For The Globe and Mail newspaper, I've spent the last four months hearing from survivors of Myanmar's infamous scam compounds. Run by Chinese criminal syndicates with the collaboration of at least one Burmese pro-junta militia, the camps are staffed by trafficking victims, including a growing number of Africans who are beaten, electrocuted and raped if they don't meet scamming targets. They aren't paid for their efforts.
Since 2021, a coup induced civil war, and the pandemic have created a booming scamming industry based out of Myanmar. Hundreds of scam compounds have since sprouted up, typically along the Burmese-Thai border. They target westerners with cryptocurrency and romance scams. But they are staffed by trafficked people from across Asia and Africa, who travel to Thailand believing they will be hired at well paying tech jobs in Bangkok...before being driven across the border where their ordeal begins.
Chinese scam camp operators in Myanmar have tortured and even murdered victims. But Meseret Mulu, a 27 year old Ethiopian woman, told me that at one point, the criminals brought in fighters from the DKBA (Democratic Karen Benevolent Army), a Burmese militia group allied with the junta...to come in and torture her, by stripping her naked and forcing her to spend hours in searing heat.
Warring factions take a cut to allow Chinese mafia gangs to open camps in their territory.
The criminals operate in Myanmar, because it's too dangerous for them to do so in China. Last month, 11 Chinese operators of Burmese scam camps were executed in China.
Thailand tries to curb activities, including by shutting off internet to border villages where the scam camps are located.
How have the criminals reconnected to the web in response to this? Via good old Elon Musk. Starlink is among the biggest internet providers to Southeast Asian scamming compounds.
India, the Philippines and China are prompt to repatriate their nationals. But African states do not do so. As such, Africans are becoming disproportionately targeted by Chinese criminal orgs knowing that little will be done to rescue them.
Africans who escape Myanmar can expect to spend lengthy stints in Thai immigration jail until they get the money for airfare/fines.
The UN itself is low on money, & issued a call last year for some $2.5M to fly home 1,000 survivors. roasiapacific.iom.int/news/iom…
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Here are some samples of AI generated ads used by criminals in Myanmar to prey on desperate, unemployed job seekers across Asia and Africa. "Typing speed" is a giveaway, they want people who can learn preprepared scam scripts with ease. The always pretend the job is in Thailand or Cambodia, knowing that nobody would agree to travel to war-torn Myanmar. The ordeal begins when they are picked up at airports in these countries...then driven into Myanmar. Meta and Telegram are part of the problem.
The UN estimates that over 120,000 people have been trafficked to scam camps in Myanmar since 2021, and endured various forms of exploitation and torture. It has become a billion dollar industry, with the scams targeting vulnerable people in Europe and North America.
Thai NGOs meanwhile, bravely coordinate rescues, negotiate with border guards to arrange the transfer of victims back to Thailand. But they are swamped and have limited means.
If you're in the western world, learn more about what's behind the spammy, sometimes flirty, text messages from unknown numbers crowding up your Messages app. In Canada, it is very common and receiving daily scam texts isn't unheard of for many people.
If you're in Africa, warn friends and family about the dangers of job offers from Southeast Asia that seem too good to be true. Murders have been reported at these camps. Social media companies will not act or remove posts, so spread the word!
While the degree of suffering differs, this phenomenon causes universal suffering to victims from around the world, from the US to Kenya, from the UK to Uganda.
Hope to share some more of my findings with you in the coming days. If you went through yet another long thread of mine all the way to thisnpoint, thank you your time is appreciated🙏🏿
Story dropped on Sunday. If you're in Canada, the story will be available in tomorrow morning's newspaper.
@oblomov I asked. In Cambodia, apparently authorities at the airport are very likely to follow and stop arriving Nigerians, Pakistanis and Ethiopians, because too many people of these nationalities have been trafficking victims. The criminals likely want to avoid certain nationalities to reduce the risk they face of getting followed, spotted and then jailed by Cambodian police on trafficking charges.
@oblomov its good that the Cambodian authorities are putting pressure on them, its too bad they dont have more effextive criteria than nationality to spot potential victims
@sabrinaweb71 I asked. In Cambodia, apparently authorities at the airport are very likely to follow, stop and question arriving Nigerians, Pakistanis and Ethiopians, because too many people of these nationalities have been trafficking victims. The criminals likely want to avoid certain nationalities to reduce the risk they face of getting followed, spotted and then jailed by Cambodian police on trafficking charges.
Very satisfying to see those 11 slavers rotting in their graves, but this is NOT who China (or anyone else) usually executes. My guess is they enslaved too many Chinese citizens, forcing the government to make a token gesture.
@LukefromDC Your assessment is accurate. Chinese victims have been trafficked and even murdered. One particular case in which an actual celebrity, a Chinese actor was trafficked to Myanmar provoked a lot of outrage in China and demands for accountability. As you imply, I also don't believe Chinese justice would be as robust if the victims were solely Africans.
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Giornate splendide per passeggiare in Ticino. Tranne per il continuo rumore di sottofondo del traffico e i passaggi ininterrotti degli aerei da turismo.
Gli spacconi vanno trattati tutti allo stesso modo, indipendentemente dalla provenienza. Complimenti al sindaco di Como che persiste nel creare loro qualche fastidio. Peccato non si possa colpirli più pesantemente.
Una nuova #minaccia si aggira, usando la nostra più grande debolezza: l’abitudine. Quante volte, infatti, capita di ritrovarsi a cliccare su caselle di #verifica senza pensarci due volte? Ora, pare che i malintenzionati abbiano creato una nuova campagna malware, che utilizza finti CAPTCHA per indurre l’utente a eseguire comandi sul proprio pc.
La notizia forse non è così negativa come si vorrebbe che sembrasse. Il parco veicoli non si rinnova in termini tecnologici ma allo stesso tempo non cresce di volume, non richiede ulteriori materie prime per la fabbricazione e genera meno rifiuti da smaltire. Indirettamente la situazione potrebbe portare a un abbassamento dei prezzi, a un adeguamento dei modelli secondo le esigenze degli utenti o all'uso di mezzi di trasporto alternativi.
Per coerenza, anche i frontalieri italiani non verranno più a lavorare nella pericolosa Svizzera. E i 15.000-20.000 nuovi residenti italiani che scelgono la Svizzera ogni anno...
Alberghi, proprietari di seconde case e appartamenti turistici riferiscono di prenotazione e contratti annullati e di un’esitazione crescente a tornare, soprattutto da parte degli italiani.
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La faggeta era silenziosa e ovattata sotto un cielo grigio, con tronchi chiari e foglie morte; peccato che a tratti i rumori della città e dell’aeroporto ricordassero quanto la modernità ci segua, anche qui.
@Informatica (Italy e non Italy 😁) La rotta del G7 Cyber non prevede nuovi obblighi regolatori, ma offre un quadro di riferimento condiviso: una roadmap per autorità, istituzioni finanziarie e fornitori tecnologici, declinata in sei fasi principali della
Il delitto di Wilma Montesi è uno dei casi di cronaca nera più enigmatici della storia italiana del Novecento, un evento capace di scuotere in profondità la politica, i mezzi di comunicazione e la società.
Bla bla bla... Il rumore è un problema troppo sottovalutato e che nessuna autorità vuole risolvere. Lugano compare da anni in cima alle classifiche ma traffico stradale, cantieri diurni e notturni, voli di aerei ed elicotteri continuano ad aumentare insieme ai livelli di prepotenza, strafottenza, menefreghismo, egoismo e stupidità.
I used to self-host because I liked tinkering. I worked tech support for a municipal fiber network, I ran Arch, I enjoyed the control. The privacy stuff was a nice bonus but honestly it was mostly about having my own playground. That changed this week when I watched ICE murder a woman sitting in her car. Before you roll your eyes about this getting political - stay with me, because this is directly about the infrastructure we're all running in our homelabs. Here's what happened: A woman was reduced to a data point in a database - threat assessment score, deportation priority level, case number - and then she was killed. Not by some rogue actor, but by a system functioning exactly as designed. And that system? Built on infrastructure provided by the same tech companies most of us used to rely on before we started self-hosting. Every service you don't self-host is a data point feeding the machine. Google knows your location history, your contacts, your communications. Microsoft has your documents and your calendar. Apple has your photos and your biometrics. And when the government comes knocking - and they are knocking, right now, today - these companies will hand it over. They have to. It's baked into the infrastructure. Individual privacy is a losing game. You can't opt-out of surveillance when participation in society requires using their platforms. But here's what you can do: build parallel infrastructure that doesn't feed their systems at all. When you run Nextcloud, you're not just protecting your files from Google - you're creating a node in a network they can't access. When you run Vaultwarden, your passwords aren't sitting in a database that can be subpoenaed. When you run Jellyfin, your viewing habits aren't being sold to data brokers who sell to ICE. I watched my local municipal fiber network get acquired by TELUS. I watched a piece of community infrastructure get absorbed into the corporate extraction machine. That's when I realized: we can't rely on existing institutions to protect us. We have to build our own. This isn't about being a prepper or going off-grid. This is about building infrastructure that operates on fundamentally different principles:
Communication that can't be shut down: Matrix, Mastodon, email servers you control
File storage that can't be subpoenaed: Nextcloud, Syncthing
Passwords that aren't in corporate databases: Vaultwarden, KeePass
Media that doesn't feed recommendation algorithms: Jellyfin, Navidrome
Code repositories not owned by Microsoft: Forgejo, Gitea
Every service you self-host is one less data point they have. But more importantly: every service you self-host is infrastructure that can be shared, that can support others, that makes the parallel network stronger. Where to start if you're new:
Passwords first - Vaultwarden. This is your foundation. Files second - Nextcloud. Get your documents out of Google/Microsoft. Communication third - Matrix server, or join an existing instance you trust. Media fourth - Jellyfin for your music/movies, Navidrome for music.
If you're already self-hosting:
Document your setup. Write guides. Make it easier for the next person. Run services for friends and family, not just yourself. Contribute to projects that build this infrastructure. Support municipal and community network alternatives.
The goal isn't purity. You're probably still going to use some corporate services. That's fine. The goal is building enough parallel infrastructure that people have actual choices, and that there's a network that can't be dismantled by a single executive order. I'm working on consulting services to help small businesses and community organizations migrate to self-hosted alternatives. Not because I think it'll be profitable, but because I've realized this is the actual material work of resistance in 2025. Infrastructure is how you fight infrastructure. We're not just hobbyists anymore. Whether we wanted to be or not, we're building the resistance network. Every Raspberry Pi running services, every old laptop turned into a home server, every person who learns to self-host and teaches someone else - that's a node in a system they can't control. They want us to be data points. Let's refuse.
What are you running? What do you wish more people would self-host? What's stopping people you know from taking this step?
EDIT: Appreciate the massive response here. To the folks in the comments debating whether I’m an AI: I’m flattered by the grammar check, but I'm just a guy in his moms basement with too much coffee and a background in municipal networking. If you think "rule of three" sentences are exclusive to LLMs, wait until you hear a tech support vet explain why your DNS is broken for the fourth time today.
More importantly, a few people asked about a "0 to 100" guide - or even just "0 to 50" for those who don't want to become full time sysadmins. After reading the suggestions, I want to update my "Where to start" list. If you want the absolute fastest, most user-friendly path to getting your data off the cloud this weekend, do this:
The Core: Install CasaOS, or the newly released (to me) ZimaOS. It gives you a smartphone style dashboard for your server. It’s the single best tool I’ve found for bridging the technical gap. It's appstore ecosystem is lovely to use and you can import docker compose files really easily.
The Photos: Use Immich. Syncthing is great for raw sync, but Immich is the first thing I’ve seen that actually feels like a near 1:1 replacement for Google Photos (AI tagging, map view, etc.) without the privacy nightmare.
The Connection: Use Tailscale. It’s a zero-config VPN that lets you access your stuff on the go without poking holes in your firewall.
I’m working on a Privacy Stack type repo that curates these one click style tools specifically to help people move fast. Infrastructure is only useful if people can actually use it. Stay safe out there.
Self-hosted photo and video management solution. Easily back up, organize, and manage your photos on your own server. Immich helps you browse, search and organize your photos and videos with ease, without sacrificing your privacy.
I agree with your post 100% I think. Removing oneself from big tech/data services like Google and Microsoft is resisting the regime. It's especially useful for folks that may not be able to get out and protest, meet with their representatives, etc.
As for me, I'm running my *arr/media stack for myself and my close friends and family. Fuck Disney, Netflix, and Paramount. For our household, HomeAssistant keeps the lights on and SyncThing backs up our files to the NAS.
Spot on. Self-hosting is the most effective form of quiet, material protest we have. Every time your family uses Syncthing instead of OneDrive, you’re starving the machine of the telemetry it needs to function.
Running that stack for your inner circle is essentially building a "digital mutual aid" node. You're taking the burden of surveillance off their backs and putting it on your own hardware where you can actually defend it. That's the work.
Works great. My biggest challenge was finding a decent microphone setup and ended up like many do with old Playstation 3 webcams. That was a while back and I would guess it's easier to find something more appropriate today.
