Yeah, and I’d say it’s a bit questionable whether California even has jurisdiction over revelations from God himself.

Also, I don’t think it does networking and app stores 😄

Sloppy sloppy slop slop?

100% AI text. Not even proof-read. Or they would have noticed the last paragraph is ChatGPT talking to them, not the blog audience.

Interesting. Thanks for the info. I’ll re-think whether I recommend it to random people around the world, then.

In Germany it’s great. I’ve been using it for many years now. But we have some good/strong hacker organizations, digital sovereignty and privacy groups, nonprofits and some generous IT companies. Maybe it’s random private individuals in other countries and they’re not as reliable.

Seems right now there’s something going wrong anyway. I don’t think the amount of “offline” servers is normal. And a good amount of them isn’t even offline, but still answer my DNS queries.

After a few “Delete junk” commits, “Broken”, “PATCH: Hope this fixes it”, and “Basic Reverse-Proxy”, it’s now at version 1.0.1-alpha.1.
Don’t know what they did to Git. But their “minor commit” touches almost the entire code in their repo. Rest of it (and the general confusion and the edgy commit messages) look to me like something done by OpenClaw.

100% wouldn’t use it.

I think the Tiers work the other way around. But I keep forgetting how DNS and recursive lookup works and I might be wrong.
I don’t think you’re supposed to query Tier 1 servers as a client. The Tier 2 servers would be what people connect to and who do the heavy lifting. The Tier 1 just do the root, authoritative stuff and their custom TLDs for the following network. So we’re not worried about where those are located.

Isn’t it a global effort? According to what I see, they list a bunch of servers in all Europe, USA, Canada, Australia, …Japan?!

I did one DNS query and it took 22 msec with the nearest OpenNIC server and 24 msec with Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1
So dunno… roughly same responsiveness? Maybe OpenNIC is a tad faster? For a proper answer we’d need to do more measurements, though. And with OpenNIC you definitely need to pick a good server, not just any random one. They’ll have different locations, different policies and they’re in widely different datacenters.

Even if you control your router/modem, they still control the other end, it connects to. And some more infrastructure along the path. So i think it depends a bit where you’re going with this. If you’re worried about them doing packet inspection, or logging IP numbers you connect to, I don’t think there’s a big difference. They could do it anywhere. And they’ll likely do it in some datacenter.

A router interfaces with your local network, though. So in theory a router can be used to connect to your internal devices and computers and maybe you have an open network share without password protection or something like that. But we’re talking violating your constitutional rights here. It’s highly illegal in most jurisdictions to enter your home and go through your stuff.

I’ll buy my own router because I can then configure it to my liking. And my ISP charges way too much for renting one. And what I also do is not use my ISP’s DNS service. That’d just send every domain name I open to their logfiles. Instead I use one from OpenNIC

I think the way unclear / ambiguous law works is: It’s almost always used against you. It’s probably up to the attorney general to use it as precedent for what they want to do. Less so for the person at the receiving end of it.

I’d go with the Debian package. That’s tied into the system. You get nice updates, there’s more eyes on what the upstream developers do, sometimes the Debian maintainers disable things like tracking, fix vulnerabilities in libraries. It’s smaller, less permission issues… It’s just safer and more convenient…

I’ll go for Flatpak once there’s some benefit. For example the sandboxing which is great to have for proprietary software. Or if the package isn’t available in the Debian repositories, and the alternative would be some third-party repo or deb file downloaded from a random website. And in rare cases when I need a specific version and the Debian maintainers are stuck with an old release.

I think it’s a fuck you aimed at the attorney general and whoever phrased these laws. They go into detail in the FAQ at the bottom. (What is the point of all of this? / What if the AG actually fines you?) Using it isn’t the really the point.

Depends. Sometimes you’ll get a PC magazine or blog cover an upcoming laptop and test Linux compatibility. Or someone writes a long Reddit post after they got it, or updates the Arch Wiki. There definitely are ways to learn about Linux-compatibility with new models. We used to have Amazon comments and reviews…Just be super cautious with all the AI bots and fake comparison sites out there.

And it’s a bit more complicated with gaming stuff. Sometimes they’ll add a weird webcam, or unsupported RGB LED controller, or have weird quirks in the firmware. Some other model lines like a business laptop from Dell or Lenovo tend to be just fine and you’ll get 100% Linux compatibility. There’s no guarantee, but any way, after a few Linux nerds blogged about it you should be fine.

Pretty sure they are: https://www.hetzner.com/whois/

It’s not their main business. But I believe both OVH and Hetzner as large hosting providers do domain services. I’m never sure which one to recommend. You’ll always get people complain about customer support, especially with OVH.

Yes. My question is just, how do you participate in modern life with that? For example if you commute by train, you need a ticket. And the Deutsche Bahn tries to get rid of paper tickets. Their monthly subscription is an App now, available for Android and Apple. Do you install Waydroid and whip out your laptop once the conductor asks for your ticket? Do you also pull it out of your backpack 3 times on the platform to look up all the delays, changed platforms, trains you have to transfer to? What’s with the pkpass file for the concert, cinema, exhibition? I mean we can still print the QR codes. I do that, I have a printer at home and sometimes do the extra effort. I can’t take my laptops and tablets to concerts. And some other things will get more complicated as well. For example Shop & Go is almost impossible without a phone. You’re guaranteed to wait in line at the few cash registers left and waste an extra 10min… You’ll have to apply for a chip card to charge your EV, can’t update some of your electronic gadgets any more… And if you drive by car, how do you listen to Music and Podcasts? With an USB stick or a 12xCD changer in the trunk like in the early 2000s?

https://inwx.com/ GmbH is based in Germany / Switzerland. I’ve been using them as my domain registrar for a long time now.

There’s also hetzner.com for all your hosting needs. Or gandi.net from France…

Yeah, probably jump ship to a life without a mobile phone, online banking and train tickets. 🙁

Oh man, why didn’t I slop-code it. Hold it for two months and then sell out to some mega-corporation… Sounds like easy money. Any other very stupid (and easy) ideas still left?

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Thanks for the link! As a short aside for the other people here: Try not to spam developers. That usually achieves the opposite and makes them miserable, when we want them to not burn out, and write good software for us. A thumbs-up emoji is the correct reaction for the average person. Or for the pros - a code-review highlighting specific issues within the code.

Uh. I’d really prefer if people experimented with new technology a bit more cautiously and not directly jump to “the biggest release […] ever done”.