50 ms·

As a fellow European, I'm perfectly content to use someone else's computer, as long as they have a legal responsibility to respect my privacy, i.e. not submitti

As a fellow European, I'm perfectly content to use someone else's computer, as long as they have a legal responsibility to respect my privacy, i.e. not submitting to the USA Cloud Act.

WA 2y ago
Speaking of: Is there an EU alternative to Netlify where I can basically upload/host a small static website for free, including custom domains and free SSL?
- mvanbaak 2y ago
  While 'for free' is something we all want (who wants to spend their money right) it is not a sustainable business case. And with prices of it/server/hosting in the EU being a lot higher then in other parts of the world, what you want is not going to be easy to find.
  - kkfx 2y ago
    it's cloying how people (individuals and SMEs) forget that in the present time in vast part of the world we have FTTH with enough bandwidth and low enough ping that's MUCH better than a cheap VPS or someone else server. The only needed thing is a fixed IP, witch is pretty available anyway. A homeserver is much cheaper, not less monitored, much powerful and much more flexible than living on someone else computer. Since IPv6 it's not an option but a need, it's about time to IMPOSE a public global per host to any ISP, without clauses to avoid legally hosting a server because hey, that's how internet work, it's not a damn mainframe.
    - mvanbaak 2y ago
      Yes, self/home hosting is an option for some. but maintaining a server is not as easy as you make it sound. Power, cooling, noise, spare hardware, network etc are all factors that are taken care of by a provider, that are not easy to replicate. And even if you can self-host, fighting against (D)DOS attacks is not something I have seen done at any consumer ISP.
      - kkfx 2y ago
        At a personal|SME level? Who might want do DDOS John Smith or Pop's store? How much iron you need for such usage? That's without counting the various "datacenters horror stories" about how badly many providers are really without appearing. My homeserver is a simple NixOS, so I have to maintain just a config, easy to replicate anytime without manual setups or complex orchestration, it's a small celeron machine with 32Gb ram and two sata classic disks + 2 nvme on a PCIe adapter card, total cost around 300€ few years ago, cooling is juts the home cooling, power it's free on sunny days (domestic p.v.) and otherwise it's still cheaper than the cheapest VPS, plus it can do much more. It's run my HA, Asterisk (for having some VoIP numbers on my deskphone and diverting call to my mobile when I'm not at home, nothing more), a small video-surveillance setup, fetchmail+maildrop+notmuch to serve mails via muchsync, etc etc etc a minimal equivalent VPS setup would costing me around 100+€/month, performing much less. If my server die I have a spare motherboard+cpu a little bit outdated but powerful enough drives are both mirrors from different brands, I have some cold spare anyway shared if needed with my main desktop etc in case of a complete crash I have my config, few kb of text, and I can replicate it anywhere. For personal usage is MUCH more than any classic hosted setup. The only real issues is for most: - knowing the software stack they need, witch is rare, because yes maintain a classic Arch or FreeBSD server it's much less comfy than NixOS/Guix System especially if you never heard of them but heard a gazillion of recommendations to use k*s or docker, proxmox and co AT HOME some even trying on raspi sbc... - some minor legal and hw things, depending on your home and how much the temp mount in summer inside. Essentially for most it's just about knowing the sw stack witch is a big issue since no university seems to be interesting in really teaching FLOSS nowadays and most professors themselves have very little practical knowledge.
        mvanbaak 2y ago
        I won't bore you with the details of my home setup, and I do host from home with both static IPv4 and IPv6 and everything (ok ok, two details: it's all freebsd on enterprise hardware) I will repeat: it is an option for some. and if you fall in the small group that has everything on green for a home hosted setup, it is the best option. But thinking this is for more then a very very small group of people is not confirm reality. And I really applaud you for having a setup that generates enough power so for you it turns out to be free. If only I could get a setup like this. For the biggest part of the population this is, unfortunately, not an option. Also, there is a very big difference between running k*s, docker, whatever at home in a homelab, and hosting your stuff at home. A homelab is to learn, learning means breaking stuff all the time. hosting things dont really combine with that. Most people that actually host things at home have 2 setups, one that hosts the online tools and one homelab where they can break stuff at their will. At the end of the day, for the majority of people throwing a couple of dollars per month to a company to handle all this crap is the better option :)
- layer8 2y ago
  Not for free, but for negligible cost.
kkfx 2y ago
Like Schrems sentences you can't get that from USA companies, legally, but you can't get technically for ANY third party, because you are not on their servers, and no one else is there to control them. How can you verify what any company state in a GDPR nightmare letter response? I've sent one time ago where a bank asking me to drop an RSA physical OTP for an Android app, that alone violate PSD2 (since the app it's not only a soft-token but also allow to operate on the same device, the reason why banking piracy was a thing again and more then ever), they respond accordingly to the law, but I can only choose to trust or not their response, I can't prove anything and I have nothing tangible to push some public inquiry on them. Oh, you might feel protected if you upload ONLY encrypted contents, at least feel protected for an unknown amount of time, potentially very long but potentially not enough long. So no, you can choose to trust someone else, but it's a choice that demand trust, you can't verify, so it's a vulnerability.

