NaibofTabr

Would this mini pc be a good homeserver

For what purpose?

Um, the core feature is privacy invasion. It does what it says on the tin.

It’s fine if some people want that functionality, as long as it’s not enabled by default.

Food is a reasonable target for biodegradable packaging because you don’t really expect the food to sit around for more than a year (for long-term food packaging you just wouldn’t use a biodegradable material).

Packaging products that might have a long shelf life is more problematic. If the material breaks down in saltwater then it will start breaking down if someone picks it up with sweaty or recently washed hands.

Well right, and coating them with plastic means that they leave plastic residue behind if they break down in an uncontrolled environment, and increases the cost and complexity of recycling:

If the paper has a plastic or aluminum coating, it can be recycled, but it is much more expensive and complicated.

Some plastic coatings can be separated from paper during the recycling process. Still, it is often cheaper and easier to use virgin materials to create new products than recycling paper coated with plastic.

Paper coated with plastic isn’t suitable for composting, and most times, such products are incinerated for heat or landfilled rather than recycled.

https://www.almostzerowaste.com/non-recyclable-paper/

Yes they already exist. They are not really better than pure plastic, they’re kind of a form of greenwashing because they appear to be environmentally friendly.

Aida said the new material is as strong as petroleum-based plastics but breaks down into its original components when exposed to salt.

If this means that it does not break down when exposed to just water, that’s a pretty big deal. Water solubility has been the major issue making biodegradable plastics useless for food packaging (typically you want to either keep the food wet and water in, or dry and water out - either way water permeability is a problem).

Of course most foods also contain salt, so… I guess that’s why the article talks about coatings. If the material has to be coated to keep it from breaking down too fast, what is the point? either the coating will prevent it from breaking down, or it just moves the problem to the coating not breaking down.

One of the more revealing – and darkly amusing – features was the phone’s automatic censorship of words deemed problematic by the state.

…

Pain is a great teacher.

If you had the hardware to build a robot that could “feel” the world around it, and you wanted it to self-teach how to move around on its own (so that you don’t have to pre-define movement paths), you would probably program in a system that could interpret potentially damaging sensations as danger/bad and avoid them automatically (too hot/too cold/too sharp/too hard/etc). That system would essentially be a pain response.

Graphene is the most amazing material, it can do anything you can imagine - except leave the lab.

Encrypting the connection is good, it means that no one should be able capture the data and read it - but my concern is more about the holes in the network boundary you have to create to establish the connection.

My point of view is, that’s not something you want happening automatically, unless you manually configured it to do that yourself and you know exactly how it works, what it connects to and how it authenticates (and preferably have some kind of inbound/outbound traffic monitoring for that connection).

Ah, just one question - is your current Syncthing use internal to your home network, or does it sync remotely?

Because if you’re just having your mobile devices sync files when they get on your home wifi, it’s reasonably safe for that to be fire-and-forget, but if you’re syncing from public networks into private that really should require some more specific configuration and active control.

The Internet Used to be a Place

There are still active webrings:

sadgrl.online webring directory
digilord.neocities.org/webring
webringworld.org
brisray webring list

Company Scrip

It’s the same old grift.

My main reasons are sailing the high seas

If this is the goal, then you need to concern yourself with your network first and the computer/server second. You need as much operational control over your home network as you can manage, you need to put this traffic in a separate tunnel from all of your normal network traffic and have it pop up on the public network from a different location. You need to own the modem that links you to your provider’s network, and the router that is the entry/exit point for your network. You need to segregate the thing doing the sailing on its own network segment that doesn’t have direct access to any of your other devices. You can not use the combo modem/router gateway device provided by your ISP. You need to plan your internal network intentionally and understand how, when, and why each device transmits on the network. You should understand your firewall configuration (on your network boundary, not on your PC). You should also get PiHole up and running and start dropping unwanted inbound and outbound traffic.

OpSec first.

Not enabling it may prevent you from accessing the user-facing features but may not actually prevent it from recording your conversation and training on it.

Not privatize, atomize. Centralized control is ripe for abuse, no matter whose control it is.

Oh yes, let’s nationalize the communications platforms and give the government direct control over how people express themselves. Surely the government is 100% trustworthy and will not use that power to suppress criticism or political opponents, or track people who are ‘unpatriotic’, or redefine ‘hate speech’ in a way that benefits the current regime. No such thing has ever happened in the history of ever. What could possibly go wrong.

AI is a surveillance technology.

VPNs as a technology might not be illegal but circumventing the firewall certainly is.

Unless you are very vocal and high profile person no one will black bag you in a country of billion people, lol.

This is a bit of a misunderstanding about how things work in an authoritarian system. Sure, you might fly under the radar for awhile, but if you call attention to yourself (say, by getting caught trying to bypass the government firewall) and you are not high-profile, then it is very low-effort to make you disappear. Few will notice, and those that do will stay silent out of fear.

If you are more high-profile you still get black-bagged, you just get released after, with your behavior suitably modified.

Naomi Wu no longer uploads to YouTube.

Depends - how many family members do you have that the PRC might use against you? or who would miss you if the PRC black bagged you?

And there are hundreds if not thousands of them, plus a lot of automated tooling.