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• VPNs v/s TOR

  I’m fairly certain this post might end up revealing my lack of knowledge on this topic rather than being a sound technical question, but here goes: Why are most people keen on VPN services when TOR was present all along? Is it just because TOR is “slower” than VPNs or some other reason related to access? Here are the points that confuse me: Many services block TOR. True, but that’s the case with VPNs too. Netflix, Spotify, or some government website (won’t specify which country) will giv...

• [Meta] Request special treatment for US/ Trump memes

  Look, maybe I am getting too old for the internet or my brain isn’t what it used to be, but each time I see a Trump meme, I legit do not know if the meme is based on something that was really said, or something that the OP has made up. It’s one thing to laugh at absurdism where I read something like “Trump gifts Vance a new couch and causes marital troubles to the vice president” with a clearly photoshopped image of those two with furniture around. But when I see Trump holding a placard with...

• Are ISPs responsible for bots having residential IPs or is this a user problem?

  I’m trying to understand the bot problem in the internet and finding more ways to defend myself. One thing that I can’t seem to understand is why most bots, scrapers and crawlers seem to have residential IPs. Is it that ISPs are being paid by tech-bros to assign them these IPs? Is it that residential devices have been hacked /contain malware that does this? Is it trivial for companies to assign themselves residential IPs? Paid volunteers are doing this for AI companies? Or is there is some o...

• Security considerations about hosting Immich from home

  So far, my self-hosting has been limited to Pi-Hole, and a static website. I now want to try out something new, an Immich server. I have a static IP from my ISP, so I don’t need to rent out a VPS. However, given that this IS a home internet, I want to be extra sure that it is going to be secure. In my existing website, I use Fail2Ban + BadBotBlocker + Anubis + Nginx rate limits to protect it from scrapers, bots and malicious users, and it works well. With photos (especially family photos) at...