MystikIncarnate

It's that recent. Jeez. Feels like it's been a thing for months.

Wait, what day is it? WHAT YEAR IS IT?

OH GOD

IMO, the post is centered around proton VPN, and since that's a public VPN service, it's the focus of the discussion.

Private VPNs are a very different story.

Yes and no.

Modern HTTPS connections send the URL you are connecting to in the initial hello, so the remote webserver knows what security certificate to use when you connect. A lot of web servers host multiple sites, especially for smaller webpages, and so it doesn't assume that since you connected to that specific webserver, that you're connecting to the site that the webserver is hosting, even if it's only hosting a single site.

This can leak the data to anyone sniffing the traffic.

You can also determine some traffic by IP address, this is for larger web services like Facebook, youtube and other sites of similar size. They load balance groups of IPs for their traffic, all are serving the same data. So if you connect to an IP that's owned by Facebook, for example, then your actions can be easily derived.

Since the connection is still secured by TLS, the content can't be deciphered, but the location you are going to absolutely can.

It really depends on a lot of factors.

All ISPs are legally obligated to forward that shit to you. The alerts are not from spectrum, they're just relaying the information.

Right now, copyright owners do not have legal permission to find out who you are directly without a court order. They would only seek that information if they were planning to file a lawsuit.

Media companies know, from the Napster incident, that such actions can backfire stupendously. It's rare that they even bother anymore. I can go into detail on why, but I'll leave it out for brevity.

So they send the notice to your ISP, who is legally obligated to match the information on the notice to the subscriber and forward the notice to you.

For many, this goes to an ISP provided mailbox, which most people ignore the existence of it. Clearly spectrum operates differently.

The notices are from copyright holders who have no idea who you are, and can't determine that information unless they intend to sue you. So those can be, for the most part, ignored.

It's not your ISPs fault that you got those. They couldn't give a shit less about what you do on their service, or what you download. They just want you to pay your bill every month and keep the gravy train rolling.

There's a lot I can say here, but to be terse, the money paid into (un) employment insurance is more than what is paid out normally, since some people will pay for it all their life without ever collecting, that money isn't just stored indefinitely, it's used for other things.

As a result, if a large portion of the population suddenly find themselves without work, the system will be unable to sustain itself, whether "short term" or not. All systems that rely on EI overflow funds would suddenly have a deficiency in their money flow, and considering they the people pay most of the taxes while billionaires and corporations get tax breaks so that they pay nothing, the entire social support systems would collapse quickly, as the country plunges further into debt, devaluing the countries currency.

The entire economic model is built upon things maintaining and continuing mostly as they are, pull any thread too far and the whole thing unravels.

In my country, Canada, it goes hand in hand with welfare. One will often lead into the other if things go on long enough.

There's a lot of complexity to it that I won't get into, but the unemployment system likely can't handle a rapid influx of new request, even from those that have paid into it.

Depends on where you live.

As a nearly full time internet user since dialup, the web has changed a lot. Dynamic updates to websites is one of the nice things that's changed. You no longer need to mash F5 to keep up to date on anything. Wifi is way better, though for a while there it wasn't really a "thing".

The people have changed for sure. Originally it was a lot of techies and nerds, either by circumstance or due to the efforts needed to make the internet operate. Most people online had similar hobbies and interests, so most people online were similar, and their interests varied only a little on specific things.

Ads were basically a joke. Everyone had a website, usually on Geocities or something. You'd spend hours painstakingly putting together your website, then when you went to other people's websites, you'd skim over it and never look at it again.

No bots existed, if someone was talking to you, then you probably knew them somehow, or you were on a public forum/IRC. No YouTube, no Netflix, but mp3 file sharing was happening even before Napster.

There wasn't a lot to do at first, but after you found a few websites you liked, whether Slashdot or fark, 4chan or something else, you were hooked. People were brutally mean, especially for sites like hotornot. No social media or social networks, no corporations, just people mostly. Most sites selling stuff were scams. Early eBay was a trip.

This all morphed into a more congealed mass when social media became a thing and "high-speed internet" was more readily available. WiFi g ERA, back when it was always referred to by the standard, 802.11g. only laptops for a while then the iPhone dropped and it's been a steady downhill after that.

Now the internet is huge, everyone and their fridge is on social media. Ads are everywhere and worse than ever. Almost everything is trying to funnel you into one of a handful of categories that you don't fit into to sell you something. A few gems still exist, like the Foss community and stuff like Lemmy.

IDK, the old web sucked in some ways, but was awesome in other ways. Now there's just too much to keep up on, and unless you spend every waking moment consuming content, it's basically impossible to do. Some people have staked their entire career on basically aggregating memes and popular stuff, to give an overview to those who don't have the time to do it themselves.

Media streaming is pretty good, though, media companies keep trying to make it into the next cable TV bundle package, and keep raising the prices and enforcing rules that were not possible 20 years ago, and that sucks.

I'm don't think that this is better. It's certainly different, but not better. The way things are going well cause the internet to become a wasteland of AI bots and advertisements all run my corpos because everyone else will be unemployed and unable to find work because their job has been replaced by some AI or other technology that doesn't cost the corp as much as humans do. I'm sure minimum wage and salaries will be corrected to match inflation right after the majority of the workforce is laid off to be replaced with whatever technology does their job for them, which will create an elite class of super rich (moreso than they already are) who own the company either through shares or by being in an upper management kind of position, and a "middle" class of the people hired to maintain and fix the technology... There will be no lower class, just a massive pool of unemployed people, unable to work because all the jobs have gone to, what is essentially, bots.

My prediction is that when that happens, it will maintain a steady state until the vast majority is living on unemployment benefits, at which point the unemployment system will collapse because the money will run out for it, and either we'll go into a massive depression, which will set us back 50 years or more, or the entire system will collapse and either we will die off from all the pollution and destruction to the planet, or we'll have to move to something that's not capitalism to survive. I'm rooting for a star trek like economy, where your status is determined by reputation, and money no longer exists. Unlikely, but I still want it.

No idea when things will start to shift, but IMO, Amazon (the company) will make the first major move, since they burnout their workers so quickly (specifically in the warehouse and item delivery segment) that they're already seeing the effects of running out of people willing to work in their warehouses in some areas, and as a consequence of them being unwilling to pay appropriately for the work, and/or afford the workers enough latitude to handle the work without burning out, by either hiring more people to reduce the workload, or give people... IDK, breaks to use the bathroom.... They will very likely turn to robots to do the work instead. Once they get to that point, it's all downhill as other companies will follow suit.

Depends on the UPS. Many cheap offline UPS units don't. Anything line interactive or online will.

APC makes low end offline UPS units, which are cheap garbage.

They also make line interactive and online ups units, which are decidedly not completely garbage.

I pick up line interactive APC units from used locations like eBay, and go buy off label replacement batteries. Haven't had any problems with them so far.

To date, over the last ~10 years of running a homelab, I have used mainly SMT 1500 units, one was a rack mount. I've recently upgraded to an SMX2000. I've replaced batteries, but never a UPS, and never any server components due to power issues. I've run servers ranging from a Dell PE 2950, to a full c6100 chassis, plus several networking devices, including firewalls, routers and PoE switches. Not a single power related issue with any of them.

I'm also a remote guy and I see both sides as well.

The critical assumption you've made in this example is that a large majority will choose to be remote, so there won't be anyone in the office for the in-office people to work with.

I don't believe that's as much of a problem as you seem to imply it will be. The problem with the argument is that it's all assumption and opinion based. To my understanding, there hasn't been any reliable data produced on what percentage of the population wants in-office and/or remote to be permanent.

Relative to that, you'd also have to take into consideration for populated the company is, and how many people would actually be in the office, before making a determination whether it would be a ghost town or not.

Additionally to that, not everyone wants in-office work for the social aspects of it. Some people's home life is too chaotic so they prefer in-office, to separate themselves from the chaos of home, and focus on work. It's not a desire to connect that drives them to the office (pun might be intended here), but rather a lack of outside distraction from their home life while they try to "earn a living".

There's also the consideration of who is at home all the time. A homebody spouse, such as a stay-at-home mom/dad, may appreciate having space from their spouse to get things done, as they appreciate the space away. Having such separations can be very healthy and beneficial for relationships, which can also play a role IMO.

The fact is, not everyone is doing it as a social and/or company culture thing. The percentages of people who want it for company culture vs the people who want to for personal reasons, is also an unknown metric.

So in all, at present, we don't know how many overall people want remote/in-office work, and we don't know what their motivations for making that choice are. Without that data, it's difficult to make a value proposition about a decision.

Company owners don't really care about the metrics, since, during COVID and mandatory isolation, everyone was WFH, and productivity was overall increased. Whether that was because people now had 24/7 access to their work systems, or because people were overall happier about it in average, and were simply more productive due to that, is anyone's guess.

I appreciate the comment, but there's a lot more in play than simply socializing and company culture.

I'm not new in my career, when I started, my training was a couple of days on a full-day teams call with my direct manager, where he showed me the ropes of how we do what we do with the tools we have.

I think it was 3 or 4 days for me, until I had grasped enough of the basics to properly adapt to their way of doing things.

Within a week or so, I was pretty much up to speed. Like with any job, there's specifics that I learned as I went, but I got the broad strokes during the first week.

I imagine anyone that's green will need more mentorship that I did. I'm fairly senior in my position, so many times I'm on the other side of mentorship. It's been a while since I've been green.