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Be a property owner and not a renter on the internet

den.dev

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Re: Be a property owner and not a renter on the internet

#161

Post by BlueTemplar »

dend wrote: post #130
dusted wrote: post #121

So this is a blog stating to be an owner and not a renter, and then proceeds to talk about how to rent hosting.. Sorry, but if it's not your hardware, on your property, then you're renting. Regulations have been waay too lose on, especially, american ISPs where I understand they are allowed to not only refuse you a public routable IP but also dictate what kind of traffic you're allowed to send and receive (for exampl…

I generally agree with the sentiment (and yes, internet should be treated as an utility). However, the reality is that the vast majority of people will not be able to self-host on their own hardware for a myriad of reasons (lack of skill, lack of money, lack of interest, etc.) That's not a reason to gatekeep them from having their own corner and claim it as theirs. If you have a domain and your own site, even hosted…

There is a simple way though : have the ISPs provide all of this. If they can provide you a personal website, an email account and a NAS, they can also provide you a a personal website and an email account ON that NAS. (Especially now, with IPv6.)

(Which of course assumes that there are laws in place against lock-in, just like there are already laws in place against lock-in for your pick of ISPs and obligations for mobile carriers to transfer your phone number to another carrier.)

Re: Be a property owner and not a renter on the internet

#162

Post by rmoriz »

dend wrote: post #28
sobkas wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A homelab with an useable uplink can be sufficient for many services like blog, DNS, mail. I always felt like you are painting target on your homelab when you allow outside access.

You do. That's why I wouldn't recommend it to anyone unless they absolutely know what they're doing. Can't tell you how many friends I had to have a talk with who had plain vanilla port forwarding done on their home router, exposing their entire home network to the web. Nowadays, I recommend them use Tailscale as an out-of-the-box Wireguard-based VPN to safely connect to their home servers from remote locations.

To be honest, as an IT professional you should have basic knowledge about firewalls. nft/nftables is a big improvement in firewall usability for Linux, I also know many homelab people using OPNSense or even DD-WRT for that job. I prefer plain Linux (distro of your choice, I don't judge) and nft.

Tutorials:

- https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Nftables/Examples

- https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Nftables

- and probably the best advanced tutorial is a video series https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8JPwbcNy_0&list=PLUF494I4KU...

TL;DR One should know firewall fundamentals, nft/nftables as successor of iptables is very convenient to use, a single config document instead of interactiving with 100 cli commands which have to be in a specific order.

Re: Be a property owner and not a renter on the internet

#163

Post by rcxdude »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #158
chii wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If the holder of the rights does not agree to a certain kind of use, what else is there to discuss? the holder of content does not automatically get to prescribe how i would use said content, as long as i comply with the copyrights. The holder does not get to dictate anything beyond that - for example, i can learn from the content. Or i can berate it. Copyright is not a right that covers every single conceivable us…

Copyright means the holder does automatically get to prescribe how content can be copied. That's literally the definition of copyright. A typical copyright notice for a book says something like (to paraphrase...) "not to be stored, transmitted, or used by or on any electronic device without explicit permission." That clearly includes use for training, because you can't train without making a copy, even if the copy is…

This a particularly extreme interpretation of copyright, and not one that has seen that much support in the courts. You can put what you like in a copyright notice or license, but it doesn't mean it'll succeed, and the courts have generally taken a dim view of any argument which relied on the fact that electronic data is technically copied many times just to make it viewable to a user. Copyright is probably better understood as distribution rights.

(Not saying training will necessarily fall in the same boat, just saying that the view 'copying to a screen or over the internet is necessarily a copy for the purposes of copyright' is reductive to the point of being outright incorrect)

Re: Be a property owner and not a renter on the internet

#164

Post by richardwhiuk »

namaria wrote: post #160
alibarber wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on my experience, I've found that I like using AI (GitHub copilot) to do things like answer questions about a language that I could easily verify in the documentation. Almost basically 'yes/no' questions. To be honest if I were writing such documentation for a product/feature, I wouldn't mind the AI hoovering it up. I've found it to be pretty crap at doing things like actual algorithms or explaining 'science' -…

I've argued years ago based on how LLMs are built that they would only ever amount to lossy and very memory inefficient compression algorithms. The whole 'hallucination' thing misses the mark. LLMs are not 'occasionally' wrong/hallucinating sometimes. They can only ever return lower resolution versions of what was on their training data. I was mocked then but I feel vindicated now.

They can combine two things in a way that never appeared together in the source material.

Re: Be a property owner and not a renter on the internet

#165

Post by BlueTemplar »

dend wrote: post #46
indigodaddy wrote: post #41

What this guy doesn't really get is that people don't want their own websites. What the hell would they do with a website? They love social media platforms. The why or where of how we got here doesn't really matter, it's the reality. I think the only way forward is better and less evil social networks, or perhaps some sort of cyclical sea change where the Internet sort of starts over again, ala how civilizations/huma…

That's a fair call-out, but that's why in the post I mention this: > Most people are perfectly content with everything living inside their Facebook account because it’s convenient and their family and friends are already there. Telling everyone to learn how git and GitHub Pages work to host their blog is not an effective way to drive change. But that’s also not the point. As I mentioned earlier, the goal is to start…

What I don't understand is why you would think that GitHub Pages is an acceptable alternative : it's kind of the equivalent of being a doctor and recommending Oxycodone to cure hangover for someone of alcoholic tendencies...

