sylver_dragon

It is now functionally impossible to detect anything about the traffic or the Wi-Fi router without some serious or illegal methods.

You should really spend some time learning about WiFi signals. Tracking down rogue Access Points is a pretty common thing and having the SSID turned off does fuck all to prevent it. On the easy end, many enterprise wireless network controllers have rogue AP detection built right in and will show you a map of the location of the rogue AP. Harder, but still entirely possible, is running around with a setup just detecting the signal and triangulating it.

Welcome to AI:

Re-read what I wrote, but hop down off your high horse first, it’s obvious you weren’t able to read it clearly from up there. I’m neither promoting nor defending piracy. Quite the contrary, I’m praising the legitimate services (and Steam in particular) for understanding that competition with piracy isn’t all about money, it’s often about the quality of service. Funny enough, your own comments are actually a point in favor of this:

You ever wonder why these companies don’t operate in countries that don’t have strict piracy laws and can’t shut down sites with court orders? Because it’s still easier to pirate than face criminal charges.

Yet somehow, with a lot of time, money and effort put into shutting down piracy, the pirates were able to provide a better service. Seriously, step back from the whole “napster bad” for a moment and think about the dissonance of the situation. Large companies, pulling in millions of dollars a year, with no need to worry about law enforcement or monied interests coming after them, somehow failed to create anything resembling a functional digital marketplace. They were stuck in the physical distribution paradigm and fought tooth and nail to avoid digital distribution. At the same time, a few kids, with little money, and law enforcement trying to shut them down created a pretty good user experience. Sure, some of that is not having to worry about licensing. But, a large part of it is understanding what the users want and giving it to them.

It wasn’t until Apple came along and basically created “Napster, but legitimate” that music piracy really fell off. Netflix pulled off something similar with video (though that is rebuilding some rough edges at the moment) and Steam did it for games. Sure, piracy still exists, and it will always be a problem. But, a lot of piracy can be tamped down by having a good service available.

One thing that we have learned is that piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue. The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates. – Gabe Newell, 2011

Time and again, digital distribution platforms have proved this. Apple Music became a dominant music distribution platform at the height of Napster, LimeWire and other peer to peer sharing apps. They did it, because it was easier to just buy the tracks/albums you wanted than to dig through trackers and websites which may or may not actually have what you want. Netflix became the de-facto source for streaming movies at a time when BitTorrent was common and well known. Again, they made it easy and convenient, while not charging an arm and a leg. Steam also faced competition from BitTorrent piracy. But again, Steam made buying, downloading and running games easier than the pirates. And people are willing to pay for that convenience and not dealing with the crap which floats around the high seas.

And, so long as Steam continues to treat it’s customers right, those customers will keep coming back. And that’s the problem with Pitchford’s whole premise. Developers will go where the customers are. Sure, you’ll get the odd case of a publisher/developer doing an exclusivity deal. But even then, it’s probably limited, because the customers are on Steam. If another storefront wants to draw customers, they need to start with treating customers well. They will still face headwinds, as Steam has a large “first mover” advantage. But, success is going to start with making customers want to come back.

Ok, good luck with that! Can’t wait for this guy to start whining that he can’t find employees.

Have you considered just beige boxing a server yourself? My home server is a mini-ITX board from Asus running a Core i5, 32GB of RAM and a stack of SATA HDDs all stuffed in a smaller case. Nothing fancy, just hardware picked to fulfill my needs.

Limiting yourself to bespoke systems means limiting yourself to what someone else wanted to build. The main downside to building it yourself is ensuring hardware comparability with the OS/software you want to run. If you are willing to take that on, you can tailor your server to just what you want.

That sounds like a feature, not a bug.

The Crypto Wars have never ended. Governments dream of a world without public access to encryption and privacy. And many government attacks on encryption are done “for the children”.

I do agree with what you are saying, but for a complete beginner, and a very general overview, I didn’t want to complicate things too much. I personally run my own stuff in containers and am behind CG-NAT (it’s why I gave it a mention).

That said, if you really wanted to give the new user that advice, go for it. Rather than just nit pick and do the “but actshuly” bit, start adding that info and point out how the person should do it and what to consider. Build, instead of just tearing down.

No, but you are the target of bots scanning for known exploits. The time between an exploit being announced and threat actors adding it to commodity bot kits is incredibly short these days. I work in Incident Response and seeing wp-content in the URL of an attack is nearly a daily occurrence. Sure, for whatever random software you have running on your normal PC, it’s probably less of an issue. Once you open a system up to the internet and constant scanning and attack by commodity malware, falling out of date quickly opens your system to exploit.

Short answer: yes, you can self-host on any computer connected to your network.

