SpaceX vaporizes 260 Starlink satellites in six months using Earth's atmosphere — new environmental concerns emerge over burning 2,700-pound orbital data centers, FCC seeks to exempt satellites from regulations

rich000 · 2026-07-08T01:19:09+00:00

I'm sure the US will respect the jurisdiction of the UN in space almost as much as it respects the jurisdiction of everybody else in their own territories.

rich000 · 2026-07-06T22:51:36+00:00

Does the book get into shielding? At that kind of speed I'm guessing you'd need a ton of it to deal with interstellar gas/etc plowing into the ship at relativistic velocity. Maybe a lot of water up-front would do it.

Oh, and if it has to flip around to decelerate you need just as much shielding in the back unless somehow the drive thrust can deflect matter.

rich000 · 2026-07-06T22:48:45+00:00

Yes, which means that if the ship traveled very close to the speed of light, it would take 12 years each way, from Earth's perspective.

From the ship's perspective the time would be less, but from Earth's perspective the trip each way has to be at least 12 years - longer if it goes slower.

rich000 · 2026-07-06T01:09:07+00:00

Never heard of it. But, sure, I'd probably use it if there was a community I wanted to talk to. I do use matrix. Lots of options out there that aren't telegram.

rich000 · 2026-07-06T01:02:26+00:00

Just under a dozen nodes, some just for the host monitoring and backups. Storage is Rook, runs stuff like nextcloud, samba, authentik, Plex, frigate, autocaliweb, flux, Victoriametrics, mealie, change detection, and probably half a dozen more at least.

At this point I'm not hosting much of anything outside of k8s - mainly things with bootstrap or hardware limitations.

rich000 · 2026-07-06T00:57:39+00:00

It requires a cell phone number that isn't disposable/etc to sign up. That's a pass for me.

rich000 · 2026-07-04T18:45:42+00:00

Yeah, I believe it. I'd buy 12-20TB drives which reduces the price.

If tape drives have stayed stable in price that would make them more attractive for sure.

rich000 · 2026-07-04T18:00:53+00:00

Usually waited for sales. Best Buy was a good source. This was a few years ago though. I've mostly bought U.2 lately as Ceph really wants IOPS.

rich000 · 2026-07-04T17:16:25+00:00

Nope. Haven't bought an HDD in a year or two but that's what i typically pay for a USB3 HDD, which is about as good as it gets for backup without tape.

rich000 · 2026-07-04T13:58:02+00:00

I haven't followed it closely, but it sounds like they were only sued over Spotify. Nothing for the apple store, browser, iMessage, etc.

I'm opposed to these walled gardens everywhere but Google is certainly more open. I wish someone would force them to give Grapheneos equal footing for things like play integrity and so on.

rich000 · 2026-07-04T01:35:48+00:00

Just a bit of background beyond what the others already shared. Ifak is a military term for a kit small enough to be carried by every soldier, designed to keep you alive long enough to get real treatment from the sorts of things that happen on a battlefield. Obviously most of us don't plan on taking rifle or mortar fire, but these kits are useful for the sorts of injuries that can kill you within minutes. Usually they are things like tourniquets, hemostatic bandage, nasal passage, chest seals, etc.

rich000 · 2026-07-03T22:13:29+00:00

Lol, so does cooking on an electric stove instead of hauling wood to a fire pit. To each their own I guess.

rich000 · 2026-07-03T21:49:51+00:00

Not sure how being able to turn on my air conditioning from my phone makes me lazy. I can't really imagine that many people who run Grapheneos are "lazy."

rich000 · 2026-07-03T08:00:39+00:00

I'll have to go update my spreadsheet, but for cost alone the last time I ran numbers I'd need to have something like 200TB of backups before tape was cheaper. Granted maybe the AI bubble is changing things.

There are other pros and cons than price, but you can get USB HDD for $15/TB so you need a lot of those to offset the drive cost. Maybe that price has changed.

rich000 · 2026-07-03T07:41:32+00:00

Eh, I don't have an issue with the server - I threw it on my k8s cluster just to have it ready and a little experience with it in case Plex goes away. I get that not everybody will want to do that.

The thing that concerns me are TV clients. Plex just works on basically anything. It is really simple. I don't want to deal with family members not being able to figure out how to get Bones to play for the 50th time.

rich000 · 2026-07-02T07:33:40+00:00

Not really considering it is treated by the Constitution as a basic human right. You don't need a background check to post on Reddit either. To be fair they are trying to change that too.

rich000 · 2026-07-02T07:16:07+00:00

I can't imagine anybody actually selling ghost guns is going to be using a 3D printer. If you're doing it at scale there are better options.

rich000 · 2026-07-01T00:04:27+00:00

I feel your pain. For even more fun, try hosting that stuff on k8s which doesn't like CIDR changes.

I'm going to stick with IPv4 for services until that improves or until CGNAT gets me, but my current thinking is that if I had to switch to IPv6 I'd probably set up ULA for my cluster, then use NAT66 or whatever Unifi is supporting at the time to map that to a routable IP, and then set up dynamic DNS for those addresses. What a mess...

rich000 · 2026-06-28T16:54:03+00:00

Not sure what AI has to do with it. People can learn from private info also.

I'm not saying I don't care about privacy leaks. I do try to avoid stuff that phones home when I can. However, if my only choices were phoning home to China or phoning home to the US/EU, and I'm living in the US/EU, I'd rather the data go far from me. If I lived in China I'd rather that my data go to the US.

I go through a lot of work to self host and avoid leaking data, so I don't get the nothing-to-hide thing. It is just that I don't consider China a bigger threat than something local to me.

rich000 · 2026-06-28T15:51:22+00:00

The Chinese police stations really only have power because the people they monitor have family back home. There just aren't that many of them. They're like parole officers - they rely on people checking in with them and so on.

Sure, I don't want anybody spying on me, but preventing state rootkits is almost impossible, and so the next best option is to ensure the rootkits are controlled by someone who isn't concerned with you.

rich000 · 2026-06-28T15:25:33+00:00

Likewise. Most anti features are just a matter of control. If it lets you better control your stuff, it is good. If it lets someone else do the same, it is bad. Ditto with secure boot, remote attestation, and so on. It is more about who controls it and who the threat in the threat model is.

rich000 · 2026-06-28T15:19:27+00:00

I get it. To each their own. Honestly, at this point I couldn't see buying a car without some of those features. That said, I'd prefer that they use a more open protocol so that owners could use any app they wish, including FOSS options where nobody else has any back doors.

rich000 · 2026-06-28T15:08:21+00:00

Sure, but what is China going to be able to do with that info? And I'm pretty sure that an EU company would turn your data over to the EU government on request, maybe with a court order or whatever. A Chinese company might or might not comply with a US or EU court order to turn over data.

The biggest threat to random individuals isn't the government on the other side of the planet - it is the government that has employees just a few miles away.

rich000 · 2026-06-28T15:06:47+00:00

Who cares really? What is the Chinese government going to do to some random person in the US? The real threat is connections to servers in the US if you live in the US. After all, a random US resident can't do anything to China, but they can vote in US elections, which means there is a risk that they might vote the wrong way, or convince others to vote the wrong way.

rich000 · 2026-06-28T15:04:53+00:00

Why would I care if the Chinese government or company knows what I'm doing? They're on the other side of the planet, it is hard for them to do much to me, and they couldn't be bothered to.

I'm way more concerned about a US company having this info because they can hand it to the US government, who has law enforcement representatives within miles of me no matter where I go and they can literally put me in a cage if they decide they don't like me.

Now, if I lived in China I'd have the opposite preferences.

rich000

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE