How much rate-limiting do you get with a VPN? Because I use SearxNG with my regular network and I tend to get a lot of my search queries fail because the search providers have CAPTCHAs after the 10th request or so for some given timespan.

Yes, operating system accounts. And a good follow-up step is to check whether that account is really unable to read the files from other accounts. Sometimes Linux distributions come with weird default settings, I think Debian allows read access to files per default. I’m not 100% sure.

Virtual machines are way better at isolating stuff. Downside might be some extra effort to set them up, and maybe some fiddling with the graphics card.

Yeah, I think it’s a bit sad it has to be like this… But it is what it is… I once moved and asked my neighbours if I could use their Wifi for a month, and that was basically their answer. Just that I wasn’t some internet stranger, but a regular stranger living nextdoors.

I feel there’s a lot of bandwidth with “risky files” anyway. If that’s just a select few pirated games, creating two seperate user accounts might do. I did that for a while. Had one regular account for all my files, browsing etc. And another one with Lutris and some pirated games from ye good ol times… If there’s some Windows virus included, it can’t access any of my files.

If someone does computer security research, or plans to deliberately execute the nastiest malware, ransomware… that’s obviously not enough by any means.

But people are in different kinds of situations. So pick what’s best for you. And my priorities changed over time. These days I -for example- don’t pirate as much software anymore. In case I want some of my Portal2 memories back, I’ll just wait for the next Steam sale and buy it for 5 bucks… and for the rest of my software needs I have Linux and the Free Software community. I still keep the separate user accounts for random games and work and personal stuff, though.

I’m not really an expert on VPN, but I believe solutions like Tailscale, Netbird, Pangolin all leverage the Wireguard protocol.

https://github.com/erebe/wstunnel seems like the obvious solution.

Or maybe OpenVPN over normal TLS on port 443.

You could try to run Wireguard on a different port which would be otherwise used by some very common service, maybe there’s some general exemption for port 21, 22, 53, 80, 443…

Does your bank even allow you to file debit notes, or collect money from other people’s credit cards? As far as I know that’s never part of a regular consumer bank account…

For payment in advance (if you clients put in the effort to do a bank transfer) I think there’s HBCI, FinTS or whatever standards we have integrated in some CRM and eCommerce solutions.

…if you follow it up with a secure discard of all of the remaining blocks.

I don’t think so. I did a secure erase on my Samsung SSD and I forgot how long it took, but I still remember being surprised how quick it was. I think it was quicker than overwriting the entire disk, even with zeros. I even double-checked whether it did it because it was done so fast. But yeah, it didn’t return any data after that.

I mean I’m generally not a big fan of all the compromises. Sure maybe most of it is deleted. Maybe it’s not that easy to recover the rest of it. Maybe there’s an easy tool out there… I mean the issue with it is, we have all kinds of personal data on our laptops. One nude left, or the tax filings document and you might be in trouble anyway, if you do some half-assed compromise. Maybe you’ll give it to a regular person and nothing will happen… But I think generally it’s not good advise to hand out to people. They might not be aware of all of the consequences, we might not know the full picture… And the exact phrasing is doing way too much heavy-lifting.

Luckily there’s a clever way. Use LUKS and encrypt your disk right from the start. (As OP did?!) That takes care of everything. And once you give it away, just discard all the blocks. Mainly as a service to the next person, because that’s going to make the drive fast again. Should also be the fastest option, since SSDs do TRIMs all the time and are optimized for it. Quicker than a dd over the entire drive.

Not really great on SSDs, though. It’ll likely make them slower because now the controller thinks 100% of the memory is allocated. And some small percentage of the data will still be around, because they do overprovisioning.

Shouldn’t matter for OP, though. If they set up LUKS properly, there’s no way to decrypt the data.

But I mean secure wipe isn’t hard… It’s copy-pasting 2 more commands from the Arch wiki, compared to the dd command.

Nice. Like the coffee mug. And the table has coffee color as well… I just got a bigger desk with enough room to push all the clutter to the sides 😅

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Dunno if it’s necessarily worse tech… I don’t really care if it’s physical tokens which get exchanged or virtual ones… Point is, it has to work and cover a wide array of use-cases. Has to work in edge-cases, for both residents and tourists, has to work when there’s surprise maintenance at the bank, when there’s an internet outage… We gotta easily pay $1000 for a hotel for 10 days and the rental car, or 73ct at the local flea market. I might need to pay for a bus ticket or gasoline in the middle if some forest where there isn’t any 5G coverage…

I think exchanging physical tokens is just absurdly good at that. I’m just not sure if it can’t be done any other way? I mean we obviously don’t have that hypothetical tech in the real world, because banks want to control the process and they always come up with some central way of doing it, with them in the middle. That’s kinda their business model. And the alternative concept is some convoluted approach which needs an internet connection and a decent amount of resources to do the transactions…

There’s some better approaches at digital cash like GNU Taler I think that one is pretty much like cash. And we only need one of the transaction parties to be online (to prevent double-spending of the virtual tokens).

Edit: And we need some default. Makes it way more comfortable to live in a country that just demands people to offer a payment method and I can go anywhere and just pay with that. In contrast to install 25 different apps, open 20 bank accounts to cover all possible cases, and the parking meter at the tourist place randomly asks me to install the 26th app.

Welcome to the future, where everything is a stupid 200MB phone app which doesn’t even work properly. At least here in Germany you can still eat without any. But you definitely have to download some fat BurgerKing app with lots of 4k fire animations to get an 1€ coupon. Of course it’ll also ask for all kinds of stuff.

I always use dd or ddrescue. Takes 20min to open the computer, connect the drives, boot from usb, copy everything and you’d be done. Also super easy. Just pay a lot of attention before hitting enter. One small mistake and you copy it the wrong way around. Or overwrite your old drive in some other way.

Yeah, I doubt anyone runs it, because if you follow the instructions and click on the link to the server code, it’s just missing. And the empty repository has been sitting there since May… There isn’t any Android app in the Appstore either, so you wouldn’t be able to install anything. Seems all “Circulus” is, is a shiny website with (made-up?) advertisement text.

(And by the way, if you decide to self-host some of the standard open-source messengers… You can always just disable Federation and disallow sign-up. That way XMPP or Matrix won’t be able to connect to anyone else, except the people you invited to your server. And there’s this messenger overview, it doesn’t talk about kids-features, but maybe it’s useful nonetheless: https://www.messenger-matrix.de/messenger-matrix-en.html )

Yeah, Some people here really love drama and to fight other people online, preferably on a personal level. PieFed has become target of that. I don’t think it necessarily means a lot, other than we’re some high drama online place. There wasn’t any one software vs another one involved.

But everyone is allowed to pick their favorite software. They’re both fine from a technical perspective. You’ll get some different perks, but it’s all the same Threadiverse. I myself like PieFed better, including which side of drama they end up on. But YMMV. If OP wants to start on a new journey, they’re entitled to do whatever they like. Main thing with side quests is to do something in the first place. That’s more important than the exact details.

(Btw, I’ve also been using Lemmy for quite a while… It’s not like I’m in my comfort zone all the time.)

Yeah, being conservative isn’t how awesome new hobbies start. You need to leave your comfort zone 😂

Why not host a PieFed instance instead? Similar but more features and easier to maintain. Does have some scraper countermeasures built in, so maybe you don’t even need Cloudflare. Also as a next project after that, you could learn Python and contribute to the project.

My mom taught me, other people doing things is never an excuse for yourself… But yeah, maybe that’s how things are.