Believe it or not, I can be concerned about both.

The difference is, the place where I live has some data privacy regulations which actually get enforced, and I have some legal recourse against organizations which mishandle my data. China does not have such regulations and I do not have any recourse against organizations based there, so my risk from them is significantly higher.

Does anyone remember MSN WebTV?

It technically worked.

Greenwashing.

Just don’t walk behind them, or they might try to kick you.

This is really good advice for basically every animal with hooves. They mostly have a blind spot directly behind, like horses:

If you walk up behind them inside that blind spot and then move out to either side and suddenly appear in their vision, they’ll react defensively, usually by trying to kick you with their hind legs.

Basically if you can’t see the animal’s eyes then assume it can’t see you, and stay out of kicking range.

Or just reinstalls it in the next update.

You’re welcome. I tried to do basically the same thing a few years back (run a WordPress site from a RPi on my home network - and also a Minecraft server) and so I tried to write up the problems I ran into - I probably forgot some, but those are the major hurdles. I learned a lot along the way.

I should also point out that if you rent hosting space (from linode or inmotion or digitalocean or many other options) then problems 1 & 4 become much easier, and 2 & 3 go away entirely (most people don’t host public websites on their home networks because of these and other issues).

Happy to help. If you’re interested in learning networking more thoroughly, I want to point you to Professor Messer especially the Network+ content. He has far more complete explanations than I could write (and it’s free!). Even if you’re not interested in getting any certs, the explanations will be helpful.

So your goal is to host a publicly accessible static website from a computer in your home. There are a few problems you need to overcome before even worrying about configuring any software. You need some more basic networking knowledge first.

0. Basic Networking Theory - you should read a brief explanation of the OSI 7-layer network model. You don’t have to try to memorize this and you won’t really understand it until you start actually doing stuff, but you should read it for some basic terminology and to understand that there are distinct steps through which communication between computers happens.

   When you start running into problems (“why can’t I access the server? I did all the tutorial steps”), figuring out which layer the problem is in will help guide you to the solution:

   • is there a bad cable? -> 1. Physical
   • do I have the right IP address? -> 3. Network
   • is the firewall port closed? -> 4. Transport

1. Privacy/Security/Safety - don’t host a publicly accessible website from your personal computer. Just don’t. To make this happen you will have to open a hole in your network security that makes your computer accessible from the public internet. Don’t do this on your daily driver computer. Don’t do this with any device that has any files on it that you care about or any access to any personal information. Don’t.

   Set up your web server/learning environment on a clean, dedicated system. This could be an old laptop or a Raspberry Pi (an older 3B model will work just fine for this) or whatever cheap computer hardware you have, as long as it can run Linux and has a physical network port (using WiFi will give you extra headaches for getting this working). If you think you might want to expand your projects in the future, you can get a used Dell server for very little money, and add more hard drives as needed. Wipe the hard drive and install Debian or Ubuntu server as a base, there’s lots of resources out there for setting up web services on either.

2. Restricted Ports - you are most likely on a residential internet connection. Most residential ISPs close ports for security reasons, especially 80. For example, here is Cox’s list of restricted ports. You will need to find your ISP’s equivalent list and understand what you can and can’t do with your connection.

   There are workarounds, primarily through port forwarding. You will need admin access to your router to set this up. I recommend that you read that entire article because it probably applies directly to your situation.

3. Dynamic IP Address - most people still find it easier to work with IPv4 addresses - I won’t go into IPv6 right now, but you should read a little about it just for awareness. Your residential internet most likely has a dynamic IPv4 address, which means you can’t rely on that address staying the same forever (or even until next week), which means that you can’t configure your Cloudflare domain name to point to a single IPv4 address.

   Dynamic DNS is the solution for this, and again you’ll need admin access to your router to set it up.

4. HTTPS/TLS/SSL - if you get through all those issues then you probably have a working website, but now you’re seeing something like this when you try to view it in your browser:

   This doesn’t mean that you can’t get to your website - it just means that you can only do it via HTTP and not HTTPS, which the browser is warning you (and anyone else trying to view your website) is not secure. You can either just accept that this alert will always come up, and that you have to click through it, or you can learn about TLS and getting an SSL/TLS certificate. This is a later topic - it doesn’t matter and probably won’t make sense until after you’ve got your web server online.

The first two ads I see under the article are for hearing aids, which probably describes the target market for this thing.

Steve is one of those guys that has done so much with computers that if you have a problem it’s highly likely that he’s already dealt with that problem too and has a solution or workaround, or knows where to find one.

Yeah, I started listening to the podcast a couple years ago, and based on that I’d trust Steve’s opinion on basically everything related to computers & networking - largely because I know he’d be able to explain in detail why he has that opinion.

InControl by Steve Gibson allows you to set a specific Windows release version and prevent further feature updates, but does allow security updates:

InControl controls Windows automatic updating/upgrading system by targeting it to a specific major version and feature update release. By default, the current release will be used. So if you “Take Control” with the major version and feature release shown in the boxes in the lower left, Windows will remain right where it is – only installing monthly security updates – until you “Release control”.

Also:

Like all of GRC’s ultra lightweight freeware utilities, no setup or installation is required. Just run the utility with administrative rights. InControl’s operation can be scripted from the command line, and full technical details about the Registry keys it changes is provided.

I think the tricky part is getting a virtual network interface from pihole that can be properly configured in the Android Settings > Connection & sharing > Private DNS > Specified DNS.

For this to work on the mobile device, you don’t want pihole to make itself accessible on the external network interface, but rather an internal (virtual) interface that Android sees as a valid DNS server so that it can be permanently configured (otherwise you would have to reset the private DNS IP address every time you connected to a new WiFi network, and it would be tricky to get it working on the cell network at all).

I’m not sure if this is possible without running a more complete virtual machine that creates a virtual network adapter. Maybe a VPN app could be abused to redirect Android’s outbound DNS requests to localhost?

Hmm… I wonder if I could run pihole in an onboard container and force all my local device traffic through it…

It probably heavily depends on where you are from.

What makes you think so?

The legal precedents that have been set in this area basically boil down to this: if the police could unlock your phone while you were unconscious (e.g. by placing your finger on it or pointing it at your face) then they are allowed to do so.

You cannot be legally compelled to reveal your password or unlock a device with your password. Obviously you could be forced anyway, but evidence collected this way would be inadmissable in court.

It’s not a problem, until it is a problem.

“It hasn’t happened yet” is not a valid basis for making decisions.

It’s not really forgotten, but Wing Commander has been abandoned, and a proper modern rebuild of it would be fantastic.

Also, I want a new Deer Avenger.

Alternatively, Material Files (available in F-Droid) can easily create a local FTP server or connect to a NAS. It’s also a pretty good file manager app.

Yup, and it might be necessary to reproduce a lot of the answers that people used to find on reddit.