and now Google of all companies wants to lock down the whole internet?

Of all the companies, Google always seemed the most likely, both to want to and to be successful. They’ve tried before, sometimes in small ways, sometimes in larger more obvious ways (AMP, the implementation of content filtering in Chrome etc.).

They’re the world’s largest advertising and data harvesting company. It’s their business. Of course they want to lock the internet down to serve their goals of learning as much about you as possible and using that data to shove ads in your face.

Whenever using any Google/Alphabet product you have to ask yourself, “am I ok with this thing I’m about to use being built by the world’s largest advertising company?”. The answer should be “no” more than it is “yes”, particularly for things that have access to lots of your data, like web browsers, phones, home speakers etc.

I think they might mean bricked up, as in the windows have been bricked over?

Or maybe they’re associated with buildings built during a certain period that are now mostly empty due to a boom and bust cycle?

Evans has been impressive. Not the hardest test in the world but he’s looked commanding and composed so far.

Meanwhile Porsche are developing an even tighter integration allowing you to control parts of the car through the CarPlay interface.

It’s really hard. And really expensive. I used to work in five nine environments, life or death type use cases, and my rule of thumb was that you double your cost for every extra nine you add.

When we got to five nines it was multiple hot standbys with a custom control and orchestration plane - literally custom hardware we had to build. This was for local installations, so not modern cloud environments (it was over a decade ago), but many of the challenges are similar, like session handling, transmission replay and caching, locking, clashing, routing, jitter, latency etc.

I moved from Organizr to Homepage via Heimdall.

I had no end of issues with Organizr. It felt like something broke with each update and performance was pretty bad (not to mention some apps just not working with it). Seemed to be pretty common when I last tried it a couple of years ago, there were lots of similar complaints.

The good thing about Homepage is that the widgets mean you rarely have to go in to each app’s ui, so it actually saves me time.

Don’t do any port forwarding, and test your network’s external exposure regularly. If you do that, you’ll set yourself up in the right way.

If you need to access anything you’re self-hosting from outside your network, do it through a VPN and open up one single port, the one the VPN users, rather than accessing services directly. And use a non-standard VPN.

This has other benefits too. For example, if you’re running a pihole, you’ll be able to use it when out and about on your phone if you’re going through your own VPN.

My slightly vague recollection was that they were basically feeding “enterprise customers” a load of information including stuff that could be used for union busting, monitoring protests etc. Their enterprise plan has

Feedly AI Advanced Skills: Market intelligence Threat intelligence Biopharma research Competitive intelligence

as features. So yeah, creepy as fuck. And they said at the time that this was all done using “AI”.

I stopped using Feedly after all the creepy AI stuff. Reeder synced over iCloud with an OPML export every now and then keeps it so I’m not reliant on a central service and can run it all locally should I choose.

Anyone using Feedly, or equivalent, hasn’t learnt the lessons of Google Reader. Manage it yourself, don’t rely on a central service that’s going to do creepy monitoring on you to power their AI model.