MightyOwl13

Nothing vast enters the life of mortals without a curse.

On a side note I do use their free tier stuff (the amd vps-es) to host my website and it's been fine. Used the ampere instance to transfer stuff between two rclone encrypted remotes and haven't had issues so far.

Be careful though, the ampere instances aren't treated as "always free" so after the trial period ends, they get suspended and you either have to contact them or delete the instances and set them up from scratch... Had to spend a few hours setting up a book stack app instance again.

I started using Syncthing a while ago and its blazing fast. If you do LAN syncs, try setting fixed IPs to your devices in your router and when pairing them in Syncthing use their ips in the address field instead of using Dynamic.

So in my case my server would be 10.0.0.1 and I have two devices, let's say 10.0.0.10 and 10.0.0.20, I would putmy servers IP in as tcp://10.0.0.1:22000 in the settings page.

You can then even disable most of the doscovery options (if not all). Curios if you will see improvements!

Really sorry to hear about your experiences and I must agree that this isn't the way out of this, it just isn't. Situations have unbelievable complexities and these are blanket approaches that will invariably do more harm than good. I think a frustrating argument that I hear from parents and other people on the other side of this is the classical "if you have nothing to hide then X".

They step back on that when the problem is turned around into "why does your house have walls? why do you have locks and doors?". It's not because you have something to hide, it's because of privacy and safety. And we need these spaces to provide us with a modicum of safety and privacy because some discussions can only emerge in those spaces, some ideas need to be discussed in those safe spaces and because I wouldn't want that the world in which modern children grow up in has entirely given up their right to privacy. We always end up using the bad as something that needs to be guarded against, but we seem to fail to see all the positive experiences that have emerged in those safe private spaces as we were growing up...

Hope you are better now and thank you for the write up!

This is a serious situation that has been unfolding for years now in the world of fraud in general (from both the retailers and the banks' perspective).

I used to work in a company doing fraud prevention. The first thing that shocked me when I started in the role, was the sheer indifference people working there had for rejected transactions. The way these were supposed to be handled was like this:

1. Transaction is rejected because of a rule/condition/bank decline 2. Investigate transaction manually and identify root cause 3. Contact customer and provide information on how they can resolve this (ask for more details if you are unsure, mark them as safe to allow transactions as it was a clear false positive or ask them to speak to their bank or payment provider as the system wasn't the one that rejected the transaction)

The general view was though that if the customer think it's important, then they should get in touch with the company and there shouldn't be proactive work done on these transactions since chances are "most of them are dodgy". The problem was that there were thousands of these every single day and a very small team working in that department - less than 10 people. I voiced the fact that even if someone is fast at identifying these and going through them (once you developed experience in identifying the cause of the decline and doing the administrative work of allowing the user to complete transactions, emailing them and then keeping an eye on their account for when they try to make a purchase) they couldn't work through more than maybe 2-300 transactions in a day. That was 2-300 of someone working ONLY on this task, almost automatically and having a deep understanding of what happened in each of them. Realistically it was more around 50-100 transactions per day. The rejection list could have up to 3-4000 entries per day.

I argued for improvement of the rules that were pushing rejects into that queue, I argued for better analysis to be completed before a rule would be added, I argued for accepting a higher risk but allowing lower value transactions through to reduce friction and make the queue more manageable. I ended up getting some of the things I was asking for, but what happened was that the rejections went down to 1-2000 per day and people just assumed now that those are fraudulent for sure since now we're "better at spotting criminals"...

The introduction of another system that employed machine learning made fraud agents even more indifferent towards those queues since now "you can't fool AI". It was a very sad state of affairs and since I left there I seriously doubt that this has improved in any way. I remember the email chains you would get from some users who tried to make important purchases or even just regular purchases and not being able to get in touch with a human. I remember the frustration, the friction and the blanket statements that would emanate in team meetings saying that "it's fine as long as we protect the company from losses, so what if a few people have issues"... Those few people could have been them in other scenarios.