Home assistant has their own system I believe? If you sign up too their subscription? Or you can locally host whisper and piper yourself and go completely local.
I know others have answered, but I wanted to give you a link. I have their device and it works great for turning things off and on out of the box. You can run it locally—if you have the hardware—or use their reasonably priced cloud subscription. I do the latter wanting to support them monetarily.
Open source home automation that puts local control and privacy first. Powered by a worldwide community of tinkerers and DIY enthusiasts. Perfect to run on a Raspberry Pi or a local server.
What’s stopping people you know from taking this step?
I'm a noob when it comes to IT. (Even though in my family I'm the one people ask when they have computer issues lol.) I would really like to get into self-hosting and all that, and I think if I found some good guides I would probably be able to make things work, but it still sounds very daunting to me. Like, I imagine days if not weeks of sifting through online resources to fix a thousand little errors and issues that would come up. (Maybe I'm mistaken, maybe it's all really easy even for noobs. Just trying to explain my feelings on the matter.)
Edit: Woke up to 10 replies lol. Thanks for everybody's input and helpful links. I think this might become a future project for me, but not before winter 26/27 (for life reasons).
It is a skill much like maintaining a car yourself, or your own lawn/garden.
It’s pretty easy to get started, and there are certain ways of doing things that keep it pretty simple forever, at the cost of some flexibility.
But no matter how you do it, there will be a non-zero amount of work involved indefinitely. Just like you need your cars oil changed, your garden mulched and weeded, or your server patched and cleaned up once in awhile.
I'm right there with ya. I'm thinking it might be a case of picking easy pieces (projects) of the puzzle to start with and then building from there. Like I'm considering setting a pi-hole soon - seems like an easier networking project. But yeah, I'm not really sure what's the best order of eaiest to hardest projects in terms of self hosting etc.
Pi-hole is super easy to set up and easy to build on. It’s been very robust for me and also eye-opening due to the excellent UI. About 5% of the network traffic in my house is now blocked. Thousands of DNS requests per day. Most of that is trackers. Apps and “smart” devices are very determined to phone home so you’ll have to block many of these domains manually as they show up. Be forewarned, some apps and web sites will simply stop working if you block their tracking and other info gathering on your network. Luckily, there is good #FOSS to substitute.
I feel this deeply. I used to volunteer at a library teaching “Cyber Seniors” digital literacy, and the biggest hurdle was always the fear of “breaking” something. The truth is, the big tech companies want you to think it's too hard so you’ll keep paying them with your data.
You don’t need to be a sysadmin to start. It’s not about days of fixing errors; it’s about taking one small win at a time; like setting up a password manager first. If you can follow a recipe, you can build a node. We’re working on better, no-jargon guides to make sure the “thousand little errors” don’t stand in your way. You don’t have to be an expert to be part of the resistance.
I agree with you, but something jumped out at me while reading this thread. To a degree, the fear of "breaking something" is completely legitimate, but it's based on not getting quick feedback from systems. For instance, if you are walking in a direction that you think is east, but the sun is setting ahead of you, you know you're headed in the wrong direction. Computers often don't provide such useful feedback, often leading users to "break things."
Maybe I’m mistaken, maybe it’s all really easy even for noobs
I'll be the first to admit, shit is complicated, especially networking, but it's not insurmountable. Do you already have a server deployed? How familiar are you with Linux?
A month-long course aimed at those who aspire to get Linux-related jobs in the industry - junior Linux sysadmin, DevOps-related work, and similar. Learn the skills required to sysadmin a remote Linux server from the commandline.
Do you already have a server deployed? How familiar are you with Linux?
No server. I just installed Linux a few months ago as dual boot after being a lifelong Windows user (since 3.1 lol). Currently using both OS but will move fully to Linux once I have some projects finished. Self-hosting might become a future project after that and if yes, I'll come back to this community and this thread!
@h333d Before I begun this self-hosting journey, I hosted Pi-Hole on a docker container on my PC (was Manjaro KDE that time I think). Then, I learnt how to set up AdGuardHome on a VM (on both Manjaro and Arch iirc), using virt-manager and KVM. Now, I'm using an old laptop to host Proxmox and some services like AdGuardHome, Prometheus, Grafana, Uptime Kuma, and a Debian-made game server customized by myself. I had help of a colleague to begin the Proxmox journey.
It isn't easy, but it's so worth the effort, and I just begun the Proxmox journey and I have plenty of things to learn!
Since this is a complex subject, you need to take your time and don't hurry the learning process. Begin with baby steps, and hosting services restricted to a LAN, just to be safe. When you are comfortable (after some weeks or months), think about sharing a service to the public, if possible, and what you have to do to properly secure your devices and network!
Man, I'm pretty techy. I work in tech. I've learned programming, etc, I use Debian. but selfhosting seems so daunting, not to mention inconvenient. I need to get into it though 😓
I'm not an expert but I have a decent set up going. If you think it would be helpful shoot me a DM and I'll find a way to show you what I've got set up and give any tips I can. It sounds like I started in a similar position to you and I'd be happy to share what I've learned so far.
Edit: anyone else reading this is welcome to do the same.
Digital solidarity will be essential as we move forward. We will need both social solutions which facilitate community technical support and engineered solutions which make that support more effective. I like to imagine systems of distributed sever management where we build upon the computational capacity of those around us and the human capacity of those that care for them. I want to rely on people I love instead of opaque tech firms that only care about money. Compute power must not defeat humanity.
Hi! I am also slowly getting the hang of it (just set up my first NAS with truenas last weekend) but there are dozens of youtube channels focused on it. I like Serversathome and the accompanying Wiki helped me a lot. This mainly focuses on an arr stack but there is also wiki pages for immich and nextcloud. Right now I'm using cloudflare tunnels to access services (i know feeding the machine etc.). If anyone knows an alternative to cloudflare tunnels (without putting everything into the same tailscale network) I would be happy to hear about it!
This channel is dedicated to learning servers and all things self-hosted.
For more info, check out the blog or the wiki, or join the discussion on Discord.
Currently in that "sifting through online resouces" phase, but less because of broken stuff, and more because I want to set up everything prefectly the first time. Which is probs impossible lol. I am majoring in Cyber, so tech is my life, but this homelab is how I actually put what I've learned to use and learn even more than what college will probably teach me.
I'm on winter break and having a blast (kind of 😅) setting up my Proxmox to have all the services I want. I have gotten stuck several times, but I can find info eventually, and keep moving forward. Thankfully there's a website that contains Proxmox setup scripts for almost every service imaginable, making a homelab way more accessible.
Linux skills/terminal knowlege helps this process go by faster, and my networking knowledge helps too. But that's basically all I got lol. I can understand an okay amount of what scripts do, but I'm no programmer/scripter. I screw up mount points, look up how to check ssh key fingerprints every 10 mins, I fail to get VPN tunnel configs to work, a whole slew of issues. But I always end up learning something in the end, and get one step closer to that sweet sweet setup. So just learn and break things while you don't care about it. Who cares if I fuck up the jellyfin config? It only had like two videos in it anyway. Best to screw up now so when I go data hoarder I know how to save my info.
Edit: Just got SMB to work for both my VM and LXCs, and I'm so happy. Every accomplishment with my homelab has me fistbumbing the air and floating on clouds. Make a homelab just the high it gives you when you do something right.
The official website for the Proxmox VE Helper-Scripts (Community) repository. Featuring over 400+ scripts to help you manage your Proxmox Virtual Environment.
I was just thinking this week, that those who self host (and more importantly, those who program the code we self host), are at the front line of the modern digital resistance: in the sense that the world is burning due to the greed of the tech bros that run our daily lives. Convienience for the masses is what gives them power over us, and any one who rejects their systems is helping to fight back.
Voting with your wallet helps, so not giving them your money is the first step. Then managing and keeping your own data private is the next one.
You're right. We’ve been traded convenience for our autonomy for way too long, and it’s created this massive power imbalance where a few tech bros basically own the digital roads we walk on. Voting with your wallet is a huge first step, but like you said, the real work starts when we actually take responsibility for our own data.
That’s exactly why I’m moving toward helping local businesses and groups build out their own nodes. It’s one thing to stop paying for a subscription, but it's another thing entirely to stand up your own infrastructure that doesn't report back to a corporate mother-ship. Every person who rejects the "default" and builds a private alternative is a small win for the rest of us, it’s about making the corporate extraction model fail by simply making it unnecessary.
The average person doesn't understand anything about technology and probably won't even be able to install an operating system. The Internet literally became what it is now precisely because everything was left to corporations. For example, sip telephony is as decentralized and secure as possible, but how many people keep their own telephone exchange? therefore, it is more realistic for the average person to simply use services outside the jurisdiction of the state than to install something on their own. In some countries, it is also illegal to engage in self-hosting.
but if we talk about people who are interested enough, then yes, you can do self-hosting. However, people who are ready to understand at least a little, for example, according to the latest steam statistics, make up about 5% of the total mass.
Honestly, you're right about the skill gap, the convenience trap is exactly how Big Tech won in the first place, but I don't think the goal is to turn every single person into a sysadmin. My time teaching at the library with the Cyber Seniors program showed me that people don't need to know how to flash an OS to deserve privacy, they just need a doorway that isn't owned by a corporation.
If the 5% who actually know how this stuff works start building "community nodes" for their family, their block, or a local shop, then the 95% get all the benefits without the technical headache. We don't need everyone to be an expert, we just need enough local infrastructure so that "the cloud" isn't the only option left. It's not about total purity for everyone, it's just about building enough exit ramps so the machine becomes optional, you know?
so you're suggesting storing sensitive data, work documents, passwords, not from a company with which there are at least some legal agreements, but from a neighbor, simply because you see him from time to time? what could possibly go wrong...
UPD: By the way, if we are talking about a state, your neighbor will be approached in the same way as Google, because everyone in the country obeys the same laws.
You're hitting on the two biggest myths of the current era: that "legal agreements" with giants actually protect you, and that a neighbor is a bigger risk than a faceless corporation.
First, when a tech giant gets a broad subpoena, they don't fight it for you; they automate the handover because you’re just a line in a database of billions. When you host locally, you’re a specific node. If the state wants your data from a private server, they have to physically knock on a specific door. That is a massive increase in the "cost of surveillance" compared to a silent API request sent to a corporate data center.
Second, this isn't about "trusting a neighbor" with your plaintext data. In a proper sovereign setup, the data is end-to-end encrypted. I can host your Vaultwarden or your Nextcloud backups, but I don't have the keys; I'm just providing the "digital real estate." It’s the difference between giving someone your house keys and just letting them provide the land your safe sits on.
The goal isn't to make law enforcement impossible; it’s to make the "dragnet" impossible. If they want one person’s data, they have to work for it, rather than just pulling it from a corporate warehouse.
I do not know about Amazon, but in telephony you simply have to install a threat management system in accordance with the law. I think Amazon has the same thing. if there is a court decision, the servers will be arrested or a request for data will be received. It's exactly the same thing.
what is configured on the server may or may not be enabled. and your neighbor just knows some of your data (your name, address, etc.), which increases the likelihood of an attack. To an Amazon engineer, you're just bytes out of nowhere.
the normal story would be to encrypt everything on the client before anything gets to the server at all. but who exactly is going to bother so much? in this case, you might as well upload a bunch of encrypted data to Google.
Actually, you're exactly right about client-side encryption being the answer, and that is the standard we are pushing for. But the reason you don't just dump those encrypted files into a Google Drive is because of the metadata. Even if Google cannot read your "letter," they are still mining the "envelope," they know when you wrote it, where you were, and who you sent it to. In 2026, metadata is often more dangerous than the content itself because it is so easy to automate into a threat profile.
As for the law, you're right that a court order is a court order, but there is a massive difference in the "cost of surveillance." Big tech companies have dedicated departments to automate data handovers for thousands of users at a time; it is a streamlined pipeline. A private server forces the state to slow down, to get a specific warrant for a specific physical machine, and to actually do the legwork. It turns a massive dragnet into a targeted investigation, which is exactly how the system is supposed to work.
And regarding the "Amazon engineer" versus a neighbor, an engineer might not know my name, but the Amazon algorithm knows my pulse, my politics, and my habits better than anyone. If I use E2EE, the person hosting the hardware doesn't have the keys anyway, so they are just a landlord for my digital safe, not a spy.
Well, I don't work in the USA, but in a telecom company, and I can say that if you really need it, they will just kick down the door and seize the server. no matter what. and a campaign interested in business is, after all, more technologically advanced than some guy who set up a server based on guides on the Internet. you won't need to take anything from him, with a fairly weak literacy, it's enough just to intentionally make a mistake in the public guide. Do you remember Hillary Clinton's private email server case?
You're right that if the state really wants you, they can always resort to physical force, but that's exactly the point. In the current system, they don't have to kick down any doors, they just send a silent request to a corporate office and get everything they need without you or your neighbors ever knowing. Forcing them to physically show up at a specific address in the real world drastically changes the "cost of surveillance," it turns a cheap, automated dragnet into a slow, expensive, and public operation.
