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hperrin

@hperrin@lemmy.world

I’m Hunter Perrin. I’m a software engineer.

I wrote an email service: port87.com

I write free software: github.com/sciactive

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hperrin ,

Wouldn’t know. Never happened. 😎

..

Because.. I’ve never talked to a girl.

hperrin ,

I bet those businesses who relocated from Cali to Texas are loving those power prices.

Oh yeah, they already left Texas.

hperrin ,

I haven’t had a power outage in about ten years, between SDG&E, PG&E, and SoCal Edison. Meanwhile, Texas has regular power outages. So just what are you on about?

Is Privacy Worth It? (blog.thenewoil.org)

When I announced I would be closing my communities earlier this year, a curious thing happened: a surprising number of regulars replied with some variation of “I think this is my exit.” While some were specifically talking about Matrix, claiming that mine was the only room they were really active in and therefore they saw no...

hperrin , (edited )

^ This.

I’m a software engineer, and I’ve worked for the big tech giants. I’m familiar with how they track you. VPNs are worthless. Unless you’re trying to hide your activity from your own ISP (like if you’re pirating stuff), the VPN does next to nothing to cover your tracks. And it’s not like they’re gonna advertise their VPN by saying, “you can pirate stuff without your ISP catching you!”

If you want actual privacy, you’ve gotta use something like Tor browser or Tails. Of course, I’ve gotta wonder what you’re up to if you need that kind of privacy. Usually a privacy window is good enough.

hperrin ,

Hell yeah! Get that shit… OUTTA HERE!!!

Ok but seriously, that is a very good reason to ban it. Who knows what would happen if the AI just fully ripped someone else’s code off that’s supposed to be like GPL licensed or something. If humans can plagiarize, than AIs can plagiarize.

But also, how are they still using CVS? CVS is so slow and so bad. Even Subversion would be an upgrade.

hperrin ,

That is definitely your fault for letting randos @everyone in your server.

hperrin ,

Can I have an AI that leads spammers on for months thinking they’re going to get a big payout from me? No. Just one that scrapes my data. Ok.

Google mentioned 'AI' 120+ times during its I/O keynote (techcrunch.com)

It ran 110 minutes, but Google managed to reference AI a whopping 121 times during Google I/O 2024 (by its own count). CEO Sundar Pichai referenced the figure to wrap up the presentation, cheekily stating that the company was doing the “hard work” of counting for us

hperrin ,

I’ll be really glad when this particular hype cycle dies.

hperrin ,

That is not surprising at all. That’s like saying laying off the conspiracy theory conventions for a while reduces your belief in conspiracy theories.

hperrin ,

Yay Jellyfin! What an awesome app!

hperrin ,

You don’t actually need to run down first. Just a docker compose pull if you haven’t made any changes, then docker compose up -d will restart whatever needs to be restarted.

hperrin ,

Try it. Just change an environment variable, then run up -d and you’ll see.

hperrin ,

How are we gonna eat the rich if we don’t trap them?

hperrin ,

I agree that the modern internet is shit, but paying for journalism isn’t what’s making it shit. If we don’t pay for good journalism, we don’t get good journalism.

What email provider do you use for sign ups?

I used to use Protonmail, however the verification steps become tedious when creating unique emails for sign ups. I've switched to Tutanota despite it contravening their one account policy. What do you all use for one off emails (for sign ups etc )? Or do you prefer one of those 10 minute email sites?

hperrin , (edited )

I use (and created) https://port87.com. It lets you use a different address for every account and keeps them all organized. It’s great for managing accounts. (And I have literally hundreds of accounts.)

One of the nice things is you don’t need to create a new email beforehand. You can give out an email address that starts with yourusername-, and it just works. You get a new label in your account that you can approve and it goes in with all your other labels.

