If you were part of a group that names anonymity as the foundation of all its traditions, what would you say to keeping master records with google as opposed to our own darn site?

You could just point them to https://killedbygoogle.com/ and then ask them what they'll do when all their data suddenly vanishes. If that isn't a sobering thought for them then perhaps they shouldn't be involved in decisions such as this in the first place. And that's even before you consider the data-mining aspect.

Nice… and uncanny how much of it I played around with and didn’t even know was gone. Zeitgeist alone retired in 2007. News to me. Say… good news, really. Google has largely wormed its way out of my life with that graveyard. They had the hooks in really deep at one point.

The service I miss the most is "Google Code Search", I found it an extremely useful way for google to pay back to the OS community. (shame on them)

Not sure in which way "Google Site Search" died, heavyweights like the guardian newspaper and perlmonks still have customized searches using google.

And in all fairness it's also a graveyard of many experimental services which aimed to attack similar competitors and those markets are very "highlander'ish". No wonder they died after loosing the fight.

For instance: I organized meetings with my old schoolmates (communications, reunion pics, address database, etc ) with "Yahoo! Groups", a glorified mailing list with boards and upload areas.

Reason was that Yahoo was too dumb to monetize our data, but on the other side too big to fail. This strategy worked for 15 years, till they shut down.

Now I'm very reluctant to move that stuff to FB.

Cheers Rolf
_{(addicted to the 𐍀𐌴𐍂𐌻 Programming Language :)
Wikisyntax for the Monastery}

Ok, thx, hippo. That's a good start. What I'm finding as I knock the cobwebs off scripts is that I had left things unfinished, and the problem with my heavily-google-dependent scripts was that I hadn't loaded the data, so google didn't have a response.

Another variety of google coming up with weird things is like this:

fritz@laptop:~/Documents$ ./1.lys.pl 
Subroutine get_logger redefined at ./1.lys.pl line 47.
INFO: ./1.lys.pl
INFO: return from the google is -30 meters
INFO: Lysychansk on 2022-10-11T03:22:31 (1665476551 seconds unix-epoch
+) timezone: -0500 (lat: 38.4324101, lon: 48.9207881) at height -28  m
+eters
INFO: Object    Azimuth        Elevation
INFO: Jupiter    19.4268573032889        -50.7078930524939
INFO: Moon    336.298782353501        -36.1827200711628
INFO: Saturn    79.8122077165904        -38.9955330829549
INFO: return from the google is 821 meters
INFO: in the 'Ho on 2022-10-11T03:22:31 (1665433351 seconds unix-epoch
+) timezone: +0700 (lat: 43.61, lon: -116.2) at height 823  meters
INFO: Object    Azimuth        Elevation
INFO: Jupiter    36.2621632578313        -41.0584802357843
INFO: Moon    1.03055134306704        -36.9777514240792
INFO: Saturn    86.7497259872478        -27.6215597186519
fritz@laptop:~/Documents$
[download]

bliako may differ with me, but I think it is within their reach to have a valid number for the altitude of this hill, but they don't publish it so as not to be used the people who are targeting civilians, as they did today with approximately 85 missiles.

Script here for interested parties:

Read more... (11 kB)

I'm still curious about the question of whether an email from Berlin to Moscow goes through. Does anyone know? (I'm fresh out of people in Moscow I talk to. Hi Ed, if you read this.)

Also, can someone enumerate instances of google misusing people's information or the potential to do so? I talk about needing to have some rapport/realpolitik with giant evil corporations, but this is a step too far for me.

Is there a treatment out there from sysadmins about why an organization should have one document on a secure site and send out links to that one secure document as opposed to sending it as a mass email attachment where 60% of the recipients have no context for it whatsoever?

Do well-intentioned people create a polluted digital spam ocean by sending mass email with attachments?

I'm still curious about the question of whether an email from Berlin to Moscow goes through. Does anyone know?

Schrödinger famously said that a sent email is in a superposition of both received and unreceived states until the intended recipient actually looks in their inbox*.

An email might get through. I can confidently assert that more than 0% and less than 100% of the emails sent from any city to any other city will arrive successfully at their intended destination in an uncorrupted form.

* I'm paraphrasing, of course.

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Do well-intentioned people create a polluted digital spam ocean by sending mass email with attachments?

I spoke recently with a local deli owner who apologetically explained to me that she had recently been working to reduce her carbon footprint, and as part of that process was avoiding replying to emails except where strictly necessary. That prompted me to look into the carbon cost of email, on which subject there is quite a lot of information.

A lot of that is based on the first (2010) edition of How Bad are Bananas by Mike Berners-Lee (brother of Sir Tim), but the figures were substantially revised with more up-to-date information in the 2020 edition. See for example the carbon cost of an email.

This may be an angle - either as "carbon cost" (for the planet) or as "energy cost" (for the bills) - by which to argue your point.

I'm still curious about the question of whether an email from Berlin to Moscow goes through. Does anyone know?

