A software developer and Linux nerd, living in Germany. I’m usually a chill dude but my online persona doesn’t always reflect my true personality. Take what I say with a grain of salt, I usually try to be nice and give good advice, though.

I’m into Free Software, selfhosting, microcontrollers and electronics, freedom, privacy and the usual stuff. And a few select other random things as well.

  • 4 Posts
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Joined 5 years ago
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Cake day: August 21st, 2021

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  • Interesting. Thanks for the info. I’ll re-think whether I recommend it to random people around the world, then.

    In Germany it’s great. I’ve been using it for many years now. But we have some good/strong hacker organizations, digital sovereignty and privacy groups, nonprofits and some generous IT companies. Maybe it’s random private individuals in other countries and they’re not as reliable.

    Seems right now there’s something going wrong anyway. I don’t think the amount of “offline” servers is normal. And a good amount of them isn’t even offline, but still answer my DNS queries.






  • Even if you control your router/modem, they still control the other end, it connects to. And some more infrastructure along the path. So i think it depends a bit where you’re going with this. If you’re worried about them doing packet inspection, or logging IP numbers you connect to, I don’t think there’s a big difference. They could do it anywhere. And they’ll likely do it in some datacenter.

    A router interfaces with your local network, though. So in theory a router can be used to connect to your internal devices and computers and maybe you have an open network share without password protection or something like that. But we’re talking violating your constitutional rights here. It’s highly illegal in most jurisdictions to enter your home and go through your stuff.

    I’ll buy my own router because I can then configure it to my liking. And my ISP charges way too much for renting one. And what I also do is not use my ISP’s DNS service. That’d just send every domain name I open to their logfiles. Instead I use one from OpenNIC






  • Yes. My question is just, how do you participate in modern life with that? For example if you commute by train, you need a ticket. And the Deutsche Bahn tries to get rid of paper tickets. Their monthly subscription is an App now, available for Android and Apple. Do you install Waydroid and whip out your laptop once the conductor asks for your ticket? Do you also pull it out of your backpack 3 times on the platform to look up all the delays, changed platforms, trains you have to transfer to? What’s with the pkpass file for the concert, cinema, exhibition? I mean we can still print the QR codes. I do that, I have a printer at home and sometimes do the extra effort. I can’t take my laptops and tablets to concerts. And some other things will get more complicated as well. For example Shop & Go is almost impossible without a phone. You’re guaranteed to wait in line at the few cash registers left and waste an extra 10min… You’ll have to apply for a chip card to charge your EV, can’t update some of your electronic gadgets any more… And if you drive by car, how do you listen to Music and Podcasts? With an USB stick or a 12xCD changer in the trunk like in the early 2000s?



  • What I do is use externed_openai_conversation from the HACS to hook into my LLM’s OpenAI-compatible API endpoint. That one makes it available via the regular Voice Assistant stuff within Home Assistant.

    Not sure what’s happening here. The Ollama page says it doesn’t have all functionality, for example it doesn’t have sentence triggers? And weather forecast is a bit of a weird one in Home Assistant. That’s not an entity (unless you configure one manually) but a service call to fetch the forecast. Maybe your AI just doesn’t have the forecast available, just the current condition and maybe current temperature. Everything else must be specifically requested with a deliberate “weather.get_forecast” call. Maybe that service call and the specific processing is in the official Assistant, but not in the Ollama integration?




  • Thanks for the link! As a short aside for the other people here: Try not to spam developers. That usually achieves the opposite and makes them miserable, when we want them to not burn out, and write good software for us. A thumbs-up emoji is the correct reaction for the average person. Or for the pros - a code-review highlighting specific issues within the code.



  • I feel Anti-DDOS and Cloudflare as a web application firewall has traditionally been a lot of snake-oil as well. Sure there’s applications for it. Especially for the paid plans with all the enterprise functions. And all the way at the other end of the spectrum, where it serves as a means to circumvent NAT and replace DynDNS. But there’s a lot in-between where I (personally) don’t think it’s needed in any way. Especially before AI.

    From my own experience, personal blogs, websites of your local club, church, random smaller projects, small businesses… rarely need professional DDoS protection. I’ve been fine hotsing it myself for decades now. And I’m not sure if people know what they’re paying with. I mean everytime we get a Cloudflare hiccup (or AWS…) we can see how the internet has become very centralised. Half of it just goes down for an hour or so, because we all rely on the same few, big tech services. And if you’re terminating SSL there, or use it to look inside of the packets to prevent attacks, you’re giving away all information about you and your audience/customers. They don’t just get all metadata, but also read all the transferred content/data.

    It all changed a bit with the AI crawlers. We definitely need countermeasures these days. I’m still fine without Anubis or Cloudflare. I block their IP ranges and that seems to do most of the job. I think we need to pay a bit more attention to what’s really happening. Which tools we have, instead of always going with the market leader with the biggest marketing budget. Which problems we’re faced with in the first place and what tools are effective. I don’t think there’s a one size fits all solution. And you can’t just roll out random things without analyzing the situation properly. Maybe the correct answer is Cloudflare, but there’s also other way less intrusive and very effective means available. And maybe you’re not even the target of script kiddies or annoyed users. And maybe your your convoluted Wordpress setup isn’t even safe with the standard web application firewall in front.

    Anubis is an entirely different story. It’s okay concerning privacy and centralisation. It doesn’t come without downsides, though. I personally hate if that thing pops up instead of the page I requested. I don’t like how JavaScript is mandatory now to do anything on the web. And certain kinds of crawler protection contribute to the situation how we can’t google anything anymore. With all the people locking down everything and constructing walled gardens, the internet becomes way less useful and almost impossible to navigate. That’s all direct consequences of how we decide to do things.



  • Hmmh. I’m not entirely satisfied with any of them. Crowdsec is a bit too complex and involved for my taste. And oftentimes there’s no good application config floating around on the internet, neither do I get any sane defaults from my Linux distribution. Whereas fail2ban is old and eats up way too much resources for what it’s doing. And all of it is a bit too error-prone(?) As far as I remember I had several instances when I thought I had set it up correctly, but it didn’t match anything. Or it was looking for some logfile per default but my program wrote to the SystemD journal. So nowadays, I’ll double-check everything. I wish programs like sshd and webapps came with that kind of security built in in some foolproof way.