IsoKiero

I'm pretty sure that Zelenskyi or Ukrainians in general are not stupid. But they're in the hard place right now and as USA support is still pretty big deal for them it's necessary to keep the negotiations going. And also they most likely need and want outside capital on rebuilding, where mineral deal (or any other deal on resources) made with both parties interest in mind might make sense.

So, my best quess is that they're actually looking for a deal which benefits both countiries equally, but they won't sign off their wealth just for a vague promise. Also keeping the negotiations going, pampering Trump every now and then and in general showing of a good faith is all beneficial for them right now. They can agree on peace fire, they can agree on joint negotiations with anyone and then either declare that there's "minor details" to iron out or (more commonly) show off to the world that they're willing to find a solution while Russia just denies every proposal.

So, their current strategy might benefit Ukraine in the long run and even if it didn't it still makes Russia look bad in comparison as they won't never be as willing for actual negotiations. In my opinion that's well spent time for few ambassadors right now.

Is my current set up secure, assuming strong passwords were used for everything?

Network security is a complicated beast to manage. If general public can access your services over the internet, that's a threat you need to mitigate. Strong passwords is a good start on that, but it doesn't take into account if there's a flaw or bug on the service you're running. Also if you have external users, they might reuse their passwords and leak for those might cause a threat too, specially if there's privilege escalation bugs on the software you're running.

And so on, it's a too wide field to cover in a short comment here, but when you're building your stuff, and what is maybe the most disticntive feature on a good professional between a not so good one, is to think ahead and prepare for every imaginable scenario where something goes wrong. Every time you add a way to access your network, no matter how minuscle, think what happens if that way gets compromised and what it might mean on the very worst case.

Maybe you want to add another access point to your network since your terrace isn't properly covered. That's nice to have, but now everyone around 100 meters around your house/apartment might have access to your stuff if they can break your wifi security. Maybe you set up a reverse proxy or tailscale on the stack. Now the whole internet can at least probe your stuff and try to find vulnerabilities, try to use stolen credentials and even try to social engineer their way into your stuff. Or maybe you made an mistake and left something open that shouldn't be.

I'm not trying to scare you off out of anything. Go ahead and play with your stuff, break things, learn how to fix them, have fun while doing it. Just remember to think ahead about worst case scenarios, weigh their risks, think ahead and then go on. Learn about DNAT, reverse proxies, VPN and network layers and whatever you come across on your adventure but keep in mind that shit will hit the fan at some point. And learn to accept that, learn from your mistakes and do better next time.

In case you're not aware: Back in the day Ubuntu took off because Debian was maybe a bit too strict on their approach on being stable and rock solid for quite a few of different architectures. There was a time when you could just edit few files and migrate a running system from Debian to Ubuntu, just with way more up-to-date software packages and that's about the time frame I moved from Debian to Ubuntu too. For quite a few years it was pretty smooth, updates just worked, software versions were up to date and the general experience was more polished than what you could get from Debian at the time.

But that ship has sailed. Ubuntu changes stuff so frequently that the package maintainers can just barely keep up, snapcraft is a steaming pile of shit in my opinion and the stability is faint ghost on what it used to be. Maybe becuse it's not that compatible with Debian anymore and thus can't benefit from the original source, maybe for some other reason.

Whatever the case might be, running ubuntu gives you an ubuntu experience, which is very much not the same than debian experience. If you want more streamlined distribution I'd recommend Mint (Debian edition), if you want the rock solid system but with less refined experience where you might need to tweak thing or two manually then go with Debian.

And, mostly for the nitpicking commenters, I know, I grossly simplified things around and cut some corners. I know it's not as black and white comparison. This is just my generic experience over quite a few years with Linux on Desktop.

Like anyone who could think critically or even have slightest media literacy, but....

Hope he doesn't change his mind and/or get overruled by then. Stable and predictable global markets are sooooo boring.

Edit: oh.. it took 5 hours since I originally commented.