Longer answer:
You can, but this is probably not the best way to go about things. The first thing to consider is what you are actually hosting. If you are talking about a website, this means that you are running some sort of web server software 24x7 on your main PC. This will be eating up resources (CPU cycles, RAM) which you may want to dedicated to other processes (e.g. gaming). Also, anything you do on that PC may have a negative impact on the server software you are hosting. Reboot and your server software is now offline. Install something new and you might have a conflict bringing your server software down. Lastly, if your website ever gets hacked, then your main PC also just got hacked, and your life may really suck. This is why you often see things like Raspberry Pis being used for self-hosting. It moves the server software on to separate hardware which can be updated/maintained outside a PC which is used for other purposes. And it gives any attacker on that box one more step to cross before owning your main PC. Granted, it’s a small step, but the goal there is to slow them down as much as possible.

That said, the process is generally straight forward. Though, there will be some variations depending on what you are hosting (e.g. webserver, nextcloud, plex, etc.) And, your ISP can throw a massive monkey wrench in the whole thing, if they use CG-NAT. I would also warn you that, once you have a presence on the internet, you will need to consider the security implications to whatever it is you are hosting. With the most important security recommendation being “install your updates”. And not just OS updates, but keeping all software up to date. And, if you host WordPress, you need to stay on top of plugin and theme updates as well. In short, if it’s running on your system, it needs to stay up to date.

The process generally looks something like:

• Install your updates.
• Install the server software.
• Apply updates to the software (the installer may be an outdated version).
• Apply security hardening based on guides from the software vendor.
• Configure your firewall to forward the required ports (and only the required ports) from the WAN side to the server.
• Figure out your external IP address.
• Try accessing the service from the outside.

Optionally, you may want to consider using a Dynamic DNS service (DDNS) (e.g. noip.com) to make reaching your server easier. But, this is technically optional, if you’re willing to just use an IP address and manually update things on the fly.

Good luck, and in case I didn’t mention it, install your updates.

“The cloud” continues to be someone else’s computer. If you put your data up there, it’s no longer your data.

While I hate ads as much as the next person, I’m having trouble getting outraged by ads in an app store. “Recommendations” are kinda par for that course. Sure, it would be nice if those “recommendations” actually reflected stuff I was interested in and not just who paid Microsoft the most for ad placement. But, I also aggressively turn off telemetry (and actually don’t use Windows at home). So, it’s not like I expect useful recommendations anyway.

At the time I stood my server up, I was supporting RHEL at work and support for docker seemed a bit spotty. IIRC, it took both setting up the docker yum repo directly, along with the EPEL repo. And every once in a while, you could end up in dependency hell from something which was at different versions between EPEL and the official repos. Ubuntu, on the other hand, had better docker support in the official repos and docker seemed more targeted at .deb distributions. So, I made the choice to go Ubuntu.

I suspect this is long since all sorted. But, I see no compelling reason to change distributions now. The base OS is solid and almost everything the server does is containerized anyway. If I were to rebuild it, I would probably use something more targeted at containerization/virtualization, like Proxmox.

I had dabbled with Linux before, both at home and work. Stood up a server running Ubuntu LTS at home for serving my personal website and Nextcloud. But, gaming kept my main machine on Win10. Then I got a Steam Deck and it opened my eyes to how well games "just worked’ on Linux. I installed Arch on a USB drive and booted off that for a month or so and again, games “just worked”. I finally formatted my main drive and migrated my Arch install to it about a week ago.

I’m so glad that I won’t be running Windows Privacy Invasion Goes to 11.

That’s funny, I have the exact same toy. It was a Father’s day gift years ago. It’s now an expensive display piece, as the battery no longer seems to hold a charge. And, as best I can tell, the battery is well sealed inside, making replacement impossible. Yet another thing I hate about our disposable culture.

If something requires an “app” and a connection to “the cloud” for basic functionality, don’t buy it. This sort of abandonment by the manufacturer will always happen. Maybe it will last longer. Maybe it will be next week. But once the company has your money, the last thing they want to do is to spend any of that money providing you with support.

My apologies, I was not familiar with the difference. I’m going to have to test this when I am back at my system. Looking at the docs, it does seem to be experimental in Linux. But it seems odd that it would turn off automagically.

That’s interesting. I’ve not had that sort of issue. On my phone (Android), my son’s laptop (Windows) and my desktop (Arch Linux) the NextCloud clients all sync perfectly and run at start up. Granted, knowing that the Linux landscape is fractured, I wouldn’t be overly surprised if the client had issues on some flavors of Linux.

If you are willing to self-host, I’ve found Nextcloud integrates well in Linux. I had been using it before I made the switch and it worked out just fine afterwards. I originally set it up to have a cloud-sync option for my phone, which didn’t mean passing everything through Google first. But, it also proved to be a handy way to sync files on my desktop as well.
It just shows up as another folder on my system and Libre Office is happy to work on files from there (with some permissions fiddling due to flatpak).