The machines I use regularly are all some form of ArchLinux (currently mostly CachyOS). Machines I use rarely I stick to LTS distros with few updates. Machines I don’t maintain myself I try to stick to immutable distros that just update themselves every once in a while (less chance of breakage).

Security is always applied in layers. The more the better. There’s a reason “encryption at rest” is a requirement in many audits.

Why full disk encryption is important: what happens when you switch servers or providers: can you be sure the disk gets wiped properly?

Or when your disk dies and gets replaced, what happens to the old disk? Will they physically destroy it or just throw it in the bin?

When encrypted, it doesn’t matter; no one will get data off of them. That’s why you encrypt servers.

From an acceptance point of view there is no difference in forcing providers to implement an API to talk to your device or forcing providers to talk to a central service (or at least any service implementing a certain interface).

If the goal was for more surveillance, they could have immediately gone for that route.

They could also have kept the current “ask the user” approach and mandated website providers to store these information. That would have been a much smaller step and would have brought them closer to big brother as well.

Now they went for an approach that takes a step away from what we already have, making it more privacy friendly. Websites don’t have to ask (and potentially store) your birthday anymore and can still stay compliant.

The US bills I have read also don’t enforce any real age (how could they). They require the birthday to be stored on the device for the device to reply with the info if the user is within a certain age bracket. But nowhere did I see anything that would force users to store their truthful birthday. All that it would do is making the already existing age checks much more convenient and giving parents the opportunity to make them slightly more secure.

Isn’t that level already socially normalized? Every second website asks me for my birthday to derive my age for as long as I can think. Many of them ask me basically every time I use them (even Steam, where I am logged in and my payment history alone should imply that I am old enough).

Beautiful. Will keep an eye on it. Thank you!

How would the current approach help?

Its not invasive yet (no third party, no ID, no verification; its basically just another user controlled date field that is not even exposed). So it is not lowering any barrier in that regard.

It’s also not a helpful intermediary step for harder measures, because as soon as you want a third party to do attestation, storing that on a user controlled device is just unnecessary complexity and risk of circumvention. It would be easier and safer (for those introducing it) to just let the attesting party talk to the providers directly.

The comment you answered to said not all software has to implement age checks; only those who actually deal with age relevant content. You said it would be a foot in the door. So… who’s foot to do what?

Who exactly gains anything from forcing lets say Krita to implement an age check?

One thing your answer dodges is the automation part. Do you plan on offering a cli to run individual workflows/scenarios? The UI is awesome for building and maintaining the workflows, but if I want to use them for automated testing for example I need to be able to run them headless.

Finally took the time to setup Woodpecker CI to replace Drone. Also finally linked it not only to my self hosted gitea, but also to github, so I can automate a few builds there as well.

In the process I also learned, that I can set up a whole bunch of pods in a single kube definition for podman/quadlets, which allows me to have a much cleaner setup. Previously I was only aware that you can define a single pod with multiple containers. It makes sense, but it never occurred to me before.

No. Because the information is user provided and unverified, so there’s no reason to lock anything down that could increase security. Once they want attestation, they need a third party service involved, in which case the device being part of the trust-chain doesn’t make sense anymore.

Sure. I also don’t want to shit talk XMPP. I prefer XMPP over Matrix any day. But it can be tricky (just like Matrix; which is funny, since Matrix set out to improve on the mistakes they claimed XMPP made).

The beauty of XMPP is this: you can use any server, and any client, and you can talk to anyone connected to the larger XMPP network, even if they made different server/client choices than you did.

That’s a very optimistic and naive view. XMPP consists of a shit ton of extensions, and different clients implement different subsets of these. So it’s very possible that two different clients fail to do an audio or video call, because the other decided to use a different extension than the other for not implement it at all.

Depends on the usecase. If you don’t need chat history for new-joiners, you can work with a single key per group, rotating it whenever someone joins or leaves. Since the server broadcasts a „so-and-so has left/joined“ it might as well include the new key. That key is then used by everyone in the group, so you can still broadcast all messages and don’t have to encrypt them individually.

Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. Discord isn’t E2EE either. Having data under your control even if not encrypted is a big win.

If all your backups are near you, a flood or fire (or even break in) can still cost you all your data. At least one copy should be off-site.

For 7 people you could look into Virola Messenger. Not open source but uses Mumble under the hood and is super lightweight. No electron shit.

XMPP is also still a thing and IMO much easier to host (at least ejabberd is). Look into Movim, which looks quite nice as a discord replacement on top of XMPP.