Re: Be a property owner and not a renter on the internet

#166

Post by rcxdude »

immibis wrote: post #98
rpcope1 wrote: post #44

> Exploiting user-generated content. You know, if I've noticed anything in the past couple years, it's that even if you self-host your own site, it's still going to get hoovered up and used/exploited by things like AI training bots. I think between everyone's code getting trained on, even if it's AGPLv3 or something similarly restrictive, and generally everything public on the internet getting "trained" and "transfor…

For images, there's Nightshade, which imperceptibly alters your images but makes them poison for AI (does anyone understand why?) I don't know if there's something similar for text. You could try writing nonsense with a color that doesn't contrast with the background. The evidence Nightshade works is that AI companies want to make it illegal.

Nightshade and glaze are basically adversarial attacks on various commonly used subcomponents of image generators, most notably the CLIP image captioner, which is both used to generate training data and as part of the generation process.

Like most adversarial attacks, they get more perceptible as they try to be robust to more transformations of the data (both in practice, i.e. applied to a level that's non-trivially removable, tend to make images look like slightly janky AI, ironically), and they are specific to the net(s) they are targeting, so it's more of a temporary defense against the current generation then a long-term protection.

Re: Be a property owner and not a renter on the internet

#167

Post by chii »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #158
chii wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If the holder of the rights does not agree to a certain kind of use, what else is there to discuss? the holder of content does not automatically get to prescribe how i would use said content, as long as i comply with the copyrights. The holder does not get to dictate anything beyond that - for example, i can learn from the content. Or i can berate it. Copyright is not a right that covers every single conceivable us…

Copyright means the holder does automatically get to prescribe how content can be copied. That's literally the definition of copyright. A typical copyright notice for a book says something like (to paraphrase...) "not to be stored, transmitted, or used by or on any electronic device without explicit permission." That clearly includes use for training, because you can't train without making a copy, even if the copy is…

> That clearly includes use for training, because you can't train without making a copy, even if the copy is subsequently thrown away.

a copy for ingestion purposes - such as viewing in a browser, is not the same as a distribution copy that you make sending it to another person.

> the right to extract the semantic or cultural value of a document.

this right does not belong to the author - in fact, this is not an explicit right granted by the copyright act. Therefore, the extraction of information from a works is not something the author can (nor should) control. Otherwise, how would anyone learn off a textbook, music or art?

In the future, when the courts finally decide what the limits of ML training is, may be it will be a new right granted to authors. But it isn't one atm.

Re: Be a property owner and not a renter on the internet

#168

Post by cenamus »

dend wrote: post #134
cenamus wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Delimarsky sounds more than just a bit Czech/Slovak :)

Hah! Well that certainly is a good directional guess! I am of Eastern European descent. Also, big fan of Krtek - grew up on that cartoon, was quite an educational experience at that age.

Ah yes, with transliteration that assumption goes out of the window haha

Re: Be a property owner and not a renter on the internet

#169

Post by franga2000 »

dusted wrote: post #121

So this is a blog stating to be an owner and not a renter, and then proceeds to talk about how to rent hosting.. Sorry, but if it's not your hardware, on your property, then you're renting. Regulations have been waay too lose on, especially, american ISPs where I understand they are allowed to not only refuse you a public routable IP but also dictate what kind of traffic you're allowed to send and receive (for exampl…

There's a huge difference between being a renter on a VPS or on a social network platform.

Youtube can demonetize or delete a channel and the creator is more or less fucked. They can find another platform, but they need to build their audience almost from scratch.

By contrast, if my VPS provider kicks me out, I just clone it or restore from backup to any one of the thousands of competing providers, change a few DNS records and my audience (not that I have one) wouldn't even know that anything changed.

Servers and domain names are transferable and neutral, platforms and usernames aren't.

Re: Be a property owner and not a renter on the internet

#170

Post by dusted »

BlueTemplar wrote: post #161
dend wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I generally agree with the sentiment (and yes, internet should be treated as an utility). However, the reality is that the vast majority of people will not be able to self-host on their own hardware for a myriad of reasons (lack of skill, lack of money, lack of interest, etc.) That's not a reason to gatekeep them from having their own corner and claim it as theirs. If you have a domain and your own site, even hosted…

There is a simple way though : have the ISPs provide all of this. If they can provide you a personal website, an email account and a NAS, they can also provide you a a personal website and an email account ON that NAS. (Especially now, with IPv6.) (Which of course assumes that there are laws in place against lock-in, just like there are already laws in place against lock-in for your pick of ISPs and obligations for m…

I think this only shifts the problem, the whole idea with the internet is a distributed network of computers that talk with each other, and if the computers at the edge (end users) can't do that, then it's no longer the internet, it's something else, more akin to cable-tv where there are "providers" and "consumers". The playing field stops being level.
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