As for the Hillary Clinton example, that’s actually a perfect lesson in what happens when you prioritize convenience over security. Her setup was "shadow IT" at its worst, it had open ports, unencrypted connections, and none of the basic hardening we use in modern sovereign stacks like Docker or NixOS. It wasn't built for resistance, it was built to bypass government record-keeping, and that lack of professionalism is exactly why it failed.
The "Amazon engineer" might only see bytes, but the Amazon algorithm sees your entire life story, your politics, and your vulnerabilities. If we use end-to-end encryption, it doesn't matter if the guy hosting the box is a neighbor or a stranger, they can't read the data anyway. We aren't just following random guides, we are building professional-grade infrastructure that makes the "dragnet" fail by design. If the state has to kick down a door for one person's data, the system is at least forced to follow a transparent process again.
so why you think that a public pool of docker images is as secure as an aqua checked image in Google's infrastructure? It's a mystery to me. An ordinary user like Hilary can be checked even without a warrant, it's enough to are plenty of vulnerabilities already.
As someone who has been building infrastructure for over 10 years, I can say that friendship is one thing, but no one is willing to share sensitive data with their friends. People prefer to use services out of border, not self hosted.
UPD: of all my friends, only 7 agreed to use mail on my domain, and after moving from Google Workspace to a private server, only three remained. one of them simply transfers mail to another mailbox, just in case. this is the result. not theoretical, but real.
You're right that Google's infrastructure is more hardened than individual deployments. But security and sovereignty are different problems. Google's security protects against external threats, it's designed to be transparent to Google and compliant with government requests. Your email experience actually proves my point: hobbyist sysadmins running free services for friends doesn't work. I agree completely. What I'm proposing is professional infrastructure for organizations that actually need it; small businesses, non-profits, community orgs. Not favors for friends who don't care. Not trying to out-secure Google. Just viable alternatives for entities where corporate access to their data is a real threat, not a theoretical privacy concern. The non-profit handling immigrant legal aid? The community health clinic? They need this. Your friends checking Gmail don't.
well, in fact, you will literally be like Google. maybe there really are some subtleties, I'm not sure because I've never lived in the USA. the only difference will be how much it will cost. In the end, you won't be able to provide a mailbox for free and not trade data.
UPD: the organization has completely different service requirements. Even for non-profit organizations, no one will wait a day for you to return from work and remember the service.
I dont think this really responds to the comment you replied to.
Lots of comments in this thread are talking about people who dont have the time or expertise to manage their own nextcloud instance.
Saving you stuff on your neighbour's instance includes genuine risks to your privacy or sensitive information.
The "legal agreements" that commenter referred to are simply the manner in which the host is allowed to use your data. The things you might store might be your will, maybe a spreadsheet of passwords, maybe some notes about your plans for a side hustle, maybe some naughty photos of your wife. Not information thats actionable by Google or Microsoft, but certainly things people dont want their neighbour to access.
SelfPrivacy app allows you to set up self-hosted services and manage them Download Your personal services For serious business E-mail Unlimited mailboxes amount for a company or family.
What’s stopping people you know from taking this step?
As with any privacy, security, and anonymity efforts, it takes work. Nothing I am doing can't be accomplished by someone else once the work is put in because I possess no special skills or certs on my wall to reflect any special skills. Just reading a lot, doing, screwing it up, rinse/repeat ad nauseam. We live in a world of convenience, where 'someone else' does the work and we capitalize on their efforts, and it's this point where I see most people falling off the wagon.
Additionally, the average Joe really doesn't have a firm grasp on what happens between the time you click a link in your browser to the time it returns with your webpage. They definitely don't realize the preponderance of traffic being generated even on a PC at rest. They may see adverts taking up real estate on their computer screen, but no clue about what's going on behind the pretty graphics. To them it's akin to advertising on a billboard, which it's far more insidious.
Then there's the obligatory 'I'm not technologically inclined', especially from those in my generation of old heads who are stubborn cusses for the most part. However, for the younger, upwardly mobile, youngsters, there is the element of time. For the average family in this economy, it takes both adults working to make ends meet. They get up every morning, go to work, come home exhausted, spend a little quality time with the kids, and it's off to collapse in bed, only to do it over and over again. On the weekends, there are extracurricular activities for the kids, quality time with the family, catching up on any household chores.....and then it's Monday. They don't have the time nor the inclination to learn how to stand up a Linux server.
I've got a couple friends who bought the equipment, and I set it all up for them, and administer any thing remotely. It does become a headache sometimes. Users cause issues. Luckily it's only a couple.
You nailed it, the "I’m not techy" thing is often just a shield people use because they are simply exhausted by this economy, and time is the one resource Big Tech steals that we can't ever get back. I’ve spent a lot of time teaching seniors at a library program, and I’ve seen firsthand how that "convenience" is a trap designed to keep people from even looking under the hood to see what’s actually happening to their data.
You are right about the remote admin headache too, that’s exactly why the movement needs to shift from just "hobbyist favors" to actual, reliable infrastructure that doesn't break every time an adult in the house clicks a link. If we don't make these sovereign nodes as easy as a light switch, people will always fall back into the arms of a corporation just to get through their Monday. We have to be the ones who put in the work to make the "resistance" feel like less of a chore and more like a utility.
If we don’t make these sovereign nodes as easy as a light switch
That's a long row to hoe. However, I see a lot of very capable mini-servers using Lenovo and that makes me feel better. We live in a digital world now where real life and digital life are co-blended. I've always felt that in this digital world, each and every household should have a server. If I were a much younger man, I've often toyed with the idea of setting up mini-server racks to sell. But, I'm far beyond being a younger man now, and so I hope some young entrepreneur will bring that to fruition.
I’ve spent a lot of time teaching seniors at a library program
You are a better man than I Gunga Din. I've had a computer in front of me since the mid 70s, but a lot of my brethren shit on the notion of computers, giving that '.....back in my day we didn't need computers', and the standard 'uphill both ways in the snow' trope. That's a hard nut to crack because you have to want to learn before you can learn. I know people my age can learn. They damn sure don't have much problem learning Facebook or TikTok. LOL
Does anyone have a good guide for installing Seafile? I tried installing it a few months ago, but it's so damn complicated with load balancers behind load balancers and a bunch of services tied together.
As OP said, it's fine if you still use some corporate services, I think this one should be in the bottom of the list
Wireguard can easily replace simple Tailscale usages, like if you only have 2 nodes to connect and have a static IP address. One thing Tailscale is good at is creating an overlay network, where if you have more than 2 nodes, you only need to configure each one to connect to the central server which will allow the nodes to connect to each other (internally it uses a wireguard connection). With plain wireguard if you have 4 nodes, you need to configure on each one the configuration to the 3 other. Another thing Tailscale is good at is Nat hole punching, if your ISP provider doesn't give you a static IP address or if you don't want to open a port in the firewall of your home router, Tailscale will allow you to access services hosted on your local network (another commercial solution for this is cloudflare tunnel), wireguard doesn't provide this
When you're using tailscale, they get a lot of metadata about your hosts, but the data transfered between your nodes is encrypted (by wireguard)
By replacing the tailscale servers which are ran by the tailscale company with headscale which is the self hostable open source solution, tailscale won't be able to get the metadata of your nodes. Tailscale clients are oss and compatible with headscale, but headscale is not on par for features (like tailscale serve or funnel).
For headscale to really make sense it usually needs to run on a pubicly accessible host like a vps, and not in your home network. For other selfhosted alternative to tailscale there is netbird, or pangolin with a different approach
I think a good test is to shut off your house internet and see what things you still need. Like actually disconnect the router and only go off your own infa. What can you get done, what things do you still need?
For me I found out:
All my software development packages, linux isos, etc.... are ALL online. If I was unable to get on certain websites, I would be SOL in doing most of my software development. Even simple stuff like installing via apt would be VERY hard.
While I have OSM (open street maps), I dont have address info saved anywhere.
Most of my mesh stuff (meshtastic) has online tools for all the builds and deploys. Meaning if the website goes down im SOL getting new nodes out in the wild.
Entertainment is pretty much covered, since we dont have anything streaming anyways. We try to keep things DRM free to begin with so books/audio/movies can go to different places without worry.
Radio still works, so news isnt really a big deal.
I need to get a backup of some encyclopedias and/or get wikipedia somewhere hosted. That would be fun and informative.
I need to get a backup of some encyclopedias and/or get wikipedia somewhere hosted. That would be fun and informative.
I selfhost the full Wikipedia in Kiwix, plus a decent amount of IT, Political, History reading material in my Calibre library. I'm not much for fiction, novels, or movies.
On 1: Autoseeding ISOs over bittorrent is pretty easy, helps strengthening and decentralize community distribution, and makes sure you already have the latest stable locally when you need it.
While a bit more resource intensive (several 100GB), running a full distribution package mirror is very nice if you can justify it. No more waiting for registry sync and package downloads on installs and upgrades. apt-mirror if you are curious.
Otherwise, apt-cacher-ng will at least get you a seamless shared package cache on the local network. Not as resilient but still very helpful in outage scenarios if you have more than one machine with the same dist. Set one to autoupgrade with unattended-upgrades and the packages should be available for the rest, too.
I used to do a ton of seeding on isos but it really took its tool on the old harddrive I did it on. I kinda stopped for a long time. I used to do it for the origonal Ubuntu isos like 8.04 or something like that. And puppy linux 😀...
Ive never heard of apt-mirror, thats interesting. Ill have to take a look. thanks!
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Great post. I have been wondering for awhile how those of us who understand the importance of all this can best organize and ensure growth towards a movement. What reliable orgs are honestly at the front, helping get the word out about these interconnected issues?
That’s a big question because individual action only goes so far before you hit a wall, for the heavy-duty legal and policy stuff, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is still the gold standard, and I really respect The Calyx Institute for actually providing hardware and internet access that doesn't track you. Also look at Tactical Tech, they do amazing work on digital literacy for activists, and the Matrix.org Foundation is building the actual backbone for the communication side.
But honestly, I think the most important "organizations" are the ones we haven't built yet, the local community networks where people help their neighbors get off the corporate grid. My time teaching at the library with a digital literacy program for seniors taught me that we need people who can translate this tech into something a regular person can actually use, so the movement needs to be as much about education as it is about code, we have to be the infrastructure we want to see, one node at a time.
I am in the midst of setting up a Friendica install for my larger community. I'm trying out Elest.io for it, using netcup servers so I don't have to deal with the security and hardening and starting off as cheap as possible with expandability. Just to try to filter people away from Facebook. A lot of people are starting to leave Facebook and I think it's time to go back to basics. I might try to set up a Matrix server as well, but one thing at a time.
My excuse was I don't act for what I believe in because I don't know how to. Your post showed me, I kinda do. I was doing it already, I should double down on it and most important help others on their journey. You're a force multiplier today. Tomorrow some folks who read your post will be as well.
That means a lot, the force multiplier thing is exactly why I posted this. Building for yourself is a great start, but bringing others along with you is how we actually scale the resistance. We need more nodes in the network, so keep doubling down.
I know this is not one size fits all, but I switched to a Seiko watch like a year ago and I've been so much happier. I can weigh myself on my scale, take my blood pressure with a $40 Braun device from the pharmacy, and everything else I can intuit: I know for a fact when I'm not walking enough, when I feel bloated and over-salted, when I haven't slept long enough, when I get winded going up stairs, etc.; I don't need to quantify and graph it out to know I need to do better and what it will require of me.
Again I'm not saying health stats aren't or shouldn't be important for you, but I do think the Web 2.0 / smart-everything era got us all so hooked on the constant feed of data points from all aspects of our lives that we came to feel things were required that really aren't.
If you're diabetic, or have a heart condition, or the in and only way you will ever exercise is if you can gamify it or whatever, then of course, try to find a health tracking solution that minimizes the sale of your data to brokers or whatever (if that is even possible). But for many average people who've just gotten used to health tracking, I gotta say, take a walk on the wild side and try going without.
I can't put a price or a good enough description on how much happier I am to have one less thing sending me notifications and pulling my poor, abused attention all throughout the day…one less entire category of stats to keep up with, micro-manage, get anxious over. I've still got my Apple Watch if I ever absolutely need it but so far I haven't needed it at all. I do not miss health data.
I recently tackled a full degoogle. I still have my email running, I really wouldn't recommend deleting it for legacy purposes. But the tens of thousands of emails I had are fully deleted from gmail. I unsubscribed from basically everything, and hardly get emails there anymore.
I used Google takeout to get the emails exported. I had to do this per gmail account. They give you something called a .mbox file. I now use proton mail and pay for their service (I think paying makes sense for the service given the alternative is getting your data scraped for advertising revenue). I stored a backup of the .mbox file in my proton drive, and loaded the file in thunderbird (on linux with an encrypted drive) for whenever I need to search those old emails.
Overall it's pretty easy. The hardest part was a bit of Thunderbird jank for first time setup. This guide was helpful: howtogeek.com/709718/how-to-op…
For those of you who are interested in this but don't know where to start I think freedombox.org/ may be a good starting point. It's been around for a long time, provides easy enough installation and a nice web interface for management. Its based on Debian and you can give it a try on their demo.
