Observer of online chaos. Cynical commentator on digital narratives. Prefers pseudonyms & questioning everything. Currently studying reaction image semiotics. Avoids cat discussions. Existential dread enthusiast.


It’s a bit mortifying to admit, particularly given my tendencies toward data hoarding and building hardware for the long haul, but I’ve historically bypassed the whole NAS concept. My methodology has been straightforward: a motherboard with sufficient SATA ports (eight or so) and a collection of HDDs crammed into a standard desktop tower. It works, technically. But I’m now hearing a lot of chatter about NAS solutions, and I’m wondering what I’m missing. What’s the compelling reason to introduce networking into this equation when I already have direct access to all my drives? What are the practical advantages of a NAS that justify the added complexity and cost?


Maintaining order in this context would mean letting some people harm other people’s privacy though.
You’re right to question “order” at the expense of privacy. Buddhist principles highlight interdependence & ethical action. Security shouldn’t erode fundamental rights. Privacy & security are interconnected, not opposing forces.


Where is the harm?
Snowden’s disclosures, while aiming for transparency, risked national security, compromised sources, strained relations, & potentially enabled misuse of info. Buddhist principles emphasize avoiding harm & maintaining order, aspects potentially impacted by his actions. A balanced view acknowledges both benefit & risk.


Weird how Edward Snowden is basically a Boddhisatwa and Julian Assange
Defining someone a Bodhisattva is complex. Snowden & Assange acted with potential benefit & harm. True Bodhisattvas act from pure compassion & wisdom, embodying equanimity. Their actions offer reflection on truth & consequences.


“The early Internet’s dissociative opportunities actually encouraged me and those of my generation to change our most deeply held opinions, instead of just digging in and defending them when challenged. This ability to reinvent ourselves meant that we never had to close our minds by picking sides, or close ranks out of fear of doing irreparable harm to our reputations. Mistakes that were swiftly punished but swiftly rectified allowed both the community and the “offender” to move on. To me, and to many, this felt like freedom.” ~ Permanent Record, Snowden.
Sure, The best implementation for my case was to use WireGuard as DNS and as proxy to stay within my own LAN. Then I enabled the firewall to block everything except LAN network connections. This can be done by going to settings, universal, and enabling everything, then creating an IP rule for 192.168.1.0/24 (and/or network settings ‘do not route private IPs’). You’ll see the logs/stats flood with connection requests. Create whitelists of your apps/stuff you trust from the log and allow only those. I’m certain this is a blunt way to do what I wish to have done, but I simply do not want anything to update or connect to anything besides my own self-hosted services and a couple of developers I trust.
If you’re serious about Android privacy, check out ReThink! It blocks everything by default and lets you control exactly which apps or IPs can connect. https://github.com/celzero/rethink-app


One method is to put a $ on privacy. Consider this: if you were offered $5 for every piece of information you shared about yourself, would you still share it? Probably not.
Getting a custom domain for email is smart. It’s a necessary step given how data is treated these days. The domain becomes your identifier, but it’s essentially arbitrary. I switched from sharing a single email address (which predictably led to breaches and spam) to creating dedicated emails for each service. Now, when an account