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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • The first thing that came to mind when I saw the question is perhaps a bit of a weird answer–but I really want to learn SELinux. It’s completely overkill for my Linux desktop and the few services I run on my network. The same with OpenLDAP, I want to play around with it even though I have no real need for it with my setup, I just haven’t gotten around to it yet.

    On that note, I also feel like I want to learn Ansible, or some other configuration management tool. The thing is, I haven’t even played around with it (or any others) enough to really even get what the intended use case is. I’m looking for ways to manage policies and configurations across multiple machines in a common way, but it feels like the more common use case is deploying webapps. So while it’s on my list of things I want to learn I don’t even have sufficient background at the moment.

    Then, finally, the other thing that came to mind was timeshift–or really BTRFS snapshots in general. It would be nice to have that additional feeling of safety while playing around with my systems.



  • I’ve taken to using Kagi. It may not meet your privacy requirements (more below), but it does keep the web wonderfully shopping mall free. It’s a paid search engine, it sources results anonymously from other search engines as well as its having its own internal database. I generally find because the search results are weighted by its own criteria which in no way is influenced by ad revenue decisions they tend to be pretty good – plus you can customize them by assigning your own weightings to sources you like to use a lot (like, say, Wikipedia) or ones you never want to see (like AI-generated spam domains). Privacy may be where it breaks down for you, and will depend on your threat model. For the most part, my privacy concerns are more for private businesses and advertisers – which it excels at protecting me again. If I was concerned about law-enforcement it may be less desirable (it is run out of the USA and is presumably subject to subpoena), likewise for state-level espionage (and if that’s your concern, you wouldn’t be asking this question anyway).

    All in all, hugely happy with it and totally think I’ve gotten my money’s worth from it – but I also totally get a lot of people aren’t interested or are unable to pay for a search engine. I figure I’m paying one way or another, and I’d far rather pay this way than with my time sorting through ad spam. If you are interested, they have a tonne of documentation explaining their philosophy, search results, privacy policy, and what all you get for your money.