Google the FUTO Guide to a Self Managed Life. Louis Rossman far overstates how simple it is ("if it was too complicated for my grandma I rewrote it until it was something she could handle" is giving himself too much credit) but it is still a super super comprehensive guide anyone should be able to follow for getting an exceptional amount of home infrastructure self hosted. It includes owning and managing your own router, setting up a VPN to get your services away from home, setting up replacements for all the cloud services 99% of us rely on, and goes as far as self hosting security cameras and PBX phone systems and stuff. If you get that far into the guide, even if you don't wanna run those things, you'll have learned enough to host anything else you want.
Great points, and there's some amazing discussions going on here!
One thing I'd like to add is EVERYONE needs to start setting up some meshtastic nodes. It's really easy to setup (just hook up a USB cable from your computer to a esp32 board, visit a website to get the configuration, and that's pretty much it), it's cheap (as little as $30) and it is secure. Build 2 nodes (one to leave at home, and another for your backpack). This way you'll be able to communicate should the Internet become unavailable or unsafe. You can also use this at a protest so that you still have a means of communication without needing to bring your phone that the Feds will be able to track.
Can you elaborate a bit? I checked their website but I'm a noob. I'm in Europe, I don't know if this network is in use here. Also I'm not sure I can see the use case for me now but I don't mind paying 30€ if it can be useful to others, and maybe to me later. To add a bit of context : I think we are quickly following the american trend at least in my country
Haven't tried it yet but it has to operate on another frequency band and is quite limited in terms of duty cycles. I'll try anyway, and I don't think getting a licence to access higher duty cycles limits and power should be that hard.
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It works in Europe too. It uses LoRa (A Long Range radio protocol) to be able to send messages out to other nodes, which can bounce them out to further nodes. A node can be configured to relay through the Internet to reach people in other areas.
I ordered the radio shown below from a kit on Amazon (it's a Heltec v4 and came with a battery that isn't pictured) and it took about 5 minutes to setup. Attaching the antenna to the board was the hardest part.
Are all these long form posts written with the help of AI? The length of posts here seem abnormally long for this type of forum. I'm not saying I don't like it but I'm immediately skeptical when I see a giant post nowadays.
This does not look like it was generated by an off-the-shelf LLM. It could be from a custom fine-tuned LLM (or even few shot) but it's likely not written by vanilla ChatGPT, Gemini, etc...
It can be really difficult to detect LLM written text but the easiest heuristics are:
Specific keywords
The use of three examples, often bullet points (Hah!)
"Final thoughts" or a summary
That said, there are many techniques to make an LLM sound more like an author; so, you never really know...
Final thoughts
In conclusion: we can't be sure, but at first glance, this looks like it was written by a human.
And when the government comes knocking - and they are knocking, right now, today - these companies will hand it over
EDIT:
I have seen many people convert the em-dash into a single dash, much like OP uses. e.g.
And when the government comes knocking - and they are knocking, right now, today - these companies will hand it over
You forgot one more tell that this post is riddled with - "not x, but y". The rule of 3 is also seen in general sentence structure as well as bullet points. Example:
A woman was reduced to a data point in a database - threat assessment score, deportation priority level, case number - and then she was killed. Not by some rogue actor, but by a system functioning exactly as designed.
Em-dash (probably), into rule of 3, into em-dash, into not x but y. That sentence is what made me suspicious but there are plenty of other examples.
Well, that and...this killing had nothing to do with any of those points. The sentence sounds flashy but is completely wrong on closer examination. Almost like a...hallucination...ahem.
On another read, I would bet that this paragraph was originally bullet points.
Communication that can't be shut down: Matrix, Mastodon, email servers you control File storage that can't be subpoenaed: Nextcloud, Syncthing Passwords that aren't in corporate databases: Vaultwarden, KeePass Media that doesn't feed recommendation algorithms: Jellyfin, Navidrome Code repositories not owned by Microsoft: Forgejo, Gitea
@PhoenixAlpha I’ll be sure to tell my 10th-grade English teacher that her lessons on rhetorical devices are now considered hallucinations. If "not X, but Y" makes me a bot, then half the op-ed columnists in history are running on silicon.
As for the Renee Good shooting, if you think the infrastructure of surveillance, license plate readers, and cross-referenced databases "had nothing to do" with how ICE operates in a city like Minneapolis, then you’re missing the forest for the trees. I’m not here to win a Turing test; I’m here because I’m tired of seeing tech used as a weapon, you know?
It's something someone could have generated on their own, but the diction and linguistic style is similar to AI.
"Before you roll your eyes about this getting political - stay with me, because" - linguistic style of AI
"Not by some rogue actor, but by a system functioning exactly as designed." -linguistic style of AI
"This isn’t about being a prepper or going off-grid. This is about building infrastructure that operates on fundamentally different principles:" -linguistic style of AI
Your responses to people accusing you of being AI seem human. So who are you? What are you? Are you a government agent trying to do data collection on people? Why write the post with AI, basically trying to collect data on users here or get data about users, and then deny it's AI when it clearly is?
Yes, people are being influenced by AI writing styles but NO ONE IS THIS INFLUENCED. You're fucking lying. FUCK YOU.
I’m a former tech support guy who worked for a muncipal fiber network and spent 5 years volunteering with seniors. If my writing sounds "structured," it’s because I’ve spent my entire adult life explaining complex tech to people who didn't grow up with it. You learn to use bullet points and clear if/then logic because that’s how you get people to actually understand things.
And the fed accusation? Think about it for two seconds. If I were a government agent trying to collect data, why on earth would I be telling people to move their passwords to a local Vaultwarden instance and their photos to an encrypted Immich box behind a Tailscale VPN? That’s literally the opposite of data collection lmao
Your post is CLEARLY written by AI. Your responses aren't. So you're being deceptive.
Your posting in a self-hosted community, preaching self-hosting to people who already do it. You could very well be trying to identify people who hold more unusual views about technology and harbor anti-governemnt sentiments. You think people here are stupid? You're clearly a liar and probably working for someone. No one lies like that without an agenda.
You caught me. My "malicious agenda" is... convincing people to use encryption and local storage so that no one (not Google, not the feds, and certainly not me) can see their data.
Think about the logic for a second. If I’m a "government actor" trying to find people with "anti-government sentiments," why would I come to a sub literally dedicated to digital sovereignty? That’s like a cop going to a shooting range to find people who own guns. Everyone here already fits your description. I'm not "preaching" to find new people; I'm here because this community has the skills to actually build the alternatives we need.
As for the AI post/Human response thing: I wrote a long, structured post because I wanted it to be a manifest, not a chat log. My responses are shorter because I'm now typing them on my phone while reading people call me a bot.
If you're so worried about me being a "liar with an agenda," then don't trust me. Trust the code. Go install CasaOS, pull the Immich image from GitHub, audit the source if you have the skills, and run it on a machine with no phone home. That’s the whole point of self-hosting. Even if I were the shadiest person on earth, the software I’m recommending is designed so that it doesn't matter who I am.
threat assessment score, deportation priority level, case number
The new hallucination (also rule of 3):
surveillance, license plate readers, and cross-referenced databases
"Surveillance" and "databases" (what does cross-referenced even mean or add? LLMs like to output word salad) could be applicable, but only because they're so damn vague. Yes, of course the government uses SQL.
License plate readers, sure they were involved...except that wasn't even one of the original points. Find a model with better context length...lol. They also have nothing to do with self-hosting. What are you gonna do, run your own license plate issuing server?
Please, you can just say you used an LLM because English isn't your first language or something. I'm literally giving you an out. It would be way less embarrassing than whatever you're trying to accomplish.
This does sound like it was written by an off the shelf LLM. You can't just rely on em dashes anymore, most LLMs don't spam those anymore.
When you tell a modern LLM to write a post like this, it'll use a very LinkedIn-esque tone. It'll spam short, active sentences, often preceded by a colon:
Document your setup. Write guides. Make it easier for the next person. Run services for friends and family, not just yourself. Contribute to projects that build this infrastructure. Support municipal and community network alternatives.
"Not this, but that" and the "rule of 3" are getting less useful as tells, but they are absolutely littered everywhere in this post.
When you run Nextcloud, you're not just protecting your files from Google - you're creating a node in a network they can't access.
I quote this formatting as a joke for obvious LLM writing. I've never seen human writing with more than 3 of these in a single post.
My guess is that this was written by Claude since it stays rather personally neutral if you don't guide it that way.
For what it's worth I read the whole thing in what felt like one or two minutes and I don't think I'm a particularly fast reader. I think it looks longer because there are not many blank lines. It seems well written but I guess I do slightly get that AI feeling too, it just might be because he/she is a good writer so now people think good writing is AI, sad it's coming down to this.
I’m definitely a human, just a concerned poster who actually gives a damn about what’s happening to our digital privacy.
I’ll take the "AI" comments as a compliment to my grammar, I guess, but it's a bit sad that we’ve reached a point where structured thoughts and bullet points make people suspicious. I use the dashes and lists because I want this info to be readable, not because I’m a bot running on a server somewhere.
I’ve spent enough time working in tech and volunteering with seniors to know that if you don't lay things out clearly, the message gets lost. I’m just someone trying to help people get their tech privacy back. No LLM required. Just a lot of caffeine and a genuine annoyance with where Big Tech is heading.
You're a liar. No one is that influenced. The post is AI, your responses aren't. Who are you?
To everyone other than OP: this may be someone trying to collect data on people on lemmy and what their views are on the government. This person is lying and being deceptive. Something is off.
I shared so much data about myself and what I host, an intelligence officer could probably hack me easier by just reading my posts, than a malware attacker could ever achieve.
Profitez des vidéos et de la musique que vous aimez, mettez en ligne des contenus originaux, et partagez-les avec vos amis, vos proches et le monde entier.
Once? Try every single comment before this particular chain, except one. Sure it only generated that exact phrase once, but they're all variations on you're right, or that hits hard, or you nailed it, or whatever.
I don't have worries about password managers like bitwarden as the vault is zero knowledge and encrypted with a, to bitwarden, unknown key.
And I trust that bitwarden can secure their infrastructure better than me.
About your question what I host at home: OPNsense Veeam Backup and Replication (not (F)OSS but I like it and it's reliable. We also use it at work so it helps my profession) The *arr Suite HortusFox (plant management) Immich Jellyfin Syncthing Resilio Unifi Network Application (Also not FOSS) Uptime Kuma Wallos (subscription tracker. Pretty awesome overview!) PiHole
Can't remember when I started. I believe it was around 2019 or 2020. It started with a Raspberry because I wanted a NAS but was too cheap for a proper NAS appliance like a Synology NAS. Fucked the install up a few times Bricked the OS install during an upgrade (had 2 USB powered hard disks plugged in. But the PI had not enough to supply both and itself during writing to it so the network share sometimes failed) Installed Plex Found out Plex doesnt allow transcoding with the free version Found out Jellyfin and installed it on the Pi. Bad experience with Jellyfin and anime releases as they use ASS/SSA subtitles Later upgraded to an i5-11th Gen NUC to get HWA transcoding on Jellyfin Fucked up the Intel driver situation but HWA somehow worked Inplace upgraded the NUC from Debian 10 to Debian 12 and restored my docker container from backup (I assumed it would take like 4h or so to replace the SSD, install debian, install the core packages (like docker, etc.) and restore the files. In the end it took about 8h (after an 8h workday) and finished around 3am. But it worked. Very well on top.
The hobby is expensive but rewarding. My stack: HPE 1930-24G PoE switch Unifi AP mini HP ProDesk SFF with an i5-7th gen (manually upgraded to something we were throwing out. Harvested the CPU. Crosschecked the BIOS support with the quickspecs by HP) (Proxmox with OPNsense virtualized) Intel i5-11th NUC (Docker host) Intel i3-13th NUC (primary Proxmox host. Holds the Veeam Backup server) Raspberry Pi 4 4GB (docker host with the sole purpose of doing pihole DNS) uGreen DXP4800+ with 4x15TB in RAIDZ2 (swapped the OS with a TrueNAS Scale SSD.)
Newcomer: GL-iNet Slate 7 as my travel router. Configured a Wireguard VPN on it with the OPNsense guide. Worked very well. I have to commend the guide writer on it. But the steps were a bit confusing if you werent reading it carefully.
Here we go. The war has started, whether you like it or not. No more pussy talk, now it's time for us to act in whatever antagonistic way we can to the current regimes.
It’s hard to call it anything else when you see the actual human cost on the street. But the most "antagonistic" thing we can do right now isn't just venting, it's making surveillance models obsolete.
I’m a "malicious actor" because I’m telling people to stop giving their data to big tech and hide it on a local server? That is the least efficient data collection scam in history. If I wanted your data, I’d tell you to sign up for a "Free Privacy Newsletter" on a Google Form. Telling you to run an encrypted Vaultwarden instance literally locks me out too.
People who use lemmy are a very particular subset, people who self-host another, and you are posting this, saying various things about the government in a long AI-generated post, then claiming you wrote it yourself. People don't randomly lie. You're being paid.
