As a professional software dev, I worked with pretty much every OS daily. My personal computer was a Windows, my work laptop was a Mac, and I ran my code on Linux so I was familiar with the things I liked and disliked about each. I also ran my own set of server with my websites, mail servers, and various research projects to learn and grow.

Then I decided it was time to order a new laptop and I didn’t want to go to Windows 11 because I felt Microsoft was going too much into features I didn’t want like Ads, more tracking, pushing AI. Don’t get me wrong, I like AI, but it was too much about forcing me to use it to justify their stock valuations.

I also was working on reducing my usage of big tech, setting up self hosted services like pi-hole, Home Assistant, starting to work my own Mint alternative. It just felt natural to get a Framework laptop and try running Linux on it.

I still have a Windows desktop for games and other things, I still use Mac at work. I still like the Mac for it’s power efficiency and it doesn’t get as hot. Linux has some annoyances here and there, like dbus locking up, or weird GNOME issues, or for a while my screen would artifact until set some kernel params, or the fact that my wifi card would crash and I had to replace it with an Intel card, but I’ll stick with it.

I actually have a double sided male A cable. I was shocked when I got it but I have this laptop cooler that has two A ports on it, presumably to allow a pass through but I’m always nervous that I’ll plug it in and fry something.

There’s two main ways of doing geo-based load balancing:

1. IP Any-casting - In this case, an IP address is “homed” in multiple spots and through the magic of IP routing, it arrives at the nearest location. This is exactly how 1.1.1.1 and 8.8.8.8 work. It works fine for stateless packets like DNS, however it has some risks for stateful traffic like HTTP.
2. DNS based load balancing. A server receives a request for “google.com”, looks at the IP of the DNS server and/or the EDNS Client IP in the DNS query packet and returns an IP that’s near. The problem is that when you’re doing Wireguard, it goes phone -> pi-hole (source IP is some internal IP) -> the next hop (e.g. 1.1.1.1 or 8.8.8.8), which sees the packet is coming from your home/pi-hole’s public IP. Thus it gets confused and thinks you’re in a different location than you really are. Neither of these hops really knows your true location of your phone/mobile device.

Of course, this doesn’t matter for companies that only have one data center.

Sorry, what do you mean route it directly? Maybe I didn’t clarify well enough.

My DNS is routed over the VPN but Internet traffic is routed directly. The problem is the load balancing is done based on where the DNS server is so say Google even though the traffic egresses directly to the internet bypassing the VPN it still goes to a Google DC near my home. Not all websites do this so its not always an issue.

Yes, but if you hit a company doing DNS based load balancing, DNS is going to return an IP that’s near to your DNS server which may not be near your device. That’s going to add to the latency.

I have Wireguard and I forward DNS and my internal traffic from my phone over the VPN to my pi-hole at home. All other traffic goes directly over the Internet, not the VPN. So that means only DNS encounters higher latency.

However, because a lot of companies do DNS based geo load balancing that means even if I’m on the east coast all my traffic gets sent to the West Coast because my DNS server is located there. That right there has the biggest impact on latency.

It’s tolerable on the same continent, but once I start getting into other continents then it gets a bit slow.

Yes fiduciary duty to the shareholder is sometimes misunderstood but this is in scope.

Everything can be securities fraud:

https://archive.is/p2YHV

Or:

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-06-26/everything-everywhere-is-securities-fraud

Or just used wired connections. This is targeting wifi cameras and doorbells.

Right, it’s a lot better to give somebody a better alternative first if you want the public on board. Build up public transit, build up regional and high speed rail and leave planes for long distances that are unfortunately suited for trains and cars (e.g. international, cross-continental, etc.)

They could and clearly they should have done that but hindsight is 20/20. Software is complex and there’s a lot of places that invalid data could come in.

I think this a problem with applications with a privacy focused user basis. It becomes very black and white where any type of information being sent somewhere is bad. I respect that some people have that opinion and more power to them, but being pragmatic about this is important. I personally disabled this flag, and I recognize how this is edging into a risky area, but I also recognize that the Mozilla CTO is somewhat correct and if we have the option between a browser that blocks everything and one that is privacy-preserving (where users can still opt for the former), businesses are more likely to adopt the privacy-preserving standards and that benefits the vast majority of users.

Privacy is a scale. I’m all onboard with Firefox, I block tons of trackers and ads, I’m even somebody who uses NoScript and suffers the ramifications to due to ideology reasons, but I also enable telemetry in Firefox because I trust that usage metrics will benefit the product.

Why is telemetry useful or why is it needed to use pi-hole to block telemetry?

Telemetry is useful to know what features your customers use. While it’s great in theory to have product managers who dogfood and can act on everyone’s behalf, the reality is telemetry ensures your favorite feature keeps being maintained. It helps ensure the bugs you see get triaged and root caused.

Unfortunately telemetry has grown to mean too many things for different people. Telemetry can refer to feature usage, bug tracking, advertising, behavior tracking.

Is there evidence that even when you disable telemetry in Firefox it still reports telemetry? That seems like a strong claim for Firefox.

Things that can be composted are usually food waste or food spoiled papers not treated with chemicals. Paper is hard to recycle because it can only recycled into lower quality paper, frequently gets contaminated, and it’s hard to seperate out from everything else.

Thus if something is compostable I believe it’s better to compost than to recycle that same material.

For those who aren’t aware. This is talking about when cell phones roam into other networks, they now encrypt the traffic back to the home provider which means law enforcement struggle to tap it (legally or illegally).

PET is privacy enhancing technologies

That would be illegal. I worked on the software deployment of these devices in a store. If we increased the price, we’d automatically give the customer the lowest price in the last several hours.

The other problem was they were extremely low powered and low bandwidth and it would have killed the battery to update more than a few times a day.

https://github.com/hakluke/how-to-exit-vim/blob/master/README.md