You can also enable screening on a label if you wanna use it for real people, then it will screen new senders before you see their email.

hperrin , (edited )

Sorry, I don’t have the prices up on the landing site. Here’s the breakdown:

  • 500MB of storage, receive unlimited mail, free
  • send mail, $1/month (to prevent spam)
  • 2GB of storage, $2/month
  • 10GB, $6
  • 20GB, $10
  • 100GB, $20
  • 1TB, $40

I’m working right now on custom domains. I haven’t finalized the price, but right now my plan is to do unlimited domains for $10/month, plus $4 for each additional user.

hperrin ,

You could make a new movie library named “Christian Propaganda”, put them all in there, and only give your mom access. She’ll probably be mad, but it’ll be funny and you’re technically abiding by her request. Once you have your laugh, you can change the name to “Christian Movies”.

hperrin ,

Damn dude. Nice score. :D

hperrin , (edited )

No, low quality carbon fiber didn’t lead to the accident. A blatant disregard for safety, testing, and best practices led to the accident. Low quality carbon fiber just contributed a bit.

hperrin ,

Claustrophobia?

hperrin ,

Next stop: plausibly deniable end to end encryption.

hperrin ,

I’m really happy that my new Framework laptop’s fingerprint reader worked perfectly out of the box.

hperrin ,

There’s always the option of renting a low cost VM in the cloud and running your own VPN. They will probably monitor your traffic though.

hperrin ,

Depends what you’re using a VPN for. If you’re using it for privacy, yeah, it wouldn’t help. If you’re using it for geo locked content, it works great. Or for privacy from specifically your ISP.

hperrin , (edited )

If you’re trusting any other VPN provider, then you’re already willing to trust someone. What’s the difference between trusting Proton and trusting Digital Ocean?

If you’re only visiting HTTPS sites then your ISP already can’t snoop your traffic. A VPN gives you very little added privacy.

No matter what you use, you’re really only protecting yourself from your own ISP.

hperrin ,

You think that using a VPN is protecting you from the website you’re connecting to logging that traffic?

No. The website sees the traffic. The only thing they don’t see is your home IP address. That’s not even a useful piece of information for tracking someone. Home IP addresses are usually dynamic.

Websites track you through cookies and etags, and VPNs do not block those. If they did, you wouldn’t be able to log into any websites, and you would always be redownloading JS, CSS, and fonts you’ve already downloaded.

hperrin ,

You think that using a VPN is protecting you from the website you’re connecting to logging that traffic?

No. The website sees the traffic. The only thing they don’t see is your home IP address. That’s not even a useful piece of information for tracking someone. Home IP addresses are usually dynamic.

Websites track you through cookies and etags, and VPNs do not block those. If they did, you wouldn’t be able to log into any websites, and you would always be redownloading JS, CSS, and fonts you’ve already downloaded.

(Copied for convenience, since your comment is duplicated.)

hperrin , (edited )

What personal information do you think the VPN is blocking? Like, exactly. Precisely what information do you believe the VPN prevents a website from seeing about you?

I understand the difference between first and third party cookies. You said you were trying to prevent the website from tracking you. A website’s cookie for its own domain is first party. If you block that cookie, it’s harder for them to track you, and also you can’t log in.

Your IP address is not very useful for tracking you.

  • Residential IP addresses change often.
  • They’re usually shared by a family or organization through NAT.
  • You will often have different IP addresses throughout the day as you switch between WiFi and cell data.
  • Your different devices may or may not share an IP address.

The major ad trackers use cookies and etags to track you. They don’t use your IP address.

hperrin ,

Then we agree that’s the only advantage. So your original reply is wrong. A cloud VM running self hosted VPN protects you exactly as much as a commercial VPN with regard to the website you’re connecting to.

hperrin ,

Also, please prove to me that you are blocking etags, because that is bonkers.

hperrin ,

So just make a snapshot, and every time you want a new IP, create a new VM from the snapshot. Or if there’s an option in your cloud provider, just request a new IP.

Whenever you connect to a VPN, you use the same IP address the whole session. You have to reconnect to a different node whenever you want a new IP.

But I feel like you’re just being contrarian here. Your objections aren’t rooted in any sort of actual concern over privacy, and I don’t think you really understand the systems you’re using. In other words, you’re just being paranoid.

If you want true privacy, use Tor.

hperrin ,

A VPN doesn’t protect you the way OP thinks it does. It just hides your IP address from the websites you visit. Of course, now instead of one website seeing that you visited it, one organization can see everything you visit.

Basically it just moves your trust from your ISP to your VPN provider. So yeah, if you don’t need that, and you don’t need to get around geo blocks, you don’t need a VPN.

hperrin ,

Not really. Unless you’re visiting unencrypted websites. If you’re using HTTPS and DNS over HTTPS, your ISP can only see what IP address you’re connecting to, not the traffic.

hperrin , (edited )

I’ve been a web and network engineer for 15 years, and I run a VPN on my own production cluster, but sure man, I don’t understand VPNs.