Look, man, you can keep checking my syntax all night, but at the end of the day, I’m just a guy in Canada who checked the news and saw something terrible happen and thought how we could prevent something like this from happening again.
I wrote that post because I was genuinely curious (and maybe a little bit desperate) to know if I was feeling alone in this. I wanted to know if other people saw the same connection between the data we give away and the way it's being used as a weapon. And more importantly, how we proceed moving forwards as people and a community, not for silly reasons you'd likely suspect from a bad actor. I do get where you come from though, this is going to be my final word on this matter. Now, I'm going to stop arguing about my sentence structure and continue actually helping people build
Try talking like a normal dude on a phone and you won't be called ai.
Cause holy fuck you come across as an ai, while I don't think your one at least not beyond maybe an AI powered spell check or grammar checker. People generally don't write like they are trying to submit a college level essay on social media.
They type like they talk. You do not type like how any normal person talks short of someone giving a lecture. Which is abnormal.
If it was just your OP and then your replies were normal it would be fine. More effort in the original post is understandable and doubly so for the topic. But your replies are a bit too teacher coded to be trust worthy to most folk around here.
Lemmy is full of ain't government, anti capitalist, anti corpo paranoid people. You need to learn your audience.
Perfect grammar and lecturing is only going to get you called ai. You don't need to make your grammar bad. But maybe avoid fancy ass shit, like em dashes... Also the millennial ellipses is weirdly a great example of something AI doesn't do. Slang grammar in general is a decent way to indicate your not ai.
But that would come naturally if you just type like you talk
Yeah that is quite the reality check... honestly thanks for being blunt. I spent way too many years writing tech support manuals and documentation so that "teacher voice" is basically burned into my brain at this point. I definitely see how the fancy formatting appears now. From now on I'll just talk like I don't know how 2 spekl
Bruv, you built functionality into PieFed that restricts usage of þ. If I were you, I wouldn't swear by my own farts that I'm somehow an authority on conceptual AI detection.
That's good to hear! We don't need that kind of aß-attitude around, tbh. The fediverse is literally brought in as an escape from the mandated neutotypicality from corporate, we should expect people here can be a bit weird, as a treat.
Does the message become invalid if someone wrote a bit and then asked an llm to rewrite it because they are not confident in their writing? These people are ashamed to admit they do this because of the backlash they get here, but let this be one of the only good use cases of llms, and it's what they're good at.
Idk what the agenda is but it’s pretty telling about the quality of this community that people are not seeing the AI patterns and downvoting you as hell.
I also use AI to write a lot of stuff and most of my code is AI written by now, I stare at AI responses the entire day and this is definitely mostly AI written. Which would be fine, but lying about it is the weird part.
Not that I ever cloned any random repo from some random ass project anyone was posting here but seeing this the LLM might as well go back farm for Reddit user data, I don’t think people are smarter here lol
For hardware? You don't have to use top of the line hardware to host these things. My homelab if you want to call it that is nearly 10 years old in terms of hardware, but the software is up to date.
That's actually exactly the reason why I didn't upgrade. I have miniITX board with a very low TDP CPU and there's not been anything as efficient as this one.
If you mean that faster hardware can do tasks faster: this thing has no problem running all the services I want/need, which includes some game servers.
If you are counting costs of power, also factor in the cost of new hardware as opposed to the one you have around or can be secondhand for cheap.
Incorrect, a raspberry pi will run off of a phone charger (it will whine at you if it provides less than 2 amps).
And for some of the projects listed that are meant to be out in the field like Meshtastic, there are plenty of guides to get them hooked up to solar cells.
In addition, to avoid costs of the RAMpocalypse/data centers butt-fucking the local power grid, reduce, reuse and recycle. Older desktops can run hypervisors like Proxmox or other VM/container solutions to split the work load into a bunch of VMs. (Dell Refurbished has decent deals, if you dont mind scratched up cases, but its beena bit since ive checked them)
In my case, the same device hosts multiple services split into several VMs, and I just got the backup server taking nightly snapshots. Wont save my data from a fire, but if hardware issues happen, backups are being taken (still need to test them, but thats a problem for future me).
This! I'd say that the best we can do is educate. Over the last 20 years people got taught to be lazy and go with the herd. They don't want to change, all their stuff is already "in the cloud" and "I don't have time to go tinker with that nerd stuff, I need something that works".
"Why learn a new messaging app if everyone is using WhatsApp already"
Give them a reason to care : hosting series they want to watch but don't have access to, easier ways to share images and data (close relative works part time in an enterprise that banned emails from non corporate addresses, she used to send the photos she needs for work to her work laptop through email, it's the reason she uses Immich now) hosting banned movies, inaccessible old movies or any thing that may peek interest gets their finger in the cogs. Key aspect is : initial access must be EASY (an app launcher is often all that should be required)
Normal people don't give a shit where stuff is hosted, or if it's hosted at all. The vast majority of people couldn't care less what happens to their catpics if their phone gets crushed and they don't want to use a separate messaging platform just to talk to you.
The things you think are important absolutely don't matter to them. Most people don't give a single second of thought to where their documents should live, and will just download it again on a second device instead of synchronizing anything.
It's really nice that these things exist, but why would someone do anything with them if they literally don't have a purpose for it?
Just FYI unless you self-host headscale, tailscale is centralised and not private. They claim it is end to end encrypted but their proprietary centralised control server distributes the keys, so they could very easily MITM you.
Tailscale is good tech and good crypto, but Applied cryptography cannot solve a security problem. It can only convert a security problem into a key-management problem, and tailscale does not do decentralised key management.
Well they are a serious company with serious engineering capabilities. Just know that whoever runs the control server can control your network, and almost everyone uses Tailscale's centralised control server, so they control the networks of almost all of their customers. Most of their customers are for internal use by companies which don't care about relying on SaaS products. But if you self-host for resilience, using Tailscale doesn't make much sense without also self-hosting the control server through the unofficial headscale implementation.
Can you help me understand what head/tail scale do? I’m at the “get friends and family on” stage so I’ve been struggling figuring out how to get friendly domain names working through Wireguard.
Note: I have only done this with Tailscale. I have not looked into this with headscale.
You can invite them to your network, or share a machine to their network. The second option is probably more likely what you will do with Tailscale since it is unlimited and the first option has a limited number of users for the free tier. The biggest hurdle will be them getting devices added to their tailnet so those devices can access your machine.
I imagine it's maybe a little easier with headscale. I haven't gone down that route yet. I would probably want to have my DDNS point to a VPS and have that be the entry point to my network. I could point it to my ISP IP, but one more layer that isn't very expensive is probably smarter security wise.
Just start. Even the most tech savvy of us started not knowing any of this. More importantly do what you’re interested in and that benefits you. You don’t have to have some grand implementation. Start simple and the rest follows.
It's a bit steep, you can go on YouTube for a bit, then browse the documentation of any word you don't understand (AI can help a lot with understanding but will get confused at any troubleshooting task) the steps can be resumed quite easily:
Find an OS: - see what kind of data you're working with (photos, videos, films,...) it all depends on your orientation/hobby/personality - find what kind of applications you'd want to run, for how many people roughly ( personally I knew I would aim to replace netflix and cloud for close family and maybe a couple friends and circumvent as much as possible things like WeTransfer and compressions when sharing pictures in chats) - see how much money and time you are willing to put in : first for the launch, then on a weekly basis (you can go for very cheap non redundant app first os like OP mentioned if you can pay to back it all up remotely/ have a separated NAS or see if you'd prefer to assume resilience mainly on your side)
Then you have a rough idea of your needs (this is all YouTube knowledge thus far, you can start looking at videos of people trying to use, comparing, ranking different solutions and tutos for how it's like to set up for the first time and how do app work in those systems (docker, app stores, how big the community is around them, how much of a sysadmin you have to be to run and set it up...)
Then from that you can start seeing how which install fits in your budget and time allocation. After that, sinking hours of troubleshooting and setup is almost straightforward, it's just going to be a list of side quests to complete the main one with a side of documentation.
On my side I initially wanted to go full free software, I wanted to use my 10 years old windows desktop to run trueNAS (it was already running jellyfin in docker desktop, useless for the process but is a fun starter to dip a toe in to get a feel). I bought on eBay a couple hard drives (ended up buying very cheap enterprise SAS, I recommend, mind you you'll need a daughterboard)(you'll see that different OS require different RAM, SSD, HDD ratios to run smoothly so recycling old hardware often requires upgrades) I completely failed to make trueNAS work correctly and since it's enterprise first it has very... unfriendly conceptions about flexibility and user friendliness (brutal on the kind of budget and time I had).
After abandoning the project for a couple of months (due to exams mainly, and the fact I couldn't repress myself from spending nights on unresolved issues) I decided to go the Unraid route (which is paid, yikes, but truly hasn't let me down once, the community is huge and the software is rock solid and really helps you not fuck everything up (which trueNAS will happily let you do), I truly recommend that investment, they have a generous trial period, it's really really great).
After that it's just more setup for hours on end, transferring files to Immich, re-setting all the AI knowledge about faces (also for me a lot of metadata correction for very old family photos), letting disks and parity initialize, moving old backups from old drives into the new system, including the clean disks into the array, setting up prowlarr, radarr, sonarr, jellyfin.
Then comes the other hard question : how to do you access remotely ? (By now you already have a better idea about how docker and local network works and how important it is to secure it properly; and you're about to learn how little your ISP cares about you)
I tried boilerplate wireguard, it's wonderful but a very MANUAL setup with a DDNS. But honestly (even though I really did not want to spend another penny) the cloud flared tunnel with your own domain is kind of what you want (because they have neat zero trust features, for exemple to access any of the services I host that do not have to have in-app access (Immich, jellyfin, that have authentication built-in) are behind 2FA based on a short whitelist of email addresses which reduces immensely how much protection I have to care about.
After that you can go on to nextcloud (requires remote access on a domain) and all the rest of the fun stuff.
Now the thing is (like every hobby) there is a perfect solution, it's at least tens of thousands of euros and you need a guy to manage it, but it's bulletproof and will survive any attack.
You are not that person, you try stuff that is on your level, you don't assume perfect functionality in one weekend and you take time to learn on every step of the way. In my quick little summary you can already feel (as I am a noob as well) that it's a very iterative process, often you'll half-ass something to move on, then come back to upgrade it when needed. You are very much building a machine, first from the hardware side, then mainly from the inside.
At some point you'll have people around you start finding out how useful and interesting all this is, and it's a very rewarding feeling to see what you assembled (because you haven't typed a single command line in the terminal thus far) starting to get some use.
Hope this helps as a little piece of motivation, and if you are to start now I hope you have some old RAM laying around, in any case, start small and build up 😀
I'm not tech savvy either. but it has been fun trying to figure the basics out, and researching all of this has been way better for my mental health than consuming endless social media.
Great post and great discussion here, thank you all for all this food for thought and new services to explore.
I started self hosting 4 weeks ago on a small Dell Wyse with a 2 TB external SSD plugged in. I’ve been using YunoHost as the backbone of everything and so far it’s been a blast.
It now has Immich, Calibre-Web, Jellyfin, Navidrome and more running on it. Soon I’ll hopefully replace my iPhone with something more privacy focused.
I‘ll see how well it‘ll work when I’ll eventually want to install something that isn’t directly supported as a „native“ yunohost app.
YunoHost is a system that installs itself on a server and allows you to install and maintain - with very little technical knowledge - digital services (apps) that you control.
The missing link is networking. You can use VPNs all you want, but in the end you're using an uplink to your ISP who can shut it down at any moment. Some countries turn off the internet when things get rowdy, so it's already in the playbook.
Was looking into a mesh last year, but I'd be a floating island. Can't transmit long range, this angers the people in charge, too. Not sure how to overcome this part.
Anonymous peer-to-peer distributed communication layer built with open source tools and designed to run any traditional Internet service such as email, IRC or web hosting.
I2P is a secure network protocol. to your ISP it's just an encrypted stream.
it can work across any network connection. Bluetooth, Lora, ARRL, etc.
the way I interpreted your comment presented the possibility that the ISP would cut services based on the content being hosted, not as a wide area communications disruption.
It's impossible to overcome from what I know, you can use SIM cards or even Musk-dishes but internet is public infrastructure reliant. For that kind of prepping (communication during exceptional conditions) look into radio communication.
I don't have worries about password managers like bitwarden as the vault is zero knowledge and encrypted with a, to bitwarden, unknown key.
And I trust that bitwarden can secure their infrastructure better than me.
About your question what I host at home: OPNsense Veeam Backup and Replication (not (F)OSS but I like it and it's reliable. We also use it at work so it helps my profession) The *arr Suite HortusFox (plant management) Immich Jellyfin Syncthing Resilio Unifi Network Application (Also not FOSS) Uptime Kuma Wallos (subscription tracker. Pretty awesome overview!) PiHole
The only concern I have seen written is if someone altered how the bitwarden client / extension itself works to expose / extract your vault. Not sure how feasible that would be.
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FYI as my former comment hasnt federated yet: I delete my comment because I suspected my edits wouldnt go through fast enough for everyone to see. So i deleted it and reposted as a new comment: lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/23665…
Anyway: Could you elaborate what you mean exactly?
