Brickfrog

This was my first thought too. Interestingly that death occurred October 2023, while this particular fired employee is accused of accessing Disney’s menu systems around June-September 2024.

Almost like this ex-employee saw the news earlier and was then inspired to try to murder someone with bad allergen info.

they want to setup a server to host a simple “contact” website

Not sure what sort of uptime/reliability your friends are expecting out of a self hosted solution but for something like that you wouldn’t need much processing power, even a Raspberry Pi can host a simple website. Not sure what to recommend offhand but there are definitely vendors in that space that sell simple DIY “contact us” form software, or I guess if you wanted to roll your own that’s an option too. I’d be more concerned about keeping it locked down/secure.

Keep in mind for the internet your friends would likely need business class internet with multiple static IPs so you can give your little DIY box its own public IP address. Many (most?) residential internet service providers do not allow self hosting websites on their network and they’d be dynamic IP anyway though you could work around that somewhat with dynamic DNS since you’re going to need to purchase a domain name and point it to somewhere anyway.

run an e-mail service (about 10 accounts for now but with possibilities of expanding it to support more)

Like others said you really don’t want to go that route unless you’re well versed in that area. It would be annoying for a business especially a new one, those emails will likely keep going into other provider’s spam folders for a good period of time. All the big mainstream email providers are notorious for not trusting new email domains / new IP addresses.

Seems easier to just go to Google Workspace / Microsoft 365 / whatever other provider you like to use, presumably the business has a business use case for reliable email among other things.

Bonus: Those cloud services can easily host simple contact forms for you so maybe that’s your all in one solution. Look into Google Forms and similar.

and to store and remote access documents.

That sounds like the above commercial cloud solutions again :)

But sure technically you could go through the extra step hosting that yourself. Depends on how the business wants to use/access this stuff, it’s really a question for them. Could be as simple as a Windows server with RDP (if they’re Windows people & just want to log into something “windows” to browse/open files) or maybe multi-user Linux with VNC (the geeks might like, maybe not so much the general Windows/Mac users). Or if you’re trying to do something web oriented maybe something like Nextcloud if you want to do all this in a web browser.

You should triple check what exactly they are expecting when it comes to remote access documents… you really don’t want to spend the time setting up something that they totally weren’t expecting and end up hating.

Jellyfin should work fine for what you’re looking for. I haven’t run it on a Pi but it should work on that. You’ll be able to play music using the web ui as well as mobile apps if that’s your thing. It can also transcode on the fly so if your current browser/device/whatever can’t play .flac directly it’ll automatically transcode the playback to .mp3 or whatever it needs to be.

There are some other self hosted music/streaming projects you could take a look at that are much more built out for music playback specifically. Look into Airsonic-Advanced or Navidrome for example - I’ve been meaning to check them out myself but haven’t gotten around to it yet.

Not sure how exactly this survey was conducted, here at the small business I work at only about 2% of the desktops/laptops are Win 11 compatible. And being a small business the owner isn’t interested in spending the $$ on new systems until absolutely necessary.

But that’s on the small business side, maybe this article is only talking about fortune 500 companies? Their results seem a bit odd to me otherwise.

I have a 13 series chip, it had some reproducible crashing issues that so far have subsided by downclocking it.

From the article:

the company confirmed a patch is coming in mid-August that should address the “root cause” of exposure to elevated voltage. But if your 13th or 14th Gen Intel Core processor is already crashing, that patch apparently won’t fix it.

Citing unnamed sources, Tom’s Hardware reports that any degradation of the processor is irreversible, and an Intel spokesperson did not deny that when we asked.

If your CPU is already crashing then that’s it, game over. The upcoming patch cannot fix it. You’ve got to figure out if you can do a warranty replacement or continue to live with workarounds like you’re doing now.

Their retail boxed CPUs usually have a 3(?) year warranty so for a 13th gen CPU you may be midway or at the tail end of that warranty period. If it’s OEM, etc. it could be a 1 year warranty aka Intel isn’t doing anything about it unless a class action suit forces them :/

The whole situation sucks and honestly seems a bit crazy that Intel hasn’t already issued a recall or dealt with this earlier.

