It’s not really like they were evil about it though. Google attracted customers through its huge (at the time) 1 GB email storage space, which at the time, was unbelievably generous and also impressive in that it was offered for free. Outlook (Hotmail at the time) also drew in customers by offering the service for free, anywhere in the world, without needing to sign up for Internet service. Remember, at the time, e-mail was a service that was bundled with your Internet service provider.

Into the mid-2000s and 2010s, the way that Gmail and Outlook kept customers was through bundle deals for enterprise customers and improvements to their webmail offerings. Gmail had (and arguably, still has) one of the best webmail clients available anywhere. Outlook was not far behind, and it was also usually bundled with enterprise Microsoft Office subscriptions, so most companies just decided, “eh, why not”. The price (free) and simplicity is difficult to beat. It was at that point that Microsoft Outlook (the mail client, not the e-mail service) was the “gold standard” for desktop mail clients, at least according to middle-aged office workers who barely knew anything about e-mail to begin with. Today, the G-Suite, as it is called, is one of the most popular enterprise software suites, perhaps second only to Microsoft Office. Most people learned how to use e-mail and the Internet in the 2000s and 2010s through school or work.

You have to compare the offerings of Google and Microsoft with their competitors. AOL mail was popular but the Internet service provided by the same company was not. When people quit AOL Internet service, many switched e-mail providers as well, thinking that if they did not maintain their AOL subscription, they would lose access to their mailbox as well.

Google and Microsoft didn’t “kill” the decentralised e-mail of yesteryear. They beat it fair and square by offering a superior product. If you’re trying to pick an e-mail service today, Gmail and Outlook are still by far the best options in terms of ease of use, free storage, and the quality of their webmail clients. I would even go so far as to say that the Gmail web client was so good that it single-handedly killed the desktop mail client for casual users. I think that today, there are really only three legitimate players left if you’re a rational consumer who is self-interested in picking the best e-mail service for yourself: Proton Mail if you care a lot about privacy, and Gmail or Outlook if you don’t.

For what it’s worth, English Wikipedia editors reached a consensus to deprecate (ban) it for unrealiability last year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Noticeboard/Archive_424#RFC:_The_Cradle

The following notes are present:

The Cradle is an online magazine focusing on West Asia/Middle East-related topics. It was deprecated in the 2024 RfC due to a history of publishing conspiracy theories and wide referencing of other deprecated sources while doing so. Editors consider The Cradle to have a poor reputation for fact-checking.

I have a script running that uses the Namecheap API to automatically get wildcard certs from Let’s Encrypt. I didn’t pay a dime for this. Did something change?

Nothing wrong with Boost Mobile, or any other discount telecom provider either. It’s not like the phone signals taste different lmao

It’s just a hallmark of “I bought the cheapest domain name TLD available”.

That’s not necessarily bad if all you need is something to get the job done, but there is a stereotype associated with it.

I feel the best way to deal with this type of crap is to pretend like they’re some unimportant random person.

Hello. A request has been created. A member of our staff will respond to your enquiry within 10 working days.

Do not respond at all. When they send another email, auto-reply with the same message. Then reply this after their third email:

We have detected an unusually large number of enquiries sent from your IP address. To prevent spam, further emails will be filtered. If this is in error, please write to P.O. Box 12345, Somewhere, Some Country.

The P.O. box number given doesn’t exist. But international mail is slow so it will take them two months to realise that.

I think it is generally okay to bundle the root domain certificate and the wildcard for its subdomains into a single renewal.

So for example:

example.com
*.example.com

The data is all stored server-side. The worst that could happen is the sync connection stops working and you need to redownload the files. Nothing gets deleted by these commands. They will still be on your disk and accessible by you.

If this breaks Nextcloud, it indicates something’s wrong with your installation.

I’m guessing you’re talking about the client, right? The data folder on the server shouldn’t be touched or modified, except by Nextcloud.

Check who owns the folder. I’ll assume the folder is at ~/Nextcloud, but if it’s not, just substitute in the path to the Nextcloud folder.

You can check who owns the folder using ls:

ls -la ~/Nextcloud

This should give you something like:

drwx------ 10 user group    4096 2024-03-04 00:00 Nextcloud

Where the word “user” is in the above example should be the name of the owner of the directory. Where the word “group” is should be the group.

If either is root, check to make sure the Nextcloud client is not running as root (using sudo or otherwise).

Otherwise, give yourself ownership of the directory:

sudo chown username:username -R ~/Nextcloud

Replace username with your username.

Mine is… eh. It’s alright. I don’t use any of the apps. Just the actual sync functionality. Sometimes when I’m moving files around there’s a problem where the entire thing just stops responding. My MediaWiki instance still works, just not Nextcloud. Not sure why this happens and not sure if it also happens to other people.

For comparison, it is running on a Contabo VPS M

If you want to call it that, you can. The State spying by proxy (paying or asking companies for info) is legal and not prohibited by Amendment 4. Amendment 4 does not protect the subjects of information. It protects the controllers of information (which would be the car company).

This is getting off-track again—

Government agencies paying private companies for your information, or even just asking for it in exchange for something or nothing is legal. That’s because nothing was searched unreasonably (because consent was given by the controller of the information) nor was anything seized against the controller’s will.

You are not in the picture. The information might be about you but you don’t control the information, the car company does. From a legal standpoint, you are irrelevant for the purposes of Amendment 4 protection.

Amendment 4 protects the controller of the information from Government seizure but does not protect the subject of that information. Privacy laws are what are intended to protect the subjects of information. There is some overlap of course. For example, your computer has lots of information about you and what you did in the past. You would be both the subject of the information and the controller (since it’s stored on your computer).

Please remember, I am describing what the law is, not what it should be.

Correct and it is not illegal. It is an invasion of privacy but the law doesn’t prohibit that. Amendment 4 covers the Government doing it without the permission of the person who controls the information. It refers to “can the Government bust in or sneak in to get info”, not “can the Government make clandestine deals to buy info for surveillance purposes”.

Do you actually literally believe that (in the context of law), or is that just rhetorical speech?

Amendment 4 does not apply to the practices of a private company. That’s what privacy legislation is intended to protect against. Amendment 4 only applies to spying done by the State.

You’re getting a bit off-track here. The scenario is this: the company that provides the software for your care collects data. This part is unconcerned with Amendment 4. Amendment 4 prohibits the State from collecting information and searching unreasonably. It does not prohibit the private company that provides the software from doing so. That is what privacy laws are intended to protect against, not Amendment 4.

Amendment 4 also does not prevent the company that collected that data from providing it to the police upon request. Amendment 4 (and the rest of the US Constitution) applies only to the State. Private companies and private individuals are not bound by it.

Disappointing result but this seems like something for the legislature to fix. Courts aren’t always the solution, sometimes you have to just fix the damn law.