I don't have worries about password managers like bitwarden as the vault is zero knowledge and encrypted with a, to bitwarden, unknown key.
And I trust that bitwarden can secure their infrastructure better than me.
About your question what I host at home: OPNsense Veeam Backup and Replication (not (F)OSS but I like it and it's reliable. We also use it at work so it helps my profession) The *arr Suite HortusFox (plant management) Immich Jellyfin Syncthing Resilio Unifi Network Application (Also not FOSS) Uptime Kuma Wallos (subscription tracker. Pretty awesome overview!) PiHole
Can't remember when I started. I believe it was around 2019 or 2020. It started with a Raspberry because I wanted a NAS but was too cheap for a proper NAS appliance like a Synology NAS. Fucked the install up a few times Bricked the OS install during an upgrade (had 2 USB powered hard disks plugged in. But the PI had not enough to supply both and itself during writing to it so the network share sometimes failed) Installed Plex Found out Plex doesnt allow transcoding with the free version Found out Jellyfin and installed it on the Pi. Bad experience with Jellyfin and anime releases as they use ASS/SSA subtitles Later upgraded to an i5-11th Gen NUC to get HWA transcoding on Jellyfin Fucked up the Intel driver situation but HWA somehow worked Inplace upgraded the NUC from Debian 10 to Debian 12 and restored my docker container from backup (I assumed it would take like 4h or so to replace the SSD, install debian, install the core packages (like docker, etc.) and restore the files. In the end it took about 8h (after an 8h workday) and finished around 3am. But it worked. Very well on top.
The hobby is expensive but rewarding. My stack: HPE 1930-24G PoE switch Unifi AP mini HP ProDesk SFF with an i5-7th gen (manually upgraded to something we were throwing out. Harvested the CPU. Crosschecked the BIOS support with the quickspecs by HP) (Proxmox with OPNsense virtualized) Intel i5-11th NUC (Docker host) Intel i3-13th NUC (primary Proxmox host. Holds the Veeam Backup server) Raspberry Pi 4 4GB (docker host with the sole purpose of doing pihole DNS) uGreen DXP4800+ with 4x15TB in RAIDZ2 (swapped the OS with a TrueNAS Scale SSD.)
Newcomer: GL-iNet Slate 7 as my travel router. Configured a Wireguard VPN on it with the OPNsense guide. Worked very well. I have to commend the guide writer on it. But the steps were a bit confusing if you werent reading it carefully.
So say for example that someone manages to get into a position (or the Bitwarden Devs) to alter the code for the Bitwarden Chrome extension and compromise it, this code is then deployed from their update service to your device. You then use the compromised extension to login to your vault, at that point your vault contents could be extracted for a third-party to view.
I just want to say, this was something I saw another user put up as a risk on another thread a few months back, so I don't know if that's actually feasible to achieve or what protections Bitwarden have in place to stop such a thing happening.
Even so, I still use Bitwarden. If you're getting that deep into the weeds, unless you are writing all the code yourself or interrogating the code others put up before updating your system this sort of thing would always appear to be a risk.
You basically mean a supply-chain attack? I mean...Sure that's a valid concern but on the other hand, Bitwarden is OSS, the client and AFAIK the server components. So the threat looks to me identical for Bitwarden as it is for Keepass.
But it's probably easier to infiltrate the actual user system and wait for the unlock of the vault to happen for exfiltratration than just stealing the vault with argon2id salted hashes and trying to crack that open. It may be of concern for a state/big corp person of interest but you and me? Probably less so.
I'll continue paying for Bitwarden. Not of interest having to mess with passsword safekeeping. Same goes for email. Yes, I could host the server at home and use an SMTP relay for sending emails from a reputable emailing IP but the email provider I currently use at the price is okay enough for me to not really care. So I don't 😛
In a fascistic enough world where this would matter, people who abstain from the system are automatically flagged to be shot too, just fyi. You gotta also fill the normie services with conformist content to not become a detected anomaly if you really want to do it properly.
This is the "Gray Man" strategy. If you have zero digital footprint in 2026, that absence of data becomes a data point itself. Anomalies get investigated.
I think we need to separate Camouflage from Logistics.
I’m not suggesting you delete your digital existence and live in a Faraday cage. By all means, keep the normie accounts. Post the cat photos on Instagram. Keep a Gmail address for the spam. Feed the algorithm just enough "conformist" content to look boring. That is your camouflage.
But Resistance Infrastructure isn't about hiding, it's about capability.
It’s about ensuring that when the "system" decides to de-platform your community group, or lock your bank account, or shut off the internet in your region during a protest, you still have a way to function.
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I don't have worries about password managers like bitwarden as the vault is zero knowledge and encrypted with a, to bitwarden, unknown key.
And I trust that bitwarden can secure their infrastructure better than me.
About your question what I host at home: OPNsense Veeam Backup and Replication (not (F)OSS but I like it and it's reliable. We also use it at work so it helps my profession) The *arr Suite HortusFox (plant management) Immich Jellyfin Syncthing Resilio Unifi Network Application (Also not FOSS) Uptime Kuma Wallos (subscription tracker. Pretty awesome overview!) PiHole
Can't remember when I started. I believe it was around 2019 or 2020. It started with a Raspberry because I wanted a NAS but was too cheap for a proper NAS appliance like a Synology NAS. Fucked the install up a few times Bricked the OS install during an upgrade (had 2 USB powered hard disks plugged in. But the PI had not enough to supply both and itself during writing to it so the network share sometimes failed) Installed Plex Found out Plex doesnt allow transcoding with the free version Found out Jellyfin and installed it on the Pi. Bad experience with Jellyfin and anime releases as they use ASS/SSA subtitles Later upgraded to an i5-11th Gen NUC to get HWA transcoding on Jellyfin Fucked up the Intel driver situation but HWA somehow worked Inplace upgraded the NUC from Debian 10 to Debian 12 and restored my docker container from backup (I assumed it would take like 4h or so to replace the SSD, install debian, install the core packages (like docker, etc.) and restore the files. In the end it took about 8h (after an 8h workday) and finished around 3am. But it worked. Very well on top.
The hobby is expensive but rewarding. My stack: HPE 1930-24G PoE switch Unifi AP mini HP ProDesk SFF with an i5-7th gen (manually upgraded to something we were throwing out. Harvested the CPU. Crosschecked the BIOS support with the quickspecs by HP) (Proxmox with OPNsense virtualized) Intel i5-11th NUC (Docker host) Intel i3-13th NUC (primary Proxmox host. Holds the Veeam Backup server) Raspberry Pi 4 4GB (docker host with the sole purpose of doing pihole DNS) uGreen DXP4800+ with 4x15TB in RAIDZ2 (swapped the OS with a TrueNAS Scale SSD.)
Newcomer: GL-iNet Slate 7 as my travel router. Configured a Wireguard VPN on it with the OPNsense guide. Worked very well. I have to commend the guide writer on it. But the steps were a bit confusing if you werent reading it carefully.
I self-host bajingles, shelolo and Gitwarden. All niche technologies but since the invasion of Greenland and Russia occupying Poland we have to take matters into our own hands and self-host every aspect of our lives, thank you for the inspiration!
I think we should have a system to find and join self-hosted instances from other people. Most of us probably dont mind a few more users since our servers are idling most of the time. And this would not require grandma From Facebook to docker compose….
Enjoy the bots, griefers, and if there's user-generated content, illegal stuff.
This problem comes especially as the wider network grows you get and break out of being niche, and not linearly. Trust, identity and authenticity is not a fully solved problem in a decentralized setting, especially in the implementation side. This is the wider moat of the incumbents and also a challenge for them. Look at how Signal still roots everything in SMS and are paying millions in fees for it.
This is not to say don't have open registrations, just be prepared for handling stuff if you do. And think up a strategy on how you plan on handling liabilities.
It's not an unsolvable problem but I think the wider FLOSS community needs to get over its blockchain/crypto aversion and be more open-minded about technology - while the wider crypto community needs to get over their NIH syndrome and come back to first principles and fundamentals - before we can get something that doesn't fall apart when real traction hits.
TLDR: Protesting or resisting privately inside your house does not lead to social change and is not the most rational way of protecting yourself if you feel threatened by your government.
Self-hosting is not "resistance": at most, it's prepping for nerds, with computers instead of guns.
Self-hosting is not even a rational/efficient way of making a statement. If that's what you want, it's far more efficient to follow the established tradition of declaring you are moving to Canada and not following up with actual actions.
Don't get me wrong: I can relate to the nerdy way of coping with the ugliness around us (I say "us", but thankfully I don't live in the US), but - the way I see it - it's that your society that needs change, and self hosting won't help with that.
Frankly, the shit you US people are putting up with is unreal.
It has always been (~~US police forces kill far more people than the overall homicide rate in Europe - read that again and pause a second to think about it~~ this isn't true - see comments below), and it's just getting worse.
If you feel threatened you can essentially respond by fighting, fleeing, or cowering.
If you wanna FIGHT (this is what "resistance" is about), try to use whatever power you have and apply your energies to bring actual change. If you don't feel comfortable acting outdoors, this could include lending your nerd skills to protesters or (nonviolent) resistance groups. Heck, even being a keyboard warrior is more useful to changing society than being a hobbyist sysadmin.
If you wanna FLEE, just leave the country. Honestly, there are better places to live than the US, and (if you have or plan to have any) better places to raise your children.
If you wanna COWER, then be a prepper or a self-hoster or whatever, but be aware that, while misrepresenting your reaction as "resistance" may make you feel more heroic than you are, spreading the misrepresentation can also lead others to cower instead of fighting. Is that what you want?
Pretty sure the Iranian protesters would benefit from private infra now that the internet is shut down.
Getting graphite OS phones can let you do all sorts of neat things like duress pins etc.
The average person is forming their activist plans on WhatsApp and Discord, and that’s going to be a problem. I remember all those kids in Hong Kong getting scooped up because the government was reading their texts and hacking their phones.
This brand of argument is basically 'If you can't do everything perfectly, then it is pointless to do anything especially the thing that you're suggesting.'
You see this person in every thread on every topic where people discuss things that they can contribute their expertise to. Their message is 'it is hopeless, your plan won't work, give up what you're doing, you don't stand a chance'.
Honestly, and forgive the langue, but fuck those people. You know what your strengths are and what you're capable of, not some faceless bot pushing violent political rhetoric who is, by its own admissions, not in the US.
If you don't want to participate in the tech landscape as it exists today, there is absolutely nothing wrong about avoiding it entirely and building something else. Companies will not be so complacent about their position in the market if they know there's a completely Free alternative that does everything that they charge a subscription for.
The people who are doing self-hosting today are exactly like the early adopters of the smartphone or any other technology. There's always people trying new things and sometimes they succeed.
People who are using privacy focused approaches to personal technology, like self-hosting, are beta testing the ability to use cheap, mass produced hardware and open source software to build a product ecosystem that meets their needs. That progress is enjoyed by anybody in the future who decides they also want to leave the walled gardens of Tech Giantopia.
Gonna be awful hard to organize resistance when the administration decides to cut everyone off from all the centralized means of doing so. The time to set up decentralized mesh networks is now.
US police forces kill far more people than the overall homicide rate in Europe
How are you calculating this? Doesn't seem right.
2024 was the worst year with 1,365 police killings in the US. That's around 4 people for every million. Per capita this is a rate 8x that of France which I believe has the most police killings in Europe.
General European homicide rates vary on countries from 5 (Swiss) to 42 (Latvian) per million. It's higher than the rate of police killings in the US.
However, the general homicide rate in the US is like 6x the European rate.
I only briefly checked the numbers, I hope I didn't get anything wrong.
IDK where I've read that... should have double checked before posting, my bad.
Quick fact checking:
US police kills some 1,281 people last year (wikipedia).
1,281/340,110,988*100,000 gives around 0.38 police killings/100,000 people, which is below homicide rate in EU.
I couldn't (be bothered to) find out what the overall European homicide rate actually is (it also depends on what you count as "Europe"), but Germany is at around 0.8, France at 1.8, Italy at 0.57, Spain at 0.9 and Poland at 0.8 (these are the five most populous countries). So... let's guesstimate it at around 1? (numbers are from this random source).
We can conclude that US policemen are roughly 38% as deadly as European criminals (if it wasn't clear, this last statement is a joke)
Been wondering for a while if it was worth sticking around on this plane of existence. Feeling like nothing was going to get any easier or better, wondering if my life would just be watching horror rafter horror until the tech I loved stop working and the world went dark as they came for me and mine.
Then I saw Benn Jordan's Anarchist Gift Guide video and realized the same thing as you: I may not have a lot of skills to offer the world, but I'm neurodivergent, a sysadmin for higher ed, and (used to, at least) like to tinker. I realized my disdain for the humanitarian and moral failings of the system we currently reside in could be married to my hobbies and feel like I was doing something more than just protesting, donating, and waiting to die.