Again, you do not understand how trackers work. Trackers don’t use your IP address. And unless Google changed it since I worked there, I can guarantee that.

Prove to me that you block etags, cookies, localStorage, and service workers. Prove to me that every request you make spoofs a new user agent string. Prove to me that when you run JS, it obfuscates your screen dimensions and hardware availability. Prove to me that it obfuscates your font list and the available vendor prefixes. Prove to me that your browser adds artificial jitter to your real time clock, cause you can be tracked through that. Hell, you can be tracked through your latency, so prove to me you add random latency to your fetch calls. Prove to me you block media queries, because you can be tracked through CSS.

You are paranoid, and you don’t even understand what to be paranoid about.

hperrin ,

It’s not successful though. Like, maybe if your measure of success is that it’s usable, sure. But no other OSes have adopted it. Not even Ubuntu’s downstream OSes like Mint or Pop_OS!.

Users don’t like it, vendors don’t like it, other OS maintainers don’t like it. I’m not sure why that would be considered successful.

hperrin ,

It look me about two hours to realize that snap was the problem when I was trying to run Mastodon in a Docker container. That was the last straw before I moved to Fedora.

Snap can’t read anything outside of the /home directory, and there’s no way to fix that except changing the source code and recompiling it.

hperrin ,

Don’t forget Mir!

hperrin ,

If you don’t have a surplus of time, Docker should be your top priority. It will save you many many hours.

Hey Battery, are you OK? You've been saying 0% for 15 min now. (lemmy.world)

Running a Gigabyte U4UD, been having battery problems for months now, and the battery health only reports 50% capacity. Started playing Battlefront and got distracted and saw my battery looks like this now. Been doing this for 15 min, so either my battery is magical... or the Clevo design is flawed. Seeing how long she goes for...

hperrin , (edited )

There are 2 possibilities:

The battery is bad.

  • Replace it.

The battery is not calibrated.

  • Get it down to where the OS turns it off.
  • Turn it back on, and go into the BIOS and leave it on, unplugged. This will prevent the OS from turning the machine off so the battery can completely discharge.
  • Let the battery completely drain until the machine shuts off and won’t turn on again. If this step lasts several hours (like 3 or more hours), it’s likely this procedure will work. The longer it takes, the better the result will be. If it lasts less than 1 hour, this procedure won’t work.
  • Plug it in and leave it off.
  • Leave it plugged in until it completely charges. Probably around 8 hours to be safe.
  • After that, turn it on and check your battery health.
  • It should now work again if the battery itself isn’t bad.

Note: this procedure permanently reduces the capacity of the battery, so it should only be done as a last resort before just replacing the battery.

Nextcloud appreciation post

After months of waiting, I finally got myself an instance with Libre Cloud. I was expecting basic file storage with a few goodies but boy, this is soooo much more. I am amaze by how complete this is!!! Apps let me configure my instance to fit everything I need, my workflow is now crazy fast and I can finally say goodbye to...

hperrin ,

If you don’t like bugs, you shouldn’t be using software. Especially not software designed to do more than one thing. And extra especially not software designed to run on more than one system.

But maybe a Casio watch would be fine for you. Mine hasn’t had any bugs.

hperrin ,

Hey hey hey. That’s not fair. You also have to

sudo apt install docker.io docker-compose

hperrin ,

Webmail has been a Nextcloud feature for years. They improved it. That’s literally what you just asked for. Improving the core components.

hperrin ,

Good. Windows 11 is trash.

hperrin ,

XP is based on the NT kernel, and ME is based on the 9X kernel. They are extremely different under the hood.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Microsoft_Windows_versions

hperrin ,

That’s awesome. Immich is one of the most professional self hosted solutions I’ve used, so I love to see this.

hperrin , (edited )

Basically anything will work if you pop an Intel A380 in there and set up hardware encoding.

Honestly, a decently fast CPU with QuickSync will work just fine without a GPU. Something like a mini PC with an Intel N100 would work great.

There’s also no reason to use an NVMe RAID. Either just buy a big NVMe or use a HDD raid. Either way, have a backup solution if that’s what you’re going for, cause RAID is not backup.

As far as BSD, I have no idea if that will work. I guess if it runs Docker, you can use the Jellyfin Docker image. What makes you want to use it over Linux?

hperrin ,

I don’t think that should worry you for what you want to do with it. Ext4 or btrfs will work fine for your use case.

hperrin ,

Down in flames it is then.

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