I am not overly surprised by this. The humanitarian response funding has been absolutely gutted this year, and not only by Trump (for example German gov. funding is down by 50% since 2022).

Thus organisations are struggleing to keep the lights on in the many emergency responses they already previously committed to, and have also not yet structurally adjusted, so there is an administrative overhang that further swallows what little funding remains.

And without NGO pushing for it, the shallow self of what journalism has become is totally oblivious to such relatively slow moving disasters. But it also becomes a self-reinforcing death spiral with no media coverage there is little non-government donations, thus further reducing the funds available.

Nice to hear that they started operations now.

I found this bit interesting:

The Geretsried project will ultimately provide, in annual terms, 8.2 megawatts of electricity to the grid or about 64 megawatts of heating to the nearby town.

Emphasis mine… so I would guess they focus on electricity production during the summer months?

Such a close loop system has a bit of a low-grade waste heat problem during summer months though, even when using it to produce electricity. I guess we will see more heated public outdoor swimming pools again if this technology takes off.

If someone is offering a public wifi, there is a reasonable expectation that other people sitting in the same cafe for example can’t listen in on what you are doing on your device. As older wifi encyption standards are easily compromised, this requires enforcing a semi-recent wifi-standard. You can of course make your own judgement in your own home, but in a public space it is different.

As for SSL certificates… this isn’t only a captive portal issue. If your device has such outdated root certificates that you run into issues already at the captive portal, you will have also issues with each and every website that uses https. Root certificates are only cycled out of use for good reasons, such as them becoming compromised, so by using an super old root certificate on your device you are wide open to MITM attacks on supposedly secure connections.

Don’t look online, ask friends and family if someone has an old laptop you can get for free. Very likely someone does, especially if you are ok with a bad battery and/or a broken screen.

A RPi3 can work, but it being ARM based will cause various headaches when learning compared to something x86.

As illustrated here:

Badly implemented captive portals are an issue, yes. But enforcing certain security standards on public wifi so that random people can not see everything you are doing online is good.

And I would advise against going online with a device so old and unmaintained that it has issues with its SSL root certificate.

Typically a video-chat server does no transcoding so this isn’t a major issue. But for hosting a Peertube or Owncast server it would.

The old A/V chats in Matrix were just Jitsi-meet in disguise, but this has been largely deprechiated now with Element Calls.

Also see !disasterresponse@slrpnk.net 👍

But yeah, this article summarizes a lot of good ideas, and even in state-run disaster response organisations the devolution of power and hierachy is usually quite strong to avoid issues with communication breakdowns.

Bitcoin and Ethereum only have liquidity in the market because scammers use it for their pig butchering etc. scams. And all the major exchanges are complicit in that. Many Banks are scammy, yes, but not that scammy by a long shot. Sorry to burst your bubble 🤷

https://movim.eu/ can do that AFAIK, but for now the A/V calls don’t go through an SFU distribution server (coming soonish), so it will not scale to many participants. But if you want to only stream to a few people (like max. 5 or so, depends a bit on your and their internet speed) it should work.

Nearly all micro-plastics come from car tires 🤷

If 99.9% of PCs were solely made to steal your credit card info, then yes.

I have high hopes for GNU Taler in that regard, as it is in theory super easy to include in any website and makes tipping small sums very feasible.

But in reality it is bogged down by bureocractic hurdles on the banking side, and I am starting to lose a bit of hope due to perpetual delays even after some banks promised to support it as part of an EU grant via Nlnet.

Open minded to being scammed? No thanks.

Lol, wat? I have not seen Anubis even once in front of a static page. You are either making shit up or don’t understand what a static site is 🤦

Well… you found your problem then. It is neither my problem, nor a problem of apartments in general 🤷

Yeah, that is a pretty realistic assessment, and the author should definitely try out Snikket (XMPP). There are also somewhat decent bridges for xmpp via https://slidge.im/

You could enable Suricata on OPNsense, which will allow you to subscribe to some known attacker lists and so one. But the problem these days are mostly AI scrapers that usually don’t show up on these lists as they are not attackers per se, but just cause a lot of database load by repeatably probing every part of your web-applications.

DSub2000 is also fairly nice for Android.