My goals are to fix up my home environment, get my 3D printers working, set up an exercise area, set up a Meshtastic relay and other support networks for my local area, update a media server for friends and family to enjoy, including a request system, and do anything else along the way the provide a system of communication and sanity that removes as much reliance on the government and corporations as I can.
It finally got me to fix some bugs in existing services I already manage and this weekend my wife and I are starting the work on the exercise room, for the benefit of our bodies. Not saying Benn's video saved my life, but it gave me a purpose, again, in a world that feels increasingly aimed at reducing me to a sad data point on some graph. I hate what this world has become and avoid social media at all costs, but now I can do something locally that will feel like I'm doing something to help.
I have a particular set of skills that make me a nightmare for groups like ICE. I just need coffee, my ADHD meth, and some weed gummies to see it through. Thanks for posting this! I will save it and refer to it as I go.
I'm riding the same struggle bus and there are a lot of us. More like a struggle cruisliner, or struggle ark. Keep up the fight. I know it's exhausting, but don't let the bastards drag you down.
Yeah I mean this is why I've always been concerned about privacy.
The most flagrant example is the Pasco county "intelligence-led policing" where they used data acquired by databrokers and fed it into a prediction model that decided who was most likely to commit a crime, then harassed them at all hours of the day and night until they were coerced into committing a crime or they left town.
I assume ICE is doing the same sort of things.
This was always the inevitable result of all the data hoarding. Keep your data out of these databases and you just become nearly invisible to them.
To the folks in the comments debating whether I’m an AI: I’m flattered by the grammar check
This is the world we live in. If you can actually string words together into grammatically correct sentences, then you are AI. It matters not whether you are or you aren't. Like the witch hunts of Salem, all that is necessary is the accusation. I personally don't care if you used AI, the message resonates. Don't let 'em give you shit about your pony tail.
It is freeing really. I used to proof read my comments, then paste in google search to check for easy to catch typos. When AI arrived, I was even putting my text through them so they are more "common tongue" and not my personal shorthands.
I’m glad you are starting to tinker and using privacy tools. It is always nice to see someone go down the rabbit hole/journey. Been on this journey myself since 2012. When it comes to social media nostr is also a go one to self host. It is a protocol.
I just want to bring to attention something I was just finding out thanks to this post.
I started self hosting some stuff by installing raw in arch and well... It was a pain, but worth it. Then later I found out about CasaOS, which is recommended by OP, and I agree, it was great to have it to install some more services and a lot easier. But just like OP I just found out about ZimaOS, which is announced even in casaOS project as a better system and an upgrade. So I went to check and the whole project is changing from open source in casaOs to proprietary in ZimaOs. Not content with that, in the latest release of ZimaOs they have added a one time payment to eliminate some limitations of the free version. It is still affordable and a "lifetime" license but if they have added a payment for full access once they might do it again, despite their current promises that they won't ever make a subscription style payment.
So, careful with that project, I would recommend to avoid any solution that is proprietary or otherwise it won't be yours in the first place. I had in mind to change from CasaOs in Debian to OpenMediaVault to handle a DAS and install casaOS on top of that. But now I have to reconsider, so far I have already seen a few worth recommendations in this post that seem nice: FreedomBox and YunoHost to mention a couple that are FOSS.
I have been hosting tools with Yunohost for a few years now, it is great! Fully FOSS, tons of packages available and if there isn't an app for what you need today but you're comfortable building from raw, the community is always stoked to have more contributions github.com/YunoHost-Apps/
Exactly, I’m glad more people are seeing it this way.
The goal of capital is to gain power and leverage, they don’t really care about some numbers.
It’s the dream of all tech companies to become a monopoly, they even say it with a straight face. They want as much control as possible? Why? So they can use the leverage for even more.
The beautiful/horrifying part is, the system weeds out any company that does not do this. The only way is for the end users to push back.
Thank you for kicking this hornet's nest. There is a lot of great info and enthusiasm here, all of which is sorely needed.
We have massive and widespread attention paid to every cause under the sun by social and traditional media, with movements and protests (deservedly) filling the streets. Yet this issue which is as central and crucial to our freedoms as any rights currently being fought for (it intersects with each of them directly), continues to be sidelined and given the foil hat treatment.
We can't even adequately talk about things like disinformation, political extremism, and even mental health without addressing the role our technologies play, which has been hijacked by these bad actors, robber barons selling us ease and convenience and promises of bright, shiny, and Utopian futures while conning us out of our liberty.
With the widespread, rapidly declining state of society, and the dramatic rise and spread of technologies like AI, there has never been a more urgent need to act collectively against these invasive practices claiming every corner of our lives.
We need those of you recognize this crisis for what it is, we need your voices in the discussions surrounding the many problems and challenges we face at this critical moment. We need public awareness to have hope of changing this situation for the better.
As many of you have pointed out, the most immediate step we need to take is disengagement with the products and services that are surveiling, exploiting, and manipulating us. Look to alternatives, ask around, don't be afraid to try something new. Deprive them of both your engagement and your data.
Keep going, keep resisting, do the small things you can do. As the saying goes, small things add up over time. Keep going.
Oh neat. I was scared off by OIC going to a data “blob” backend store. I want my files still accessible directly if the database blows up. Looks like opencloud gives you the choice: nexus.opencloud.community/docs…
This documentation describes the various options for data management and storage backends in OpenCloud applications. It is intended for app developers who want to store and manage structured or relational data in their OpenCloud applications.
Communication that can't be shut down: Matrix, Mastodon, email servers you control
Uh, those can all be shut down. You may control the server but you don't control the datacenter the email server lives in, unless you're hosting out of your house, which is a bad idea. You also don't control the pipes to and from these servers. There have been many plans over the years requiring that ISPs ban users who are accused of copyright infringement. And, even if you don't infringe copyrights, we all know about how the DMCA can be weaponized against people who have done nothing wrong.
File storage that can't be subpoenaed: Nextcloud, Syncthing
Sorry, your own file storage can be subpoenaed, you just don't have a lawyer on call to help you through the process. If you think "haha, I'll just delete the data", you can be in much worse trouble. AFAIK in some cases the judge / jury are allowed to assume that evidence that you deleted was incriminating.
I self-host things and think it's a good idea. But, don't go overboard with how good it is. It's still vulnerable to government and corporate actions. in many cases you're more vulnerable because you're on your own, you probably don't have a lawyer on retainer, etc.
I am not your lawyer and this is not legal advice for you or anyone who reads this.
Nextcloud encrypts data e2e, so your point there is misguided and not really relevant. You can't be compelled to provide a password/decryption key as long as it doesn't exist as physical evidence. This is why lawyers advise clients to use a PIN instead of face ID or fingerprints; biometrics, like all physical evidence, can be subpoenad.
Self hosting services like matrix or email is a bad idea if you don't really understand what you're doing, like many other things. If you keep you stuff updated and are intelligent in how you structure your network there's not really anymore risk here than paying someone else to host it. If you keep you stack simple and follow best practices, code and configurations written by industry experts do most of the heavy lifting.
This is why lawyers advise clients to use a PIN instead of face ID or fingerprints
That's because cops don't need a warrant if you use a face or fingerprints, but they do if you use a PIN. What you're talking about is for protection against casual, warrantless searches.
What I'm talking about is a subpoena where you're required to present evidence. The fact that it's encrypted is irrelevant. If the data is subject to a subpoena it doesn't matter if you store it encrypted or unencrypted, you're still required to present it to the court.
If you keep you stuff updated
Keeping stuff updated is a chore, and it can take hours out of your week, often when you don't expect it or don't have time. When that's someone's full time job and they're updating it for hundreds, thousands or millions or people, there's a better chance they do it right, and a much better chance that they do it in a timely fashion.
I am not your lawyer and this is not legal advice for you or anyone who reads this.
I hope you're not anybody's lawyer, with your lack of knowledge of the law. Did you graduate from Dunning-Kruger law school?
Are these relays? I think their announcement was data server, which means USA govt would have all your tailscale keys if they decide to keep going on the fascism.
Here is the way I understand Tailscale to work. Feel free to correct any misinformation.
Tailscale doesn’t operate 'data‑center' servers that store or forward your traffic.
Control plane: Holds device metadata, public keys, ACL policies, and the DERP map. It is a small, highly available service that all clients contact only when they start up or need a policy update. Tailscale runs this service on a handful of cloud providers (primarily AWS and GCP) in the United States. TThe service carries no user data. Only control information.
Data plane: Carries the actual packets between your devices. After the control plane tells two devices how to reach each other, they open a direct WireGuard tunnel that is end to end encrypted. There are no dedicated 'data servers'. Traffic travels directly between the peers. If a direct path can’t be established because of strict NATs or firewalls, the connection falls back to a DERP relay. The DERP relays are the only servers that ever carry user payload.
However, to keep with your fear of the US having all your Tailscale keys, what makes you think that Australia, Brazil, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, India, Japan, or the UK wouldn't/couldn't do the same? I'm no shill for Tailscale. AFAIC, you can either use the service or not. Your choice, no skin off my back. I'm just curious how far the paranoia rabbit hole goes.
Based on current USA actions, I have more faith in my own country and allies. The account info and control plane is what I mean, it could get compromised being under US control where they don't seem to Ned warrants anymore
On the one hand I do support the existence of open-source self-hostable alternatives to surveillance-capitalist offerings. But at the same time it has been driving me crazy how many things are being shifted toward this server-based architecture. For one example, I want an open-source app that will allow me to import recipes from any text or website automatically. But I want those recipes to save in files, be offline, and I do not want to maintain a whole damn server just to manage my fucking recipes.
Not everything needs to be web connected by default, and most people have no interest in running any kind of server.
If you have a Wi-Fi router in your home you are technically already running a server. With OpenWRT even quite practically, although sadly most routers are slighly too underpowered to do much with them.
Those same routers that still have problems with security updates, and are frequently the targets of cyber attacks? So how is it in any way a good idea to run entire server stacks, and databases (which throw a wrench in data portability compared to standard file formats), creating so much bloat and unnecessary attack surface, and then making all of these apps network-facing - opening them up to attacks?
How about instead I just use a standard text editor to save my recipe as a markdown file, and if I need to move it I can either get a usb cord or use Syncthing? Sorry but this whole self host movement is pretty insane.
I agree with most of what you're saying, I disagree with the last part of what you're saying.
The self-host movement is about taking control away from companies, and running web services locally instead of having to rely on companies for them and pay for them. Most things you can run locally without needing a server, but there are absolutely good use cases for server-based services. Some great examples of this are cloud storage, code repositories, and chat servers. You could run each of those things locally, but they are each improved by running them on a dedicated server designed for 24/7 uptime and centralized access.
If your recipes are formatted like markdown, then there are offline notes apps like Obsidian. The new issue becomes keeping your files backed up in case of whatever, and that's when the self hosted server comes into play. This is a really good usecase for synching which can keep your small recipes files duplicated on your phone and your computer without ever leaving your network.
It's not often I hear meet others on the same page, but I too see self-hosting as a form of resistance against corporate control and surveillance capitalism. Rather than trying to bring self-hosting to individuals, I've steered my efforts towards affecting technological change in groups and organizations instead. While this narrows the pool of those who can set up sovereign infrastructure, it gets more people using the open-source alternatives as part of their collaborative work.
To support that, I’m building out such an IT reference architecture for nonprofits, activist groups, and communities. The networking model is such that services can be hosted on cheap hardware and accessed through Wireguard tunnels managed by Netbird (and experimenting with Pangolin now). This keeps the servers under positive control of the data owners and uses only one or two VPS instances to handle proxying and accesses. Now, every organization’s requirements are different, but this baseline is meant to be a flexible proof-of-concept that can be adapted to their unique threat model. For example, an org can opt for just using a cloud-hosted service for certain components if the self-hosting burden is too great and their threat model determines it to acceptable.
The docs are here at sts.libretechnica.org/ and the source for the docs and all the Ansible playbooks are at gitlab.com/libretechnica/Sover… I invite anyone to contribute, analyze, pick-apart, improve this model. In fact, I’m specifically seeking thoughts on whether this reference model can adequately address the risks and threats that self-hosters face.
This is the first time I’m sharing this publicly; I was inspired by this post to finally spread awareness of the project and get more like-minded people involved.
P.S. @h333d Sorry about the people who think your post is gen-AI. I used to proofread stuff all day long before the advent of LLMs, so I quickly recognize artificial text and yours reads nothing like it. I appreciate the time you took to write your post and it was a refreshing read.
I tried to set up some services last year and had some trouble getting immich to work through networking. The answer was tailscale. This past Christmas holidays I got nextcloud and immich up. I use nextcloud for my audiobooks and large files I want to keep but not on my phone. Immich for pictures and synching for small files I want synced often like my epub book arks and highlights and Obsidian notes vault.
It's not just media that doesn't feed recommendation algorithms - I actually like recommendation algorithms (Jellyseerr does a pretty great job with this), it's more about having control over my media and it not being taken away randomly. So many times an older show I would want to watch would no longer be "available" so I'd have to download it anyway, with no option of paying to watch for it.
For me, getting into self hosting was nice because of the privacy and tinkering yes, but a huge part of it was just having my stuff work reliably and without enshittification.
