Notices by Jess👾 (jesstheunstill@infosec.exchange)

Spicy take:

Normal people shouldn't self host.

From an energy use perspective, the users per watt are WAY higher in a data center.

People are already awful at running patches and doing security updates.

OMG are people awful at doing backups.

From an ewaste POV, consumer electronics just don't have a very long lifespan, fail more frequently, are rarely upgradable, and easily broken. Enterprise grade servers in a data center are better.

Hosted services actually have a SOC to monitor what the fuck is going on and investigate unusual things. An individual normal user would never notice their self hosted server being popped for forever, and we already have far too many zombies.

Sure, megacorps aren't trustworthy stewards of key internet services like email either. But telling everyone they need yet another home appliance, but one you're going to have to fuck with several hours per month to keep running.

Dynamic DNS suck balls, IPv4 is running out, hosting shit being a NAT and reverse proxies and shch is its own thing, and lots and lots of people don't have very good home internet links.

Up front cost - yes, I know people "pay" for their social media and email with their privacy and advertising. But that means that saying they need to spend several hundred on a whole new computer and find a place to put it or rent a VPS or ...

Fact of the matter is, some sort of SaaS setup for web services IS the right solution for 97% of users. Scolding people for being abused by unregulated tech companies isn't solving anything. The right solution is to make people become more aware of the intentional and malicious enshittified bullshit techbros are cramming down their throat, and lobby the government to strengthen regulations.

I mean I'm not saying nobody should self host. But that's something you do because you want to. It's like the tech equivalent of sewing your own clothes or something.
@smolbrain @itsVague

I'm once again begging people to stop blaming the victims of shitty techbro nonsense. Switching cost is never zero.

@RickiTarr I'm assuming that's just some clickbait word salad. It doesn't actually have to be advertising anything other than making people curious enough to click on the link.

RE: https://infosec.exchange/@kevinrothrock/115345860829122802

Maybe the Nobel prize committee could pull an Odysseus, and say they didn't award a Nobel Peace Prize at all this year. Because they thought Trump said "Nobody deserves the Peace Prize more than me!"

@GreenRoc 100%. I especially hate it when they bundle user interface and user experience or app settings or changes in alongside security updates. They're really sitting there and saying "want your thing to stay safe? Well, guess you're going to have to get used to whatever new shit we're going to cram into the device. Too bad.

I wish there was a PayPal, Venmo, etc that didn't suck for paying for things online when I don't want to trust some random little website with my card into.

After nearly going bankrupt once, and living through several hurricanes, and being on unpaid disability leave for months, decided never again, so emergency funds and supplies keep building in good years "just in case".

The silver lining of living much of your adult life with what many would consider risk averse paranoia is that it may actually save your ass when you need it.

I see a frustrating amount of folks living paycheck to paycheck on a 6 figure salary...

(Okay yes I know some cities are bonkers cost of living, but scale the numbers appropriate for "you're making far above average for your area")

My one biggest piece of advice for anyone finally getting a job with a "good" salary. Keep living like you're poor until you can survive a long time on emergency savings.

I dearly wish any user impacting change in security/compliance/IT policies had to come with a cost estimate of how much additional work you're putting on others, vs how much risk is being reduced.

Refusing to pay taxes is an act of rebellion, so not something to do unless you have enough other people with enough power to actually make it an effective rebellion.
@evan @mpjgregoire

Depends somewhere on how you're defining the social contract.

At its most base form, a government is just paying protection money to a mafia. You pay them because they keep other mafias from fucking with you too much, and at least some amount a vested interest in not fucking their people up TOO much since they're the ones who make the money that they get to take as protection money.

So basically, until and unless you have another wannabe government group ready and able to step up and say they'll fight to be your government and work to protect you instead of the current one, you pay the government you got because they have force of violence to compel it from you.

@evan @mpjgregoire

Legit, a super cool gay ANITFA patch design. From the 1940s ANTIFA.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supreme_Headquarters_Allied_Expeditionary_Force

psst Non-binary people don't owe you androgyny.

These days, you could have a man with swastika tattoos on his face, a leader of a violent white supremacist terrorist group, on live television, scream "I do this on behalf of my love for Donald J Trump, the one who will bring the Third Reich" and shoot a Republican political figure, and the fascist social media and news outlets would still rant "How dare the left do this? It's all ANTIFA's fault, now we must begin a purge of all Democrats."

A pretty cool thing about the Fediverse:

It will still be around in a decade. Even two decades.

Usenet still exists. IRC still exists. Email still exists. When you build platforms on open protocols and standards, it doesn't actually matter what corporations try and do to enshittify it. So long as there are people who are still willing to run instances, and users who still want to talk to one another without going through some corporation's platform, it'll still be here.

A ray of hope for trans rights.

There are more trans people, including trans kids existing loudly and proudly out of the closet then there have been any time in human history.

There are openly trans teachers and lawyers and engineers and scientists and politicians and diplomats actors, directors, musicians, and gag billionaires.

Within just the last 25 years, trans people have gone from only existing as a joke or sex workers or by hiding themselves in stealth to having multiple states and countries who have literally encoded trans rights into law.

Sure, states didn't have bathroom bans. But they didn't need it. It was just common knowledge that if you got caught in the wrong bathroom as anyone who wasn't cis ...

Informed consent was an impossible pipe dream. There were only maybe a few handful of clinics in the whole world who would dream of helping trans kids with any sort of puberty blockers or HRT, and even then, almost entirely off the books and under the table.

But we're here. We're loud. We're growing. We're only losing ground that was never really ours. It was only ours if we played the cis game of being the proper sort of super binary trans, and putting ourselves in serious danger to do even that.

How far will the reactionaries go? Who the hell knows. But there's more trans allies than ever. Hell, there's major politicians in many many countries all over the world fighting for our rights. That ain't nothin. In the long enough run, we're going to win. Will it be my generation? Zoomers? Gen Alpha? Idk. But we'll win.

A periodic reminder:

A lot of ergonomic repetitive stress injuries are cumulative. Take care of your hands and wrists and back and shit.