I think this will only keep getting worse and worse with time. Each new software that attempts to bring "efficiency" to some of these types of tasks can cause a huge array of problems downstream. You end up with companies that will have 5 people working in a department that should have 500 because machine learning will "take care of the issue". I know I haven't even touched the privacy concerns that this raises, and there are PLENTY and covered in great detail in this post and in the one made by the EFF, but we're forgetting here that those affected by these things are other people.

And as long as governments will say "You need to regulate this SOMEHOW" and companies will come back with "We'll use the power of AI and ML to train NN to easily identify any problems and thus bring efficiency and safety to all of our customers". We're people, we're not machines and we have a vast array of personal circumstances and elements that make us unique and saying that a blanket solution will "fix all problems" is absolutely inhuman and shows a crass misunderstanding of how these tools work and what their unintended consequences are.

TL;DR - using ML/AI/NN will cause a huge array of problems. We need more people working these queues which increase exponentially so that innocent users do not get caught in your "high-tech solution". For each criminal fraud prevention rules catch, a few hundred innocent people cannot complete their activities or are labelled as criminals until proven innocent.

This was a few years ago in Europe not the US. I think this was one of the positive aspects, since law enforcement here (especially dealing with people from different countries) would have different expectations for the type of information that they could receive or ask for.

A representative from Italy might ask for one specific element of information, another one from Germany might look for associative information (who a person is and who they were with) and one from the UK might ask for things as precise as the hour and minute at which a particular action would occur (this is due to the high amount of cameras that cover London for example, which could then be used to match movement around a region with surveillance to the data I would provide).

I would say most of the requests were reasonable from my point of view given the background they would provide - I guess it's also down to the person requesting the information. But as time progressed they figured out that I was able to get information or that we had information on a wide variety of elements... As I said initially, it goes from "Find info on John Doe, with an email account [email protected], with a date of birth of 33/33/2033 who did this activity at 11:30 PM on 01/01/2053" to "We have this email which is either jdoe@email or jdoe@gmail but we're not sure. Can you check all such occurences?".

I think the point is also that Europe isn't THAT much better and while people might wave privacy laws and GDPR as proof of Europe's "superiority", I think a lot of those things look good on the surface, but they still don't protect you as much as you'd think.

In a previous role I worked, law enforcement would send over requests for information from time to time. Once my scripts became better at gathering information requests turned from providing highly specific information (ex: details about this individual, on this date and time doing this particular action) to blanket statements (we think this person is called X or Y - can we get all info covering these two years).

General security/crime prevention concerns were being provided as reasons for these searches. I had voiced my concern to my managers but they said as long as we had a paper trail which clearly tied each request to the info provided, they didn't really care. I left the place shortly afterwards, but it highlights, I think, how quickly these things spiral out of control. How specific turns general, how true belief turns into mere suspicion or blanket statements (ex - everyone in THAT area is a criminal so we need all the info).

My 2 cents on this - I have used the Oracle Cloud free tier trying to get the VMs running. The default resource usage seems higher than what you would get on Hetzner/ionos/digital ocean and the resource monitors are a good chunk of that usage. Configuration was also considerably more difficult for someone with little experience such as myself... Achieving the same task (setting up a BookStackApp server) took considerably longer than it did on most services on which you pay.

What I'm trying to say is that you do get what you pay for (or don't).

Hey, did anyone actually try to run this? I'm getting a bunch of errors when trying to run the sudo docker-compose up --detach. How would I know if it's running or not? Sorry, quite new to this apart from hosting a couple of personal pages on a vps.

Something along those lines :)

I know this is a bit late to the party, but I'm not finding on your page any ability to build up search queries that are more than just a few terms, as in, I can't seem to be able to provide restrictions within the search query itself - search only in this site, search with term A AND term B, etc.

If this isn't implemented, any idea on when or if you'll implement it at all? :) Love the idea behind the project, but I'm feeling a bit apprehensive seeing as a lot of these projects to build more privacy focused engines only lead to poorer results with a lot of the pages having questionable practices still.