LGR has a video about Danmere Backup system which used your home VCR for backups. It apparently could store up to 4GB to a normal VHS-tape. Quick search around the net didn’t find much other than LGRs video and random snippets, but apparently that was slow, roughly 4MB/minute. But at the time when a lot of people didn’t even have storage on their computers up to gigabytes, so it could’ve been a viable option, but I haven’t heard about anyone who’d actually used a thing like that.

C-cassettes on Commodre 64 were a common thing and in here even the national broadcasting company sent some programs over the FM radio during nights.

I’ve always thought that it’s more ‘we need more women than men to repopulate our country after the war’ as us men are nearly useless when making new life to this planet. But obviously that idea is ‘a bit’ dated too today.

I don’t know about long term, but it’s running on my pile of virtual servers and does it’s job just fine. The openmediavault itself is a pretty good web-interface on top of Debian and it’s just configuring the underlying operating system so you can get exactly the same setup by writing configurations manually for the services. OMV is just a convenient tool to manage simple fileshares.

I use it only for samba and wireguard, so can’t really say if it’s as solid with other extensions, but for me it’s been a decent tool for the job.

I didn’t take any overhead in account, just checked that the site itself was a bit under 2kB worth of data. 1 gigabit / 2 kilobytes = 62500, so in order to consume 1Gbps you’ll need about that 62k visitors every second. Handshake is few hundred bits and other overhead is pretty neglible, but those are still not zero so I just rounded it down for a rough ballpark number.

I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s over 1Gbps.

The site is about 2kB. In order to consume 1Gbps it would need about 62 000 visitors every second, assuming no one uses any kind of cache or anything. Or 5,4 billion visitors daily. Not impossible, but I’d guess the real number isn’t quite that much.

While AI-bros warn everyone how dangerous their newest version of slop-machine is this is the part I’m genuinely worried about. LLM hallucinations about nuclear threat could genuinely push someone in the current US admin to believe that pre-emptive strike to China is actually a good idea.

AI overlors in the 1980s knew better. A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.

They are over pretty long time period. One of our representatives I happen to know personally had all kinds of nosy people around his yard after getting elected, on a pretty rural area. Some people apparently just get something out of peeping in a parliament members living room.

I’m not saying it’s impossible that there was some malicious intent on these break-ins but what’s available on public news just doesn’t feel like hybrid operation from the east.

Just for comparison, my VPS server has ~20 active email boxes (postfix,dovecot,spamassassin,clamav), a few small-ish active wordpress sites (apahce,php-fpm,mariadb), radicale and some other smaller services running with 2 cores and 4GB RAM and it’s mostly just fine. Occasionally, specially during heavier updates on wordpress-sites, memory tends to get pretty full, but it’s still just fine. Tweaking memory cache for php (or running something else than php) would increase performance by a lot, but even without optimization the 5€/month VPS is quite capable to keep your internet presence around and on your own hands.

If that’s the case then the security process has already failed. And also, if the intent was to either access data or plant a listening devices I’d assume that the intruder would make sure to leave no traces behind.

That ‘could’ is doing pretty heavy lifting here. It’s not impossible of course, but my gut feeling says that it’s something else than our neighbours from the east. Of course that’s a major news here, but just ‘visiting’ few homes of the members of our parliament and leaving visible signs of entry without actually stealing or doing anything feels more like a some stupid tiktok challenge than an attempt of foregin influence.

Ironically the site itself advertises login via google or twitter on pop-up dialog.

Nothing wrong with good old ssh. My VMs are different enough that building and maintaining ansible playbooks or something similar would be a bigger task than actually doing it in the traditional way. Maybe I could benefit by building simple playbooks to populate user accounts, ssh keys, smtp relay settings and other common things, but I don’t really set up new servers that often that it would justify spending time to set up tools for that.

Can I have a dog-sized dragon? Smaug would not fit in our living room and our budget can’t manage dozens of sheeps every week.

LLM gives you a concrete concise answer to your question while the search engine gives you dead links or spam.

LLM also very confidently gives you a wrong answer way too often. Just over the weekend I tinkered with diy-home automation gadget and fed a bunch of documents to duck.ai in hope that it could dig up protocol and electrical behavior of HAN port on our electric meter. The documentation is there, but it’s recursively referenced to a crapload of different standards so the actual answer is pretty labour intensive to dig up manually.

LLM spat out an answer which seemed to make sense, but the solution it offered didn’t work and when I asked for sources for spesific facts it just said that it doesn’t have any and that it shouldn’t have recommended such a solution in the first place, with apologies of course.

I’d much prefer the old school way of searching things, but that doesn’t really exist anymore either. Search engines, google specially, are far less useful than they used to be. Part of the problem is LLM slop filling the whole internet but somehow I feel that’s not the only reason.

My ISP offers unauthenticated SMTP for their customer addresses. It’s pretty heavily rate limited, but well enough for the occasional status email my system throws out. At least around here they are pretty common for residential customers, so that might be an option.

Other possibility is to set up SMTP relay to your network and give it credentials to an actual email account (with SMTP support, which isn’t granted these days). It can take in emails from your network without credentials and throw them to the internet with your account. It’s pretty simple to set up, search for postfix + smarthost. Added bonus is that you can read the replies to that address too via your email provider services.

I have several old but working electronics and I literally haven’t been able to give them away for free.

Few years ago I got a pile of old switches and other network stuff. Unmanaged 24 port gigabit switches, some firewalls and other network hardware you might find in a generic ~50 person office. No one wants them, but I don’t want to throw away working and (potentially) useful hardware either. I suppose I eventually have to as my own network doesn’t really need 200 ethernet ports and they are consuming the already crammed storage space I have.

And no, I’m not offering to ship them across the globe on my own expense. But trying to sell them on our version of craigslist for 15€ (shipping included) doesn’t seem to work either.

OrgAbuseHandle: ABUSE9107-ARIN

OrgAbuseName: ABUSE

OrgAbusePhone: +1-313-516-8908

OrgAbuseEmail: abuse@hostodo.com

OrgAbuseRef: https://rdap.arin.net/registry/entity/ABUSE9107-ARIN

They have options. No idea if they actually do anything for the reports, but it’s worth a shot.

I’m running Dahua cameras. They can pull new firmware straight over the internet, but they don’t rely on any cloud services. All kinds of flavours available and they do run on POE.

https://thecybersecguru.com/news/lg-smart-tv-spying-investigation/

There are roughly 216 million LG smart TVs in homes, hospitals, offices, and hotels worldwide. Each one maps its local network, fingerprints its content, and logs audio, on or off, whether you’re talking to it or to someone else, whether you’re online or not, and feeds that into an ad engine that sells access to your living room.

They do a lot more than just scan the network.

Mine is several years old by now, I doubt that the firmware on that has all the options enabled. And also I live in a pretty rural area, there’s no open networks around.

But something LG has achieved with this, I’m going to look for other brands when I’m on a market for new TV. Which I hope will be many years in the future, maybe there’s a change on products while waiting and something better is available by then.