you aren't as technically inclined. For example, in other places in this thread I advocated for duplicating your data by using two cloud services.

    Going a step further, for essential things like mail and password managers I strongly suggest people using a different service from the one that is their main data storage. Certainly for password managers there are good reputable choices in the form of bitwarden, 1password, etc. They aren't quite as easy as a built in password manager, but once setup they are not difficult to use either.

    Mail can be a bit more tricky if you are thinking custom domains, but that isn't really needed if you just want to separate concerns. For example, if all you data is in icloud use Gmail for mail. If all your data is in Google drive consider creating a mail on Microsofts side of things.

    6 votes

  15. Comment on Twenty years of digital life, gone in an instant, thanks to Apple in ~tech

    creesch
    Link Parent
    For email I would like to point out that it is relatively straightforward these days to get your own domain and have mail hosted at a good provided like mailbox.org. Note that I said "relatively"...

    For email I would like to point out that it is relatively straightforward these days to get your own domain and have mail hosted at a good provided like mailbox.org. Note that I said "relatively" as you do need to set up DNS entries for the domain, but if you are comfortable doing that I do feel that it is one of the biggest things you can do to move out of reach of big tech.

    I mostly did when I realized how many of my online accounts are tied to my Gmail address I've had since 2005. Most services require access to the email account for password resets and changing the mail address tied to the account.

    4 votes

  16. Comment on Twenty years of digital life, gone in an instant, thanks to Apple in ~tech

    creesch
    Link Parent
    I think a lot of people think it is more complex than it actually needs to be. I detailed some valid backup solutions here but the key takeway should be to just not have your data stored in one...

    I think a lot of people think it is more complex than it actually needs to be. I detailed some valid backup solutions here but the key takeway should be to just not have your data stored in one location. If all of your data is stored in Apple's cloud, also storing it in another FANG cloud is a perfectly fine approach as well.

    If one of them decided to apply their corporate ratfucking you still have your data in the other cloud and vice versa.

    The only, real, limitation here is that it will cost more money. But, given the numbers cited in the post I feel like for the author the extra costs of having duplicated cloud services would have been worth it.

    6 votes

  17. Comment on Twenty years of digital life, gone in an instant, thanks to Apple in ~tech

    creesch
    Link Parent
    There are in between options. For example, you can put your data in a hosted nextcloud instance. Or, if you simply want to have a backup for someone relatively tech savvy get something like...

    Put your data in a NAS? Good luck, self hosting is a full time job

    There are in between options. For example, you can put your data in a hosted nextcloud instance. Or, if you simply want to have a backup for someone relatively tech savvy get something like Hetzner storage and backrest. Or if that is too much simply go for backblaze backup.

    Heck, just put your storage in a secondary FANG provided cloud solution if all of the above still feels like it is too much. The important point is to not have all your data stored at a single place.

    3 votes

  18. Comment on Tildes Minecraft: What do you want to see in the next season? in ~games

    creesch
    Link Parent
    Makes sense considering the lack of minimap or locator bar you had previously.

    Makes sense considering the lack of minimap or locator bar you had previously.

    3 votes

  19. Comment on Tildes Minecraft: What do you want to see in the next season? in ~games

    creesch
    Link Parent
    I don't mind it, I use a minimap for awareness about players around me anyway. Comes in handy when certain people are sneaking around with shenanigans in mind :p

    I don't mind it, I use a minimap for awareness about players around me anyway. Comes in handy when certain people are sneaking around with shenanigans in mind :p

    3 votes

  20. Comment on Tildes Minecraft: What do you want to see in the next season? in ~games

    creesch
    Link Parent
    Good idea. Though anyone can do that, the list is there ;) Anyway for the people that are about to be pinged looks like the new start date is January 3rd for D-day around 11am Pacific time. See...

    Just randomly popped into the thread and saw the new start date. I'll hopefully be able to request off, I wanna be there for the start if possible. @creesch maybe ping the people on the whitelist again?

    Good idea. Though anyone can do that, the list is there ;) Anyway for the people that are about to be pinged looks like the new start date is January 3rd for D-day around 11am Pacific time. See further up the chain.

    @443
    @Aran
    @Admicos
    @Aphataeros
    @Arknata
    @BajaBlastoise
    @Bauke
    @Benio11xox
    @Bront
    @BunnySurfer
    @Chaosphoenix_28
    @ChthonicSun
    @ChunkyCorgiTwo
    @ColdheartsTalon
    @CowsAreCool
    @Crestwave
    @Crimson
    @Delphi
    @DisasterlyDisco
    @Durinthal
    @Endless
    @Evie
    @Expertbacon
    @Felicity
    @Fiachra
    @FiereChaussette
    @Fizz_Cashman
    @FluffyKittens
    @Flying_Anvil
    @Franklin
    @GalileoPotato
    @Garethp
    @Gesspar
    @Goodtoknow
    @GravySleeve
    @Guncxa
    @Gweran
    @IBArbitrary
    @ICN
    @IsildursBane
    @JCPhoenix
    @JIGABOT
    @Jambo
    @Jao
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    @JoeyTurncoat
    @Johz
    @Kranerian
    @Kukinko007
    @Lishian
    @Mahdawg
    @MangoTiger
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    @MarbleMoss
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    @Merry
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    @Muffin
    @Nankeru
    @Ningodeshkani
    @Noox
    @Noriston
    @Nox_Ludicro
    @Oslypsis
    @OswaldTheCatfish
    @PeeingRedAgain
    @PelagiusSeptim
    @PierogInTheButt
    @PistolPop
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    @Positive
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    @PuddleOfKittens
    @PugMan
    @Rocket_Man
    @Rudism
    @Sadavir
    @SassyCupcake
    @ShadowFox
    @SovietBen
    @Spore_Prince
    @SrgSlimeTIme
    @Starman2112
    @SuperVitality
    @TBDBITLtrpt13
    @TangibleLight
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    @TaylorSwiftsPickles
    @Tharrulous
    @ThatLinuxUser
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    @TheSkysPaw
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    @ToteRose
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    @coztellation
    @crashb
    @creesch
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    @yuke
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    @zestier
    @zini

    30 votes