I think the product that speaks the most about the camera was the Snapchat Spectacles. Snapchat did everything they could to position it strictly as a fun, party-oriented camera that didn’t try to hide what it was but leaned into the fun ways to use it.

And they still died out after the initial hype. Which I think is most telling because, like, here’s this product with the most positive take you could possibly have on “glasses with cameras” and people still didn’t want it. So wth makes Google think the creepy no-fun version will catch on?

In the Yggdrasil network any node can act as relay for other nodes. So you can get to unreachable nodes via reachable nodes, as long as there’s a possible path through the network graph.

The community also maintains a few nodes with static public addresses, specifically so they can be used as entry points into the network.

Each node has two addresses, one used for communications inside the network and one used for peering. The inner address is IPv6 allocated randomly from the reserved 0200::/7 range and never changes (unless you wipe and re-configure the node). The peering address needs to be public and static, yes, but can be either IPv4 or IPv6 fwiw.

You only need to peer with one such public and static address to be able to reach other nodes, as long as there’s a path to them among all the peers in the graph. If you’re taking advantage of the larger Yggdrasil network that is taken care of by the public community nodes. If you want to set up your own separate network then you need to set up at least one node with a public static address. But you can also use a domain name and do DDNS for example.

If you’re using ipv6 supposedly you don’t need to forward ports.

You don’t need to forward ports but you still need to maintain network rules for each port so you can get through the firewall. And those rules need to know IPs. And if your public IPv6 prefix changes you need to update the rules.

So, really, there’s no advantage over forwarding, on the contrary, since forwarding uses private IPs which you can make static so they never change.

Some router software like OpenWRT attempts to work around this issue by using a special “minus netmask” shorthand syntax for the network rules, for example ::2/-64 means you want to reach [whatever the dynamic prefix is right now]::2. Which assumes you’ve set things up so that a certain machine always gets static suffix ::2, which means that machine does not do MAC anonymization and can use DHCPv6, which excludes all Android and iOS devices. So it can be used with Linux servers for example but with a lot of caveats.

Keep in mind they can only “traverse NAT” if you have a publicly reachable node available, otherwise peering can’t complete. The Yggdrasil network maintains a handful of public nodes for this purpose, or you can set one up yourself on a VPS etc. But you still need to deal with this.

It’s a mesh VPN using exclusively IPv6 addresses in the reserved 0200::/7 range.

By default a new node connects to nothing. You add other nodes explicitly, typically they’d be your own devices, but the network also maintains a few public nodes that are used to facilitate communications across the entire Yggdrasil network.

When a node is connected it raises a tunnel network interface and routes 0200::/7 through it. With the usual caveats (it will pick up any service that binds to all interfaces etc.)

Each node can act as relay to reach nodes that aren’t directly connected – the network will compute the shortest path in that case – and this can be used to reach nodes behind CGNAT as long as there’s a path that contains at least one publicly reachable node.

All connections are end-to-end encrypted with the keys of the two end-nodes involved in it, so the relay nodes cannot eavesdrop.

That’s about it. Anything else (DNS, routing, firewalls) is the responsibility of each node.

While I also started with Nginx Proxy Manager, I would urge anybody to look into Caddy eventually. Especially someone who happens to be comfortable editing their own compose files. Very flexible and simple configuration.

Also, to create the reverse proxy, the most simple setup is to install Caddy and write something like this to its config file (Caddyfile):

a.myfakedomain.com {
  reverse_proxy 10.0.0.1:1000
}
b.myfakedomain.com {
  reverse_proxy 10.0.0.2:2000
}

I second this. Linux by its nature is very customizable. Once you start asking about it you’re entering the rabbit hole. There’s no way to help someone navigate that if they don’t know what they want – and they wouldn’t, yet, as a beginner.

So I know that recommending the same handful of distros to beginners is trite and has been done do death… but really it’s all you can do until they get a bit more accustomed to the culture, and the community, and they see what’s possible and so on.

As a counterexample look at the people holding on to Windows for dear life and how little weight any Linux suggestion carries with them. You can’t get through to someone who doesn’t want to hear it.

