Ideally you want something that gracefully degrades.

So, my media library is hosted by Plex/Jellyfin and a bunch of complex firewall and reverse proxy stuff… And it’s replicated using Syncthing. But at the end of the day it’s on an external HDD that they can plug into a regular old laptop and browse on pretty much any OS.

Same story for old family photos (Photoprism, indexing a directory tree on a Synology NAS) and regular files (mostly just direct SMB mounts on the same NAS).

Backups are a bit more complex, but I also have fairly detailed disaster recovery plans that explain how to decrypt/restore backups and access admin functions, if I’m not available (in the grim scenario, dead - but also maybe just overseas or otherwise indisposed) when something bad happens.

Aside from that, I always make sure that all of all the selfhosting stuff in my family home is entirely separate from the network infra. No DNS, DHCP or anything else ever runs on my hosting infra.

It would be better to have this as a FUSE filesystem though - you mount it on an empty directory, point the tool at your unorganised data and let it run its indexing and LLM categorisation/labelling, and your files are resurfaced under the mountpoint without any potentially damaging changes to the original data.

The other option would be just generating a bunch of symlinks, but I personally feel a FUSE implementation would be cleaner.

It’s pretty clear that actually renaming the original files based on the output of an LLM is a bad idea though.

The DJI Fly app is probably considerably worse for security/privacy than most Google apps. DJI has a storied history of sketchy practices in their apps: see here.

Google also won’t allow DJI to distribute their apps through the Play Store, because of DJI’s weird insistence on being able to push arbitrary binaries to customers’ phones entirely free of any third party vetting.

GrapheneOS’ sandbox hardening might help somewhat, but I’d recommend avoiding DJI products if you can. If you must use DJI Fly, prefer to use it in a different profile where it can’t touch any of your personal apps. Tough when they are singularly the best drone manufacturer for videography though.

OwnTracks is good for location sharing/logging and is open source. Ideally requires you to run your own MQTT server though.

If not using your own server, you can use payload encryption to protect your location data from being snooped by other users. (But ideally you should just run your own server, it’s pretty easy.)

At least in some circumstances, the risks of sharing your DNA include having children…

It’s a risk that I’m willing to take, personally.

But tbf I do make sure that I own my primary mail domain.

Website hosting and such thing? Njal.la all the way. Never had an issue with them.

Edit: oof, clearly some irrational hate for njal.la here. I state my personal preference and get downvoted… is this reddit now?!

I would’ve been delighted to receive a managed Ethernet switch as a kid! I hope it came with some useful SFP modules and a USB serial adapter 😜

Tl;dr: TPMs are very unlikely to make your privacy better or worse, but they could definitely be abused by a company like MS to make end users’ experiences worse. They could also be used for significant security and privacy gains… they’re a tool.

The TPM can be used to provide a cryptographic binding between aspects of your system’s configuration and a unique key which is resident within the TPM (a process called “attestation”). It can also generate secondary keys that are associated with the base key, and use those to do cryptographic operations like encryption/decryption and authentication.

Telemetry wise, the TPM’s only utility might be to “prove” that the data sent from your PC wasn’t tampered with. That said, I don’t think MS is actually doing that, and they don’t need to in order to be incredibly invasive in their telemetry.

The (imo) worst way in which a TPM might be abused in a user-hostile sense is to detect if the OS has been modified by the user, or if an installation isn’t legitimate, etc. That could be used to disable certain features if you try to install unauthorised software, dual boot Linux or whatever. This would be similar to the smartphones of today, which can for example disable access to banking apps if jailbroken/rooted.

TPMs (>2.0 at least) otherwise have the potential to realise a significant improvement in security and privacy for users, if used correctly. They can be used for encryption and credentials that are bound in hardware and therefore practically impossible to steal. And can detect hardware tampering and potentially foil Evil Maid attacks. Imagine if your login sessions for various websites were bound to your hardware, such that a dodgy extension could never steal your cookies.

I found it much more barebones in my tinkering. It doesn’t seem to support pulling via SSH (and definitely doesn’t support signing commits). Configuration options appear extremely limited, both in documentation and the UI.

It looks nice, but I don’t really see the point to it when Gitea Actions is now a thing. Gitea is a more mature product, and is similarly fast and lightweight.

Edit: s/Gitea/Forgejo. Gitea has moved to a for-profit model since I made this comment.

This is why self hosted to me means actually running it on my own hardware in a location I have at least some control of physical access.

That said, an ISP could perform the same attack on a server hosted in your home using the HTTP-01 ACME challenge, so really no one is safe.

HSTS+certificate pinning, and monitoring new certificates issued for your domains using Certificate Transparency (crt.sh can be used to view these logs) is probably the only way to catch this kind of thing.

Of course they do, but it isn’t the ISP’s job to do so. I believe that is the point that the EFF is making here.

Censorship sometimes needs to happen to protect people, but it should be conducted by website owners/platforms and government authorities – on each end of the information transaction, not in transit by an ISP.

Njalla is mine. I like the privacy protections they offer.

Are CloudFlare, Amazon or Microsoft any better? Google at least take security (if not privacy) very seriously.

In general it seems bad to have any huge profit-driven organisation exercising significant control over open standards, but I do think that Google is lesser than many of the other evils.