The option to run one cable to the monitor, or reversely charge your laptop with one docking cable.

USB-C docks can already do this. Obviously with less power and it's not perfect by any means, but we don't need another technology for this. And sure, it's two cables, one from wall outlet to integrated dock/monitor and usb-c from dock to laptop, but no matter the technology you still need something to plug in to wall outlet.

Hetzner provides managed web hosting too. For emails I think you need to look for some other provider.

And what exactly would that be? Essentially everything has insurance.

Here's a list of one type of that kind of disasters where, despite of insurance, various kinds of environmental damage has been left behind which may or may not completely heal, or at least it takes a long, long time.

Here's a pretty public different kind of disaster which I guarantee was not 100% covered by insurance either. Here's another. I'm not building a comprehensive list, there's just too many and their impacts vary wildly.

Then there's the waste management in poorer countries which also cause immeasurable damage to the environment all the time by using a nearby river as a sewage for everything. Here's one example which made into the headlines back then. And here's a list of similar examples.

“they replaced nuclear with coal”

Go read yourself:

A 2020 study found that lost nuclear electricity production has been replaced primarily by coal-fired production and net electricity imports. The social cost of this shift from nuclear to coal is approximately €3 to €8 billion annually, mostly from the eleven hundred additional deaths associated with exposure to the local air pollution emitted when burning fossil fuels.

And remember that the pollution which kills people just because breathing smoke and ash is bad, it's also radioactive.

Let’s not see which one’s marginally worse but instead maybe just push something that’s actually good for the planet?

That would be really nice. We just don't have the alternatives ready to go for that just yet. Here in Finland, on a good day, renewables produce more than nuclear, but those are exceptions. Feel free to look up the data in finngrid service. There's currently over 7000MW worth of turbines around but it's pretty common to have even less than 200MW of wind power in the grid and that unreliability needs to be stabilized with something else.

There's a ton of stuff going on all the time which no amunt of insurance will cover. Modern nuclear generators just can't blow up like Chernobyl. Fukushima is a bit different, but maybe we shouldn't build reactors in places where they can be hit by a tsunami in the first place. And even there the environmental impact was somewhat limited.

And that doesn't change the fact that shutting down nuclear plants and replacing their energy output with coal caused more radiation in ash and other particles which are spread out of the chimney to the environment as a part of normal operation.

And the funny thing is that coal power plants are actually more radioactive to the environment than nuclear power. Sure, accidents like Chernobyl and Fukushima change the statistics by quite a lot, but for the absolute majority of nuclear plants they are way less radioactive to the environment than any given coal plant around.

Also there's not that many severe nuclear disasters in the history. Coal and other organic fuel plants cause far more casualties globally than nuclear ever did. But maybe it's easier to accept slow death of a lot of people due to cancer and whatever caused by organic fuel power plant emissions than single large spike when nuclear power (very, very rarely) goes wrong.

I totally agree. Setting up an email server is pretty trivial, but setting up a good email server with long lifespan and managing it is another matter. I absolutely recommend doing that, that's the one front we can take back from the giants if enough people decide to go that route, but it's not something you should just spin up by following a random youtube tutorial and leave it be.

I do host my own emails, but I've been doing that commercially too for a decade or so and make my living as system administrator, so I've cut my teeth on this quite a while ago. You need to understand quite a few things, set up backups, clear your IP from various blocklists every now and then, manage the ever growing spam problem, make sure that no malicious actors can access your systems and so on.

It is very much doable and at least I personally enjoy the freedom I have for not relying on anyone else on my communications. Go for it, but be prepared to jump in to the deep end without floats.

They could at least stop using twitter (and meta). At least here in Finland a ton of public offices, news outlets, radio channels and so on use twitter as a platform to deliver their information and, while it was a decent plan back when twitter wasn't owned by that clown, that ship has sailed ages ago but their practises haven't changed a bit. Government ran mastodon instance would be pretty cheap solution to this and it would quarantee that everyone had access to their information without signing up to any service at all.