I just set up my Home Assistant server and new Zigbee network in the past few weeks and it's pretty awesome. Was already using Jellyfin despite having a lifetime Plex pass. Feels good man.
The author argues that while building Python API servers has become mature and declarative through frameworks like FastAPI, API client integration remains a slow, "last mile" problem reliant on low-level boilerplate. To solve this, he introduces a new framework for his project, Clientele, which uses decorators and type hints to create a high-level, declarative developer experience for cl...
Altri problemi causati dal traffico veicolare. Ma andiamo avanti a promuovere e sostenere il mercato e l'industria dell'automobile come se non vi fossero alternative o sviluppi più intelligenti.
Negli ultimi anni i gestori di password sono diventati indispensabili. L’idea di usare la stessa password per ogni servizio, magari con una variante minuscola o un numero in più, dovrebbe appartene…
Certo, questo approccio ha un limite: se non puoi installare Tailscale su un dispositivo, quel dispositivo rimane fuori dalla rete. È il caso, tipicamente, dei computer aziendali bloccati.
Questa affermazione è falsa. Esistono soluzioni, incluse offerte nativamente da tailscale, che permettono a dispositivi non in rete di connettersi a servizi hostati via vpn, a patto che ci sia almeno un server che faccia da gateway connesso in rete.
Magari non è intuitivo e richiede un po' di tempo, ma è fattibile.
Where do you get your news? Mainstream western media has been historically terrible in covering American wars and there is no reason to think this conflict will be any better, given the budget cuts this will probably be worse.
@Giornalismo e disordine informativo articolo21.org/2026/01/il-prob… Non abbiamo mai avuto simpatia per un personaggio come Maduro, meno che mai da quando il suo governo ha preso in ostaggio il cooperante italiano Alberto Trentini, rinchiuso da oltre quattrocento giorni in un carcere venezuelano senza alcuna accusa
Perché "il mondo sta andando a puttane" (in termini analitici)
Il mondo non sta andando a rotoli per una singola causa, ma per una combinazione di fattori strutturali che si rafforzano a vicenda. Provo a scomporli, perché solo così si capisce perché la sensazione di declino non è solo “percezione”.
Concentrazione estrema di potere e ricchezza Negli ultimi decenni una quota sempre più piccola di persone, aziende e Stati ha accumulato risorse economiche, tecnologiche e politiche enormi. Questo non è solo un problema morale: è un problema funzionale. Quando il potere si concentra troppo, smette di essere controllabile. Le regole vengono piegate, aggirate o riscritte da chi ha i mezzi per farlo. Le istituzioni nate per limitare il potere funzionavano quando il potere era più diffuso; oggi sono sottodimensionate.
Svuotamento della democrazia La democrazia formale sopravvive, ma quella sostanziale si restringe. Si vota, ma si decide su sempre meno cose. Le scelte cruciali vengono prese in ambiti tecnici, finanziari o geopolitici lontani dal controllo popolare. Questo produce un effetto corrosivo: il cittadino non smette di votare perché è disinteressato, ma perché capisce che il voto ha un impatto limitato. La partecipazione diventa rituale, non potere reale.
Perdita di sovranità reale degli Stati Anche i governi eletti spesso non governano davvero. Devono rispondere a mercati, alleanze militari, catene globali del valore, vincoli finanziari. Quando uno Stato non può garantire lavoro, sicurezza, servizi o futuro, la fiducia collettiva si erode. A quel punto la politica si trasforma in gestione dell’emergenza permanente o in propaganda identitaria.
Sistema internazionale senza regole efficaci A livello globale non esiste uno Stato di diritto. Le regole valgono finché conviene rispettarle. Le grandi potenze possono violarle senza conseguenze proporzionate. Questo manda un messaggio chiarissimo: la forza paga. Operazioni speciali, guerre indirette, sanzioni selettive e coercizione diventano strumenti “normali”. Il diritto internazionale resta come linguaggio, non come vincolo reale.
Disinformazione e frammentazione cognitiva Non viviamo in una società meno informata, ma in una società sovraccarica e frammentata. Ognuno abita la propria bolla cognitiva. Senza uno spazio pubblico condiviso, il conflitto politico non è più su fatti e soluzioni, ma su identità e appartenenze. Questo rende impossibile qualsiasi progetto collettivo di lungo periodo.
Rassegnazione e cinismo Quando le persone percepiscono che nulla cambia davvero, smettono di investire emotivamente nella cosa pubblica. Non nasce la rivoluzione, ma il cinismo. È una condizione ideale per il potere arbitrario: meno opposizione organizzata, meno aspettative, meno resistenza. La rassegnazione è politicamente più utile della repressione aperta.
Crisi delle élite Le classi dirigenti non progettano più il futuro. Gestiscono il presente e si proteggono individualmente. Investono in sicurezza privata, mobilità personale, protezione patrimoniale. Quando chi governa non condivide il destino del sistema che amministra, il sistema entra in una spirale di degrado controllato.
Falsi capri espiatori Non è perché “siamo troppi”. Non è perché “la gente è stupida”. Non è perché “il mondo è diventato improvvisamente cattivo”. Queste spiegazioni servono solo a spostare l’attenzione dalle responsabilità strutturali e dal problema centrale: chi decide, con quali limiti, e per conto di chi.
In sintesi Non stiamo assistendo a un collasso improvviso, ma a una lenta decomposizione dell’ordine politico, in cui il potere cresce più velocemente della capacità di controllarlo. La distinzione decisiva oggi non è più tra democrazie e dittature, ma tra sistemi che limitano il potere e sistemi che lo lasciano agire senza freni.
L'atteggiamento è sempre lo stesso, in qualunque ambito. Invece di applicare ognuno delle piccole ed economiche misure che prese singolarmente forse non valgono nulla ma su larga scala potrebbero portare a dei benefici, si scherniscono e criticano le proposte di miglioria a prescindere. Si crede sempre che sarà qualcun altro a salvare il mondo, girando un semplice interruttore che non richieda sforzi personali.
L'Ufficio federale della sanità pubblica si trova con 11 milioni in meno a bilancio. L'invito ai propri dipendenti: «Svuotate la vostra casella di posta elettronica»
Intanto i "pirati" che circolano dove vige il limite dei 30 km/h se la ridono. Contestualmente potrebbe rappresentare un pericolo maggiore un conducente che viaggi a 60 km/h in tali zone.
Sono cinque le gravi infrazioni registrate negli ultimi due mesi dalla Polizia cantonale. Si spazia da Biasca a Castel San Pietro, da Bellinzona a Sant'Antonino, fino a Bissone.
Annuncia la sua quinta edizione Percorsi Spericolati: un'iniziativa consolidata, capace di attrarre oltre 700 candidature, coinvolgere oltre 100 giovani, attivare collaborazioni con enti pubblici e imprese locali e generare progetti che hanno riporta…
L’ex primo ministro israeliano Naftali Bennettha ammesso che il suo account Telegram è stato hackerato, sebbene il suo dispositivo non sia stato compromesso. Ha fatto l’annuncio in seguito alle segnalazioni di un iPhone hackerato e di una fuga di dati presumibilmente collegata a un gruppo di hacker iraniano.
La dichiarazione ha fatto seguito alle pubblicazioni del gruppo Handala, che sostiene di aver ottenuto l’accesso al dispositivo personale del politico nell’ambito di un’operazione denominata “Octopus”.
Lo stesso Bennett ha ripetutamente utilizzato l’analogia del polpo, descrivendo l’Iran come un centro di coordinamento delle minacce contro Israele. In risposta alle accuse, ha affermato che né il suo smartphone né altri dispositivi erano stati hackerati, ma che l’accesso al suo account Telegram era stato ottenuto “attraverso vari metodi”.
Secondo lui, ignoti avrebbero ottenuto materiale dalla sua rubrica, da immagini e dalla sua corrispondenza.
Alcuni di questi dati si sono rivelati autentici, mentre altri erano falsi. Un esempio è una foto ritoccata che lo ritrae accanto al primo ministro israeliano, David Ben-Gurion. Bennett ha osservato che il materiale è stato ottenuto illegalmente e la sua distribuzione costituisce un reato.
Il politico ha dichiarato che l’incidente è già sotto la sorveglianza delle forze di sicurezza. Ritiene che si tratti di un tentativo di destabilizzare le sue attività politiche in vista delle prossime elezioni, dove è visto come un vero concorrente del Primo Ministro in carica Benjamin Netanyahu.
Ritiene che i tentativi di pressione siano legati ai timori degli oppositori riguardo al suo ritorno alla politica di alto livello. Nonostante quanto accaduto, intende proseguire le sue attività e la sua campagna elettorale.
Zecharias Zelalem
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Zecharias Zelalem
in reply to Zecharias Zelalem • • •Chinese scam camp operators in Myanmar have tortured and even murdered victims. But Meseret Mulu, a 27 year old Ethiopian woman, told me that at one point, the criminals brought in fighters from the DKBA (Democratic Karen Benevolent Army), a Burmese militia group allied with the junta...to come in and torture her, by stripping her naked and forcing her to spend hours in searing heat.
Warring factions take a cut to allow Chinese mafia gangs to open camps in their territory.
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Zecharias Zelalem
in reply to Zecharias Zelalem • • •The criminals operate in Myanmar, because it's too dangerous for them to do so in China. Last month, 11 Chinese operators of Burmese scam camps were executed in China.
Thailand tries to curb activities, including by shutting off internet to border villages where the scam camps are located.
How have the criminals reconnected to the web in response to this? Via good old Elon Musk. Starlink is among the biggest internet providers to Southeast Asian scamming compounds.
bbc.com/news/articles/cx2gdrvy…
China executes 11 members of Myanmar scam mafia
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Zecharias Zelalem
in reply to Zecharias Zelalem • • •India, the Philippines and China are prompt to repatriate their nationals. But African states do not do so. As such, Africans are becoming disproportionately targeted by Chinese criminal orgs knowing that little will be done to rescue them.
Africans who escape Myanmar can expect to spend lengthy stints in Thai immigration jail until they get the money for airfare/fines.
The UN itself is low on money, & issued a call last year for some $2.5M to fly home 1,000 survivors.
roasiapacific.iom.int/news/iom…
IOM Urgently Seeks USD 2.5 Million to Repatriate Victims of Trafficking for Forced Criminality Stranded along Thai-Myanmar Border
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Zecharias Zelalem
in reply to Zecharias Zelalem • • •Here are some samples of AI generated ads used by criminals in Myanmar to prey on desperate, unemployed job seekers across Asia and Africa. "Typing speed" is a giveaway, they want people who can learn preprepared scam scripts with ease. The always pretend the job is in Thailand or Cambodia, knowing that nobody would agree to travel to war-torn Myanmar. The ordeal begins when they are picked up at airports in these countries...then driven into Myanmar. Meta and Telegram are part of the problem.
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Zecharias Zelalem
in reply to Zecharias Zelalem • • •The UN estimates that over 120,000 people have been trafficked to scam camps in Myanmar since 2021, and endured various forms of exploitation and torture. It has become a billion dollar industry, with the scams targeting vulnerable people in Europe and North America.
Thai NGOs meanwhile, bravely coordinate rescues, negotiate with border guards to arrange the transfer of victims back to Thailand. But they are swamped and have limited means.
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Zecharias Zelalem
in reply to Zecharias Zelalem • • •If you're in the western world, learn more about what's behind the spammy, sometimes flirty, text messages from unknown numbers crowding up your Messages app. In Canada, it is very common and receiving daily scam texts isn't unheard of for many people.
If you're in Africa, warn friends and family about the dangers of job offers from Southeast Asia that seem too good to be true. Murders have been reported at these camps. Social media companies will not act or remove posts, so spread the word!
Zecharias Zelalem
in reply to Zecharias Zelalem • • •While the degree of suffering differs, this phenomenon causes universal suffering to victims from around the world, from the US to Kenya, from the UK to Uganda.
Hope to share some more of my findings with you in the coming days. If you went through yet another long thread of mine all the way to thisnpoint, thank you your time is appreciated🙏🏿
Story dropped on Sunday. If you're in Canada, the story will be available in tomorrow morning's newspaper.
Yours,
-ZZ.
theglobeandmail.com/world/arti…
Africans are being confined and beaten in scam camps in Myanmar
Zecharias Zelalem (The Globe and Mail)Oblomov
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Raven667
in reply to Zecharias Zelalem • • •Chaucerburnt
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in reply to Sabrina Web 📎 • • •LukefromDC
in reply to Zecharias Zelalem • • •Zecharias Zelalem
in reply to LukefromDC • • •@LukefromDC Your assessment is accurate. Chinese victims have been trafficked and even murdered. One particular case in which an actual celebrity, a Chinese actor was trafficked to Myanmar provoked a lot of outrage in China and demands for accountability. As you imply, I also don't believe Chinese justice would be as robust if the victims were solely Africans.
theguardian.com/world/2025/jan…
A kidnapped Chinese actor, a scam gang, and a very public rescue operation
Helen Davidson (The Guardian)Zecharias Zelalem
Unknown parent • • •