Interesting, any you recommend or are currently using?

Should be fine, just don’t cheap out on the external drive / cable you will be using. And when you’re using something like smartctl you’ll know right away if SMART info is passing through your USB for proper testing.

I’ve done a lot of these type of scans via USB drives, honestly the more annoying part is that some USB drives do wonky things like go into sleep mode within 1-5 minutes which will disrupt any sort of scanning you had going. So with USB drive scanning I usually implement something to keep the drive alive and awake e.g. a simple infinite loop script to write a file every x seconds, or if you’re on windows you can also use KeepAliveHD.

Nowadays I buy digital music (mostly via Bandcamp but there’s also HDTracks, Qobuz, etc.) & play the music that way. Can also stream my own music library if I want via Jellyfin or other applications.

re: physical CDs, yes I’ve got a ton of those too from before you could buy digital music but have already ripped them. Haven’t had a need to touch the physical discs in years but still keep them in CD binders just in case.

Also not sure if it matters but for me I’m always living in small apartments/rooms so I absolutely avoid collecting physical items, there’s just no space for that.

True, wouldn’t be too different vs just using a VPN. You’re choosing to trust the Tribler tech and the Tribler exit node operator vs choosing to trust the VPN provider. Granted most VPN connections are going to have much better performance vs anything Tribler related.

There is a nice side effect of running an *arr stack against Tribler, even in 1 hop mode - Your Tribler node is much more easily pulling in new content into the Tribler network for other users to access afterwards without needing an exit node. Ideally it’s just one Tribler node/user needing to pull data through the exit nodes while the rest would just pull it from you and share with other nodes in-network.

Torrents over I2P work the same way. If the torrent data isn’t found within I2P and you have outproxies configured you could pull torrents from the clearnet & afterwards other I2P users just share amongst the I2P network.

That’s pretty cool, thanks for sharing! Been a while since I tried it out but last I looked Tribler’s own automation features were quite lacking so something like this helps a lot.

I was not able to download anything with more than 1 hops in between - ie it does hide your real IP address, but only uses one relay in between.

Hmm I don’t think there’s any relays at all in that configuration, unless you’re counting the exit node itself?

https://github.com/Tribler/tribler/issues/3067#issuecomment-325367047

One thing to keep in mind is that to download torrents from outside Tribler’s own network you would need to download through an exit node… not sure on the exact stats but last I tested exit nodes were only like 5-10% of the Tribler user base. For a while I tried volunteering my own VPN connection as an exit node for Tribler just to see how it went but the Tribler client kept locking up/crashing after a few days so the experiment did not go well… hopefully works better nowadays.

But, regardless, blocking any registrars that size the way you’re describing would break way more businesses and hurt the recipient provider’s own reputation.

Yeah I thought that too but when speaking with the email admin that was blocking Namecheap while figuring this out they had already decided it wasn’t worth trying to allow the 1% of valid emails vs the 99% spam emails they felt they received via Namecheap domains.

This honestly starting to sound more and more like a smear campaign

Smear against whom? I’m a Namecheap customer, just relaying my own experiences using them. Besides that quirk I like them fine as a registrar… I know it sounds dumb but I even renewed my domains there even after those email issues.

It’s fine, you don’t need to believe me as I said it’s just my own experience using Namecheap domains for emails. But you could just google around, you’ll see plenty of people discussing Namecheap & looking for solutions to block them (or solutions to successfully send emails with hem)… it’s not something I randomly made up if that’s what you’re implying.

e.g.

https://community.spiceworks.com/t/blocking-emails-based-on-registrar/816565

https://tacit.livejournal.com/608386.html

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/05/why-do-scammers-love-namecheap/

https://www.reddit.com/r/NameCheap/comments/13t6fvm/namecheaps_private_email_is_blacklisted_by/

https://www.reddit.com/r/NameCheap/comments/wlb6vp/namecheap_making_it_too_easy_to_register_domains/

https://www.reddit.com/r/NameCheap/comments/tz4mkb/my_emails_are_always_going_in_the_spam_folder_of/

https://www.reddit.com/r/NameCheap/comments/ye358x/i_am_getting_a_ton_of_spam_scams_from_namecheap/

etc.

