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, too.

  • 0 Posts
  • 181 Comments
Joined 3 months ago
cake
Cake day: June 25th, 2024

help-circle
  • Does anyone happen to know if there is a N100 model that supports HDMI-CEC so I can make my old TV set smart with a recent Kodi and maybe some retro-games? But I’d rather not let it consume 9W or whatever such a machine needs all day long. So it’d need to start and shut down on its own. Preferably without manual additional steps involved, hence the CEC…






  • And since it wasn’t ever a secret that these services are for data harvesting, they got next to nothing from me. I mean does it make a substancial difference if they sell your data or use it to get to know you so they can do targeted advertising… Or train an AI with it? I’d say the latter isn’t even that bad compared to the other business model. But yeah, be cautious about these tech companies. Generally speaking they’re not invested in your privacy. On the contrary. If you value that, use other services. And it’s been that way for quite some time.











  • If you google it, you’ll find lots of similar questions for O2. I think you have to contact their customer support and get that activated once.

    And have a look at your IPv4 and IPv6 addresses. Sometimes you can do it via IPv6 already, just not over IPv4 because there is some translation in the way. (In case they want too much money to give you a real IPv4 address.)

    Maybe you can try if you can open your FritzBox UI from the outside with your my.fritz address. I think that has IPv6 and a port forward in place (if activated).

    And btw: It’s perfectly fine to do it. People need storage and online collaboration. Access to their data while away.



  • I’d blame capitalism. And corporations prefering short term growth and attracting investors. And the whole modern business model of exploiting users private data to sell advertisements. That’s how the whole internet works these days and thak makes being evil baked into every successful company.

    And btw: Zuck did one good thing. He personally gave us competetive AI models to tinker around with. If it weren’t for people like him, we would have AI dominate us without the average person having access to more than the online services like ChatGPT. Yeah but that doesn’t take away from the things you lined out.



  • We also had expensive engineering software at university. Oftentimes it’s a major PITA for everyone. The PhD students have to get their work done and are met by the software refusing to start because all licenses are taken. Sometimes someone forgot to log off or the computer crashed and the software takes most of the day to recover that license. Or some people do like 5 simulations in parallel. Or lock the computer, go home and block a license. The IT department will get lots of calls and have to deal with it. Especially when the pool of licenses is small. And it takes additinal effort to coordinate practical courses and excercises where you teach a group of 24 people which then need half the license pool available at a fixed time each week, despite the daily routine of everyone else.

    And I’m not even sure if the people responsible, care too much for pirated software. But they’re liable. Of course they write strongly worded mails when talking to everyone. It’s their IT infrastructure and they can’t have people do illegal things with it. Especially not while having an expensive contract with some supplyer. They can’t have anyone leak a mail where they endorse piracy. Or post screenshots or turn in assignments or papers with screenshots that say “unregistered copy” in the bottom corner. And once students do silly things and the piracy is on display publicly, they’ll have to do something. Usually that’s writing a strongly worded email first. Because that takes next to no effort. I think the usual IT department doesn’t care as long as things go smoothly, people do their various things and no one complains. They usually have other stuff to do. That makes me think in this story something must have happened that warranted some form of public reaction or at least show they addressed it and they have it in writing.

    And I think the rest of the mail fits such IT people. They said why they do it and that they can’t have piracy connected to the institutes name. They say they need some incoming complaints to justify buying more licenses. And the punishment fits the crime. They just disconnect the computer from their network and it’s not their problem anymore. I think that’s fair.