“… be sure to drink your Ovaltine.”

Ah, I see this is the predecessor to the Blue Shell in Mario Kart

Thanks for the write-up. I think Santa will be bringing me a Firestick Max for Xmas… and I’ve already got a real-Debrid subscription (which I highly recommend). I look forward in trying to plug them together.

I expect to have some website compatibility issues with Firefox/librewolf, as it does have a 3% share of the global browser market - so, website development energy is focused on the chrome/safari experience. However, 8+ years ago I felt I needed to use chrome at least every other day to view certain websites - it was frustrating.

I’m hoping (and willing to try it out) to see if this has improved.

Neato, I’ll check it out. I’m also trying out mull for android (as I’d like to keep my desktop/cellphone bookmarks/browser-history in sync)

Thanks for the comprehensive write-up. It convinced me to migrate back to Firefox.

I was on Firefox (8 years ago), moved to Chrome (I liked the non-admin/transparent update feature and Websites didn’t break like they did with ff), then moved to brave (basically chrome + more privacy), and now I’ll go back the Firefox (I hope I won’t encounter too many non-FF websites)

Microsoft creates thousands of tons of ewaste for no reason…

Of course there’s a reason, you said it yourself: TPM.

With TPM, Software will be able to cryptographically verify that the OS and Hardware are all unmodified. This’ll be an end to piracy and end to unauthorized modifications to your PC (“We’ve detected that you’ve installed an Ad Blocker, please remove it before accessing your banking website”)

This won’t happen overnight, but the forced hardware upgrade is all about control (Microsoft over you) and creating a walled garden to drive profits (like Apple).

You can take a look at Android’s attestation and how it prevents running your banking apps on a rooted cellphone as an example of things to come.

You have a valid point, and if your using this service to download dark web “illegal to possess” content (like CP) - then, yeah, you probably don’t want to use it.

However, if you “find” the random movie/tv-show: The copyright holders are usually chasing people who are distributing content (like you do with torrents) as opposed to the people who may accidentally consume the content. … but IANAL

… or you could pay approx $2.70 / month for real Debrid. Replace jellyfin with stremio + torrentio and your family can immediately stream whatever shows they want w/o asking you and without needing to wait for the torrent to download.

Illegal stuff? Sure block it, I totally respect the need to CYA.

Blocking lemmit.online 'cause it’s a bot, which yields low content and pollutes “All”? Block lemmynsfw, cause of NSFW content? … well, as an adult I’d prefer I could make that choice for myself and have it governed by my own tolerances.

The defederation topic and how it impacts me.

I’m an adult, if I find something offensive I’ll either block it or ignore it. However, not giving me the choice offends me and IMHO goes against what Lemmy and the fediverse was suppose to deliver.

I understand (and read) the reason’s why site owners defederate and I view it largely as “Lemmy isn’t mature enough to support more granular blocking - yet”, so I wait patiently and hope this trend towards defederation doesn’t turn into a powertrip by site owners “for the good of their users…”

Thank you for the link. I’m looking forward to hearing about their “improved version” in 8 months.

Sounds interesting. Is there a non-paywall link available?

Basically, my company is tightly wed to using outlook and exchange.

We would have liked to have kept all this “on-prem”. Meaning, we have physical machines running in our company network that has paid licenses for exchange.

The “force” that Microsoft has applied, is that we will not be allowed to purchase licenses for exchange (disclaimer: I don’t know if the licenses are not available/discontinued or if it’s not cost effective - I wasn’t involved in those conversations). Long story short: If we want Outlook/Exchange we must use MS Cloud solution. Depending on your organization’s size - this cost us an ungodly amount of money but (and here is where the anti-trust is) you get Office 356, Teams, and the rest of the MS eccosystem “for free” (or at a deep, deep discount).

This means the cost of Cloud Exchange (which includes Teams, O365, etc) . Was about the same (maybe a little less) than what we paid for “on-prem” exchange, plus Google docs, plus slack, plus Zoom. However, since “on-prem” exchange isn’t available - our only other option would be to ditch exchange for Google (which costs a lot more) or some open-source solution (which probably won’t integrate seamlessly into outlook).

Wow, 12 - you’re living the dream ;)

Could you share your setup? I’m on Linux, but I’ve tried both Edge and Brave. Both only show 4 people.

When a 5th person joins, I need to switch to the “group view” (?), which has a auditorium background and crude attempts by Teams to “crop” people from their background.

It’s such a perfect summary of my Teams experience : you want something simple (ie: see 5+ people) and MS delivers the most useless feature… I cannot even call it half passed, cause I’m certain the “group view” took far more engineering effort than it would have taken to just show 5 or more people on the screen.

Oh, it’s worse then that: you want to scrape some content, cut and paste content, save an image, save a stream of music/video - "oh… sorry, you can’t do that Dave cause the command line tool/3rd party website/gui isn’t trusted, but if you subscribe to our ultra premium package you can have some of that functionality unlocked (but just for our site) or you can watch some ads. "

I absolutely agree : our company used slack, Google docs, and self-hosted exchange.

Eventually, MS forced us to replace our self-hosted exchange for MS’ cloud solution. This was basically a ramrod for shoveling O365 and having it replace Slack with Teams and Google Docs with O365.

The migration was painful… going from “I have the exact tools I need for the job” to “jebus, this is the best MS has? On Teams I can only see 4 people at the same time? What was MS thinking”.

Yup, it’s kinda annoying when Google offers links to Reddit that won’t work.

I’m curious, how would you do this in such a way that it wouldn’t come at the expense of effecting your high availability?

If the server were on-prem or in the cloud… and the system crashed/rebooted, how would you decrypt (or add the passphrase) to the encrypted drive?.. cause the likehood of the kernel crashing or a reboot after and update is higher than an FBI raid… and it would get tiresome to have the site being down, while we wait for Bob to wake up, log in, and type the passphrase to mount the encrypted hdd.

You could use something like HashiCorp Vault, but it isn’t perfect either. If the server were rebooted, it could talk to Vault and request the passphrase (automatically) , but this also means that the FBI could also “plug in” the server (at their leisure) and have it re-request the passphrase. … and if Vault were restarted there’s quite a process to unseal (unlock) a vault - so, it would be as cumbersome as needing to type in the passphrase on reboot.

My point / question is: yes, encryption (conceptually) is easy, but if you look at “the whole life cycle / workflow” - it’s much more complicated and you (as an administrator) might ask yourself “does this complexity improve anything or actually protect my users?”

… another option: you use the web based Teams.

If you want more isolation, you could have a dedicated web browser for it.

Of course, the web version of Teams has a few annoying limitations (you can only see 4 people at the same time, opening multiple tabs to Teams kinda breaks it, etc), but it is endurable.