If you’re using Google Workspace, Google will give you the appropriate DMARC, DKIM and SPF records to add to your DNS. The NS themselves should resolve the records and provide the recipient server with the values you’ve entered, thereby ensuring delivery.

Sure. But why would that matter when you’re dealing with hostile 3rd party email providers that intentionally want to blackhole all email domains at Namecheap? But yes, just to clarify I do configure DMARC/DKIM/SPF and that works great for most cases.

I’m just describing what worked for me though in truth I don’t know exactly how these hostile email providers actually determine the domain is hosted at Namecheap. My hunch is that they are using a lookup & finding the nameserver for the domain & have already blacklisted Namecheap’s default free nameserver IP addresses. For whatever reason those same hostile email providers don’t seem to be blacklisting Namecheap’s paid nameserver but I think that sort of makes sense…

The larger issue is that Namecheap is known for cheap domains that scammers/spammers tend to buy in bulk & then use to spam with. Those same scammers/spammers aren’t trying to spend extra money so they only ever use the default free Namecheap nameservers.

If you use Namecheap for email domain(s) you may want to consider also splurging for their PremiumDNS to keep your domain(s) off spam blocks at other email providers.

I help maintain some emails at Gmail/Google Workspace but the domains themselves are at Namecheap. For a while there were complaints that some emails never landed in other people’s inboxes… this led me to talk about the issue with one of the email provider recipients based in the UK & apparently they were null routing anything coming from Namecheap since they felt a lot of spam came from them. But after some experimenting I figured out their system (& probably others) were figuring out they were Namecheap domains via the default FreeDNS they use. On a hunch I switched those domains over to PremiumDNS and after that all our emails were landing in other inboxes correctly. I guess maybe it makes sense, a typical spammer buying a cheap domain at Namecheap isn’t going to splurge for the higher end DNS service for it.

I’m not saying all email providers treat Namecheap domains as spam but just be warned there definitely ones out there that do.

Nice, I was pretty sure my Pixel 7 already had hardware AV1 decoding and this app seems to confirm it.

Futurama also did their own version https://futurama.fandom.com/wiki/V-Chip

Bummer, the formfactor / specs look okay but it’s kind of a dead end if I can’t just install & use a vanilla Debian OS or similar.

With all the NAS OS options probably Synology has the best one but even there I don’t actually want to get locked into that. I doubt this UGOS software can match Synology’s let alone Debian.

If it’s any consolation it looks like UGREEN is responding to comments about installing other OSes at their kickstarter page https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/urgreen/ugreen-nasync-next-level-storage-limitless-possibilities/comments

Meanwhile no mention about their limited upload speeds.

It’s okay, killbots have a preset kill limit. Just send wave after wave of human soldiers at them until they shut down.

Interesting, though I suspect that is a false positive, it’s happened before with that software

https://rejetto.com/forum/index.php?topic=9037.0

Most likely because it is a self-contained web server executable? That sort of software would seem suspicious and similar to other sorts of virus/malware.

Granted I have not used it in a while but I’d be surprised if it were true, their forums and github would be full of reports of malware.

https://github.com/rejetto/hfs

That aside you have plenty of other options to use if you prefer to use something else.

Syncthing, Resilio Sync, or one of those browser based p2p file sends e.g. https://file.pizza or similar.

If both p2p ends know how to use torrents then creating a simple torrent to share to the other peer would work fine. But that requires slightly more IT competence especially if someone needs to open a port forward (ideally you would make sure you have your own port forwarded so the other party doesn’t have to worry about this).

If you’re doing this more than once it might be worth setting up a simple server e.g. HFS is a nice open source/free HTTP file server, been a while since I used it but it still seems to be active https://www.rejetto.com/hfs/