This makes me sad, that we can’t engage in civil discussion about this. Why did you assume and not ask questions? Be curious, not judgmental.

To me it’s a question of laws. The laws of the U.S. at least somewhat constrain the people of my own country, and can prevent them from working against their own citizens. Like me.

Please be kind when replying.

As a US citizen, I prefer services that US consumer protections could apply to. (While we still have them, ahem.) I know that Chinese laws will not protect me from things a Chinese business does in China.

Don’t worry, you aren’t missing much. That paragraph was kind of goofy anyway.

Think of a Seedbox as a cloud service provider with convenience features focused on enabling piracy, by keeping the hardware in a jurisdiction that doesn’t care what you pirate and giving you one-click easy installation methods for apps that make piracy simple. But without going so far as “Thank you for your payment, download these specific media files here.”

You debatably have to be a techie. But by techie standards it’s very easy to use.

If you really hate piracy, I suppose you could pay for one for a month, get the identity of who you paid, and use one of the apps to host a shell script that listens on one of the few public ports you have access to, that answers every incoming connection with “this is a seed box operated by ABC, with cards payments accepted by LMNOP Inc in Athens, Greece.”

But the most common usage is running packaged software they let you run (like BT clients you can remote-control, sickchill, radarr, sonarr, Plex, etc.) or remote desktops or shells. Usually implemented as docker containers.

Scrooge McDuck is an employee of his companies too.

BBS software. Nerds always find a way. I guess if I have to be a sysop now…

They would enforce the rules of their payment card network. Once they’re aware of a violation they take action. If they become aware of a series of violations they take further action to ensure the merchant complies in the future.

Apologies, I did the American thing. Checks, which get turned into X9.100 files, which are just digital versions of bags of bundles of checks, with check images that were TIFF images in CCITT T.6 encoding.

I don’t know if you’re being serious, but I can confirm from my time at as a developer at a banking software company, we didn’t use a hard RT OS even for like Mosler or Hitachi high speed check sorters. Just fast C++ code. (On Windows XP still, when I left in 2016)

(Work load is basically: batch of checks is loaded into an input hopper, along with check sized pieces of paper which are headers and footers, machine rapidly scans MICR lines and they go flying towards output pockets, and our code has something like 20 ms to receive the MICR data and pass back a sorting decision.)

I’m surprised I’m the first comment saying this, but all I see is a user who needs help expressing their needs but who is not getting that help. Sure they don’t have our experience with decomposing problems and anticipating technical issues, but that’s normal and expected.

Agreed, one of those “technically correct but deliberately missing the point” statements. Not sure why you’re so heavily downvoted so I want to explain why I support your statement.

The original statement doesn’t suggest they fail to understand words are constructed for sharing meaning, it asserts that the statements don’t communicate anything useful because the speaker made them up.

The statement is wrong, it needs a response, but “all words are made up” is not a useful response. It’s technically correct but fails to meet the speaker halfway by understanding their position and building towards it. See also: “all lives matter.” Technically correct but not useful, and deliberately avoids trying to understand the speaker’s position.

My first full time job was for Ameristar Casino Council Bluffs. I can say this: see all that fancy stuff? They built it with your money. They don’t need more of it.

I think image generators in general work by iteratively changing random noise and checking it with a classifier, until the resulting image has a stronger and stronger finding of “cat” or “best quality” or “realistic”.

If this classifier provides fine grained descriptive attributes, that’s a nightmare. If it just detects yes or no, that’s probably fine.

I have an iPhone and a gl.inet gl-e750 portable cell router, and my SIM card stays in the router. I don’t actually restrict my phone the way you’re talking about, but this gives me vpn to my home network without needing the vpn running on each client device. And if I wanted to block connections to big tech company services, I could do that.

Not really, it’s been pretty effortless. Every couple months I have to make sure my renewed LetsEncrypt certs really got imported, but I don’t think I’ve had to intervene manually for anything in a long time.

I do, and I agree about their utility. My users and aliases are in OpenLDAP but it’s pretty easy to add new ones.

Separate accounts are preferable if you’re actually going to be responding to messages. I’ve had some embarrassing encounters where I’ve given an alias to a business that I didn’t realize was going to actually use it for real email conversations with a human. By default roundcube web mail lets you hit reply anyway and the reply goes out with your real address, which can lead to confusion.

I host my own for mspencer dot net, used this 15-ish step walkthrough from linuxbabe dot com. Only maybe three instances of spam in two years, gmail and outlook receive my messages just fine, etc. (Successful spammers were using legitimate services, and those services took action when notified. Greylist delays emails by a few minutes but it’s extremely effective against most spammers because they never come back to retry messages after a few minutes, while legitimate senders will.) I don’t know if I would accept blanket advice against self hosting.

Fundamentally if your mail server can see the addressee, it can see the content. SMTPS encrypts both in the same channel. So at the point where you accept messages and store them in a mailbox, the messages have to be readable.

Encrypting them at rest isn’t something I currently do, but if you’re going to later serve those messages to an email client that expects to receive clear text, your server needs both the keys and the messages. They can be stored in different places.

Most of your needs could be met with full disk encryption on the box hosting Dovecot. If you’re worried about being compelled to decrypt, there’s always the deck of cards trick: The pass phrase for full disk encryption consists of a memorized portion plus the letters and numbers of the top N cards in this deck of cards you keep by the server. If someone were to shuffle that deck of cards, and the server were powered down, the encrypted volume would be impossible to recover.

I’m eager to learn what other Dovecot tricks people can recommend to improve security.

Hmm, you have uncovered a problem with both of our ideas. Steam’s leverage is reduced after they have deposited sales proceeds, and is gone after the publisher isn’t selling games on the platform any longer.

(I’m griping about Rockstar specifically but my point is still flawed in the general case.)

Deceased users’ estates still haven’t agreed to the new terms, have they?

Now punish publishers who try to change the terms of sale after sale. “Want to play the single player game you bought a decade ago? Agree to this new arbitration clause.”