An email from a major provider (gmail, etc) is much more likely (in many circumstances) to make it past spam blocks and other blocks than emails from "lesser" servers. An email from your ISP's mail host may be more or less or equally likely to make it through than one from a self-hosted mailserver, depending on how well those servers are set up (getting SPF, DKIM, DMARC, and the other such settings right can be difficult).

But when you are talking about emails crossing political borders that involve international tensions, there are likely a lot of other factors completely out of your control. Asking us to tell you whether it will get through or not is not necessarily helpful to you, as our experience in such matters may vary from yours. (Personally, I have not knowingly tried to email someone in Moscow, so I cannot give an anecdote, helpful or otherwise.)

Q2) If you were part of a group that names anonymity as the foundation of all its traditions, what would you say to keeping master records with google as opposed to our own darn site?

I could tell you, but I don't think you're old enough for that sort of language.

As far as email is concerned, I run my own servers. I've built them at work & helped a friend do the same. It's not that hard and, for me, runs very comfortably on a Pi 1 with 256Mb RAM. If you want help on this, I'll gladly do my best.

Regards,

John Davies

I could tell you, but I don't think you're old enough for that sort of language.

I think a lot of our attitudes regarding data usage line up with our ages. At 56 belly-button years old, I was lucky to be introduced to computers at a relatively-young age, 12. I have the experience of doing telnet, and I thought I could always return and "do things from scratch." I used to love autoexec.bat. I miss the days of bulletin boards and usenet, comp.lang.c, comp.lang.perl.misc. After the Perlpocalypse, I checked out the latter, and it was the saddest post from Keith Thompson about whether the lights were on. (They're not) Gone like the hogshead, cask, and demijon. "Kids nowadays" seem profligate in their data consumption to me who wants to count his bytes by the packet.

As far as email is concerned, I run my own servers. I've built them at work & helped a friend do the same. It's not that hard and, for me, runs very comfortably on a Pi 1 with 256Mb RAM. If you want help on this, I'll gladly do my best.

Well, John, I was glad to see this response because I'd like to get back on track with finishing it off. This is gonna be long enough that I'm gonna put the rest in readmore tags to reserve vertical space for respondents:

Read more... (7 kB)

Less the gory details, my questions are:

Q1) Is gitlab a better source host than github (or google)?

Q2) How do I silence the mail queue?

Q3) Should I substitute sammy for root in the above?

Q4) What does /etc/aliases look like on a working install?

Thanks all for comments,

I, too, have referred to the debian.org document to which you link. I have spent more time linking to https://samhobbs.co.uk/2013/12/raspberry-pi-email-server-part-1-postfix, which is a bit dated. I have written my own guide which works for me. If you (or anyone else) /msg me an email address, I'll gladly send you a copy with a few caveats.

Q1) Is gitlab a better source host than github (or google)?

How long is a piece of string? Everything is a compromise and it must depend on how those compromises fit your use case. If you are trying to build a library of code for a CV, Github is where people will start looking. I run my own server, turned off most of the time, using gogs https://gogs.io/, which ISTR is available on apt.

Q2) How do I silence the mail queue?

If by "silence" you mean "purge obsolete entries", sudo postsuper -d ALL is another option.

"It seemed to me I needed "someone" dedicated to being the mailchimp, who is not in the sudo group" is not my experience.

Q3) Should I substitute sammy for root in the above?

I'm not sure. I have a dedicated Pi running postfix, so root and any "boss" user of postfix are essentially the same, so I haven't had to work through your problem.

3.1 - Unattended upgrades

Raspbian (or whatever it's called now) comes with this set up by default. The file contains lots of comments, removed below:

dr@mail:~ $ cat /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/50unattended-upgrades
Unattended-Upgrade::Origins-Pattern {
        "origin=Debian,codename=${distro_codename},label=Debian-Securi
+ty";
};
Unattended-Upgrade::Package-Blacklist {
};
[download]

3.2 /etc/hosts

dr@mail:~ $ cat /etc/hosts
127.0.0.1       localhost mail
::1             localhost ip6-localhost ip6-loopback
ff02::1         ip6-allnodes
ff02::2         ip6-allrouters

127.0.1.1       mail
[download]

Q4) What does /etc/aliases look like on a working install

dr@mail:~ $ sudo cat /etc/aliases
[sudo] password for dr:
# See man 5 aliases for format
#postmaster:    root
postmaster:    dr
root:          dr
[download]

Regards,

John Davies

Q1) Is gitlab a better source host than github (or google)?

Yes, because it isn't owned by a malignant corporation and because it's open source.

Q2) How do I silence the mail queue?

You don't want to silence it, you just want to remove the messages which are stuck in the queue and will never be delivered. qtool.pl is probably best for this.

Q3) Should I substitute sammy for root in the above?

You could if someone is going to be sure to read sammy's email. So long as someone is getting and reading the postmaster emails it can be any user.

Q4) What does /etc/aliases look like on a working install?

I'm not sure what you mean by this. The format is as described in the man page. Are you asking for someone to post an in-production aliases file?

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