Be that as it may, FOSS tends to be a meritocracy and it takes some skill to contribute to it. Contributors are driven by seeking solutions to their own problems. There’s no incentive to cater to any particular user demographic. There’s a big gap between those programmers in their ivory towers and any practical application.

That gap is filled by commercial interests. And in this particular market, the PC desktop, there’s a company called Microsoft with huge resources and a vested interest in not allowing any competition. For 20 years now nobody has managed to break their stranglehold on the PC desktop. Companies like Apple and Google managed to bypass the problem by creating completely new, alternative platforms.

The elitism of a handful of nerds is the least of the issues preventing Linux on the desktop.

Humanity actually needs an easy to use open operating system.

Humanity already has Linux, and it’s taken over pretty much every computing sector.

Does it have to be “easy”? I think that’s a matter for the desktop interfaces and whoever is choosing to support them, not Linux itself.

An OS is serious business and requires a certain level of savvy from its contributors. And conversely people who are not contributors should not shape its development.

Besides, people who aren’t computer-savvy aren’t going to turn savvy just because of an easy installer. If you cater to the lowest common denominator you’d just be dragging the whole thing down.

Depends what kind of newbie. To the right kind of nerd a well-organized technical installer is not a deterrent, on the contrary.

I don’t think people realise that most Linux distros had arcane install processes not unlike Arch until around 2000, when a few of them started introducing simplified graphical installers (Corel, Caldera and Red Hat’s Anaconda I think were most popular). Debian for instance only switched to graphical in 2006 with Etch beta 3 (although tbf they did have a text-mode UI before that).

Very, very carefully.

Whatever they need. Alphabet Inc. is made up of a dozen companies with thousands of products. There’s always something that can benefit from such insight.

The location data that Google collects through Android phones, alone, is mind-blowing. Just from your daily movement they can figure out where you live, where you work, shop, eat, drink, vacation. Indirectly they can figure out who your friends and relatives are, your partners, extra interests and hobbies etc. They sell all that to advertisers, there’s a reason why so much of Alphabet revenue comes from ads. Then there’s more complex patterns like traffic for example that they can sell to city planners and so on. And that’s just location data.

It works but it’s subject to the same limits – it can only find your most recent comments via the Reddit API. But you can upload files from your data request to help it find all your comments.

All DNS servers have “fast record changes”. They publish the records instantly on their own servers (if they don’t they’re a crappy service). But they can’t force other DNS server to update, each server does that at its own pace. In theory they have to obey the TTL for each record but in practice many cache the information and update much slower than the TTL.

You need to have “address or nationality in one of European Union states or Island, Liechtenstein or Norway” to buy an .eu domain.

There are other EU ccTLDs that are fairly cheap and have no restrictions of purchase, like .nl, or .ro.

Yes. If a TLD has the so called “premium domains” feature then it can unilaterally decide that certain domains are worth more, based on their popularity. Then they’ll ask you to pay tens, hundreds or even thousands at renewal time, and if you can’t pay they will auction it away.

This isn’t something that registrars do, this is something that the entity that manages the TLD itself is doing.

For TLD’s without “premium domains” the TLD sets a single base price for all their domains. Registrars can demand more but there’s competition so someone will always sell it for closer to the base price, and if they change their price at renewal you can transfer to a different registrar.

You can’t do this with a premium TLD once they’re targeted your domain because the TLD forces all registrars to raise the price for your specific domain.

Bottom line, never buy from a TLD with premium domains.

LinkedIn (Microsoft) has also been slowly introducing identity verification, and they’re also using Persona.

Persona has also been used for several years now by American companies hiring EU citizens, to verify their job history and background.

I’m betting that Persona “forgetting” your information is bullshit, and whenever you use them they add more of your info to your profile. They’d have your job history, your LinkedIn activity, your Reddit activity etc.

I’ve heard a conspiracy theory that says that the apps and services that Google dumps were experiments in data gathering and correlation. So basically they make a music platform like GPM, they use it to get a great music prediction algorithm, then kill the platform because what they wanted was the algorithm. They have money to burn so they don’t care about one more tiny revenue stream or about making a great music platform.

Can you even do that anymore? AFAIK Reddit now caps the amount of comment history they show you so how do you find your comments to change them?

I guess if you’re EU you can request a dump of all your data as a GDPR request and find the permalinks for all your comments in there.