Seefra 1

It’s their parent’s, OP is worried about them and you’re telling OP to abandon them?

Crypto is mostly useful for extralegal activities.

You can technically donate for some services with it, but to acquire crypto you need to either KYC to some exchange which isn’t not only a massive pain, but there are very serious privacy implications with it. Or you can acquire it via other means which means you will be buying it at high prices.

Also note that most cryptocurrencies aren’t anonymous, every transaction is public in the block chain and can be traced back to you.

So if you really know what you’re doing you can use privacy coins as a tool to transfer money anonymously, but that’s pretty much it’s only real world application.

Also, from what I understand (I’m no cryptographer) cryptocurrencies use public key cryptography so quantum computers may in the future break all cryptocurrencies and well deanonymise all previously anonymous privacy coins transactions stored in the blockchains.

Visual inspection, smell and then taste.

Delta Chat doesn’t support calls, same with Briar so I haven’t tried them since calls are as important as messages for me.

Like many said, signal is centralised and requires a phone number.

Meaning it’s not anonymous and the server owners can technically sell your metadata, not the content of the messages but who talks to who, what time, the length of the chat/call etc.

Either-way having to use a phone number to register an account, for me is not acceptable for several reasons besides privacy and metadata.

On top of that, the server side of signal isn’t free software (as in freedom), which means that the whole program requires non-free (as in freedom not beer) network services in order to work. Which isn’t acceptable for free software advocates.

Alternatives:

Simplex: If you don’t require voice calls there are more options available there are many text messages, but very few support calls, which for me is a critical feature.

In theory Simplex is the best, it’s e2ee, quantum resistant, each chat (message queue) is it’s own “account”, each “account” is just a private key, and you can switch servers with the tap of a bottom, it also supports private routing, which from what I understand is like some sort of onion routing between simplex servers.

Hosting your own server is also extremely easy, (tho note that running your own server can actually be detrimental to privacy depending on your threat model), supports calls, group chats and all the features I would ever need.

Unfortunately at least for me and my contacts, SimpleX it’s terribly buggy, specially on phone, literally tonight I missed the opportunity to be with a friend because I only saw the message one hour late.

Very often messages just stop being received until the app is restarted, usually I have my friend send me a message via other (centralised) app in order to warn me that he messaged me, I also do the same for him. After restarting the app it usually works fine for a while until it does it again. And needs restarting again.

On top of it, it’s taking more and more time to get the first message when in background even during normal operation, tho I blame Samsung for this one and not Simplex, and understand that Simplex doesn’t use push notifications for improved privacy, but it has become a real problem, what used to take 5 minutes now sometimes takes more than half an hour. Maybe my phone is overloaded, idk.

Calls could be improved too, takes several tries for it to actually work, and it doesn’t help when the other person calls me back and I call them at the same time.

On top of it, the volume of a call seems very quiet compared to a normal phone call and it’s very hard to hear the other person, I’m guessing a simple compressor DSP could fix this.

Unfortunately also has been news of Simplex planning to enshittify the app with cryptocurrency, something that I politically and morally oppose.

Session:

I’ve used it for a month years ago, before I knew about SimpleX, whatever technical merits it may or may not have, (and from what I understand it’s privacy is still below SimpleX) it relies on some cryptocurrency network in the background, so I won’t use it. Self-hosting it also seemed to me no easy task, but I could be wrong.

Jami:

Never got it to work.

Matrix:

I haven’t tried Matrix yet, I think I read long ago that calls aren’t e2ee tho that may have changed now. I also read that Matrix leaks a lot of metadata which can be a problem. Maybe not if you self-host, but self-hosting comes with it’s own privacy problems. Maybe I should research it again and try to self-host it and see how it goes.

So as bad as Signal is, I can’t give you a working alternative, I put all with Simplex despite all the bugs but I don’t think most people are willing to go though it, however if you (and your contacts) have a high end phones maybe it works better. But it’s not something I can recommend.

“I have a hammer and I hate it’s not hammering, any cool ideas involving nails?”

You see, I have the exact same problem as you, I just can’t stand seeing hardware going unused. Specially computer hardware that deprecates. But I think before thinking “what can I do with this hardware” you should think “do I have a need or a problem that can be solved with this hardware?” And if the awnser is “no” then maybe consider selling the GPU or giving it to some friend who needs it.

My Jellyfin works without a GPU, just my old 2nd generation i3 is enough to realtime transcode video to my phone, maybe I would need upgrade of I had more users, but I’m it’s only user.

Do you have multiple users on your server where you require GPU acceleration, if not there’s no much reason to use GPU accell anyway (which is usually trickier to setup)?

Still reporposing the computer to use as a server seems to be a good idea, because I at least can’t stand the nightmare of using USB hard drives, I’ve hard really bad experiences with those lousy cables and connection. But if you do that. That leaves you with another problem. What to do with the raspberry pi?

Also, I just recently also built a new PC had the same problem of not knowing what to do with my laptop, I came to conclusion that the best thing I can do with it is to run background chat applications on it and maybe web browser via waypipe. So it just looks like a window on my main PC and this way I have ram on my new PC that I may need for some heavy workloads like blender rendering.

I have never build a machine like that, so I guess I can’t help you much, but like another comment said, it seems like a pain to maintain, I usually have trouble with sata cables losing contact, with that setup there are many cables keen to lose contact.

As for ram I wouldn’t worry about it at all, unless you use zfs 4GB should be more than enough, even 2 or less. Ram is expensive now, so you may want to consider using as little as possible unless you already have it laying around. Does truenas use zfs? If so you may want to use other fs like btrfs or test how well zfs works with the ram you have. I’m not sure zfs is worth the trouble. I wouldn’t buy extra ram.

As for CPU I don’t think it matters much, but like I said, I have never tried your setup. But even an ancient sandy bridge should work fine if it’s just a personal has, with HDDs even with encryption. Works fine on my nas.

Also, if you have access to free old computers you can try a ghetto setup where each each computer only handles 4 drives and then you join them together on a master computer either via nbd or nvme other Ethernet (works on sata too). But that seems like an even bigger pain to maintain and increases your power consumption by a lot.

Yes, security concerns are always reasonable, specially when you’re switching to different software.

Generally speaking most Gnu/Linux distributions are safer than your average windows install, mostly because on windows you download .exe files from developer’s website. Which exposes you to a higher probability of a man in the middle attack between your computer and the website or simply you clicking a fake clone of the website on the search engine.

Installing software on windows is scary, I tend to double check the link from on the search engine, and then on wikipedia and check the wikipedia change history too to make sure the link on wikipedia wasn’t edited.

Even if the link is legit it’s possible that the developer simply forgot to pay for the domain, someone snatched it and is now serving a malicious version. Or simply the server may be compromised.

On Gnu/Linux on the other hand, usually software is installed via the repositories which are signed by the mantainer’s pgp key. That means that even if your server is compromised the package manager wont install the software if the signatures don’t match, if they do match, it’s still possible but very unlikely that the software was compromised somewhere in the supply chain, from the original developer to the maintainer, but as soon as detected the software is quickly removed and it’s usually on your distro’s security notices.

Gnu/Linux is also generally more secure because when you update the system (and you should do it frequently), it updates also all installed applications (assuming you installed them via the repo). So while on windows you still have that same old version of a PDF reader or a video player since you first installed it that may have a known exploit (yes, I know chocolatey exists, but I’m talking about a standard install), on Gnu/Linux the applications are usually up-to-date.

Of course a system is only as secure as the weakest link, if one application is insecure that may compromise the whole system, that’s where you should read hardening guides, you can sandbox applications with bubblewrap or firejail, for sandoxing applications, you can install linux-hardened if you have an arch-based distro, between other things that I never got my head around like SELinux or apparmor.

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That I agree, you’re absolutely right, but I still can’t stop being glad that the tyrant is finally dead. Unfortunately like you said things are only going to get worse to the Iranian people.

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Well, first while raid is great, it’s not a replacement for backups. Raid is mostly useful if uptime is imperative, but does not protect against user errors, software errors, fs corruption, ransomware or a power surge killing the entire array.

Since uptime isn’t an issue on my home nas, instead of parity I simply have cold backups which (supposedly) I plug in from time to time to scrub the filesystems.

If a online drive dies I can simply restore it from backup and accept the downtime. For my anime I have simply one single backup, but or my most important files I have 2 backups just in case one fails. (Unfornately both onsite)

On the other hand, for a client of mine’s server where uptime is imperative, in addiction to raid I have 2 automatic daily backups (which ideally one should be offsite but isn’t, at least they are in different floors of the same building).

The “farmer” doesn’t actually do any farming, they just own the means of production and exploit the farmers.

The undocumented immigrants aka the “criminals” are the real farmers.

Apart from open WRT, there’s also opensense or opn Sense which let’s you turn any old computer into a router as long as it has 2 network cards.

You may also need a switch and a WiFi AP tho, so at that point you better get an openWRT router. Just leaving this info here in case it’s useful.

No, it’s not possible, at most they could cause the battery to overheat and either expand or “explode” just enough so you notice it and take the phone out of your pocket without causing any harm.

As for cars, there’s potentially enough energy in there for a real explosion.

Do these get fixes within the old number or are they neglected?

From what I understand (and I may be wrong) at least on debian the fixes get backported if it’s viable to backport, when that happen they increment the number after the dash ex. 1.2.3-1 to 1.2.3-2. If backporting the fixes isn’t viable they backport the package.

I couldn’t find information relating to mint, it seems that packages.linuxmint.com website is broken atm. But ubuntu seems to have backported fixes on their VLC 3.0.21 package 11 times, the latest one in 29 Aug 2025 https://changelogs.ubuntu.com/changelogs/pool/universe/v/vlc/vlc_3.0.21-11/changelog

Well, supposedly Debian stable backports security updates and bug fixes. So should it’s derivates.

There’s an issue where this isn’t always the case and small bugs are patched upstream without making the news, but something as big as remote code execution from a media file it’s something that doesn’t go unnoticed. That’s usually big news.

On another topic, I used to be a proponent of rolling release for better security, but the recent xz supply chain attack made me question that wisdom.

I’m probably the most security paranoid person you may find here on Lemmy, I’m the kind of person who actually checks the gpg signatures of software I download, and refuses to use anything like AUR.

And I never worried one time in my life about exploits in media files, it’s just extremely unlikely that between the time a 0day is discovered, and your system is updated (you do update frequently, right?), that torrent is going to exploit some player or media library.

Last time I heard of something like that, it was like 10 years ago, a gstreamer 0day that got quickly patched.

Executable files aren’t going to execute themselves. If you don’t chmod +x them they shouldn’t execute at all even if you click them. I guess it can depend on your system.

I am much more concerned about internet facing applications like a web browser or torrent client.

Even if you adblock and sponsorblock. Advertisement is everywhere. It’s on tv series and films as product placements. It’s on every bus stop, metro station, in the form of billboards, every casually on TV even muted still showing ads on the corner of your eye, or just company logos, even every single product you buy comes with a damn logo on it.

Bought a new pair of shoes, new headphones, new pair of fucking glasses? Which you need to wear everyday and can’t see without them? Enjoy being a walking billboard for everyone who looks at you.

This drives me crazy and yes, I do hide most logos I can with a permanent marker, and even then it’s not enough.