As a fellow European, I'm perfectly content to use someone else's computer, as long as they have a legal responsibility to respect my privacy, i.e. not submitting to the USA Cloud Act.

WA 2y ago

Speaking of: Is there an EU alternative to Netlify where I can basically upload/host a small static website for free, including custom domains and free SSL?

mvanbaak 2y ago
While 'for free' is something we all want (who wants to spend their money right) it is not a sustainable business case. And with prices of it/server/hosting in the EU being a lot higher then in other parts of the world, what you want is not going to be easy to find.
- kkfx 2y ago
  it's cloying how people (individuals and SMEs) forget that in the present time in vast part of the world we have FTTH with enough bandwidth and low enough ping that's MUCH better than a cheap VPS or someone else server. The only needed thing is a fixed IP, witch is pretty available anyway. A homeserver is much cheaper, not less monitored, much powerful and much more flexible than living on someone else computer. Since IPv6 it's not an option but a need, it's about time to IMPOSE a public global per host to any ISP, without clauses to avoid legally hosting a server because hey, that's how internet work, it's not a damn mainframe.
  - mvanbaak 2y ago
    Yes, self/home hosting is an option for some. but maintaining a server is not as easy as you make it sound. Power, cooling, noise, spare hardware, network etc are all factors that are taken care of by a provider, that are not easy to replicate. And even if you can self-host, fighting against (D)DOS attacks is not something I have seen done at any consumer ISP.
    - kkfx 2y ago
      At a personal|SME level? Who might want do DDOS John Smith or Pop's store? How much iron you need for such usage? That's without counting the various "datacenters horror stories" about how badly many providers are really without appearing. My homeserver is a simple NixOS, so I have to maintain just a config, easy to replicate anytime without manual setups or complex orchestration, it's a small celeron machine with 32Gb ram and two sata classic disks + 2 nvme on a PCIe adapter card, total cost around 300€ few years ago, cooling is juts the home cooling, power it's free on sunny days (domestic p.v.) and otherwise it's still cheaper than the cheapest VPS, plus it can do much more. It's run my HA, Asterisk (for having some VoIP numbers on my deskphone and diverting call to my mobile when I'm not at home, nothing more), a small video-surveillance setup, fetchmail+maildrop+notmuch to serve mails via muchsync, etc etc etc a minimal equivalent VPS setup would costing me around 100+€/month, performing much less. If my server die I have a spare motherboard+cpu a little bit outdated but powerful enough drives are both mirrors from different brands, I have some cold spare anyway shared if needed with my main desktop etc in case of a complete crash I have my config, few kb of text, and I can replicate it anywhere. For personal usage is MUCH more than any classic hosted setup. The only real issues is for most: - knowing the software stack they need, witch is rare, because yes maintain a classic Arch or FreeBSD server it's much less comfy than NixOS/Guix System especially if you never heard of them but heard a gazillion of recommendations to use k*s or docker, proxmox and co AT HOME some even trying on raspi sbc... - some minor legal and hw things, depending on your home and how much the temp mount in summer inside. Essentially for most it's just about knowing the sw stack witch is a big issue since no university seems to be interesting in really teaching FLOSS nowadays and most professors themselves have very little practical knowledge.
      - mvanbaak 2y ago
        I won't bore you with the details of my home setup, and I do host from home with both static IPv4 and IPv6 and everything (ok ok, two details: it's all freebsd on enterprise hardware) I will repeat: it is an option for some. and if you fall in the small group that has everything on green for a home hosted setup, it is the best option. But thinking this is for more then a very very small group of people is not confirm reality. And I really applaud you for having a setup that generates enough power so for you it turns out to be free. If only I could get a setup like this. For the biggest part of the population this is, unfortunately, not an option. Also, there is a very big difference between running k*s, docker, whatever at home in a homelab, and hosting your stuff at home. A homelab is to learn, learning means breaking stuff all the time. hosting things dont really combine with that. Most people that actually host things at home have 2 setups, one that hosts the online tools and one homelab where they can break stuff at their will. At the end of the day, for the majority of people throwing a couple of dollars per month to a company to handle all this crap is the better option :)
layer8 2y ago
Not for free, but for negligible cost.

kkfx 2y ago

Like Schrems sentences you can't get that from USA companies, legally, but you can't get technically for ANY third party, because you are not on their servers, and no one else is there to control them. How can you verify what any company state in a GDPR nightmare letter response? I've sent one time ago where a bank asking me to drop an RSA physical OTP for an Android app, that alone violate PSD2 (since the app it's not only a soft-token but also allow to operate on the same device, the reason why banking piracy was a thing again and more then ever), they respond accordingly to the law, but I can only choose to trust or not their response, I can't prove anything and I have nothing tangible to push some public inquiry on them. Oh, you might feel protected if you upload ONLY encrypted contents, at least feel protected for an unknown amount of time, potentially very long but potentially not enough long. So no, you can choose to trust someone else, but it's a choice that demand trust, you can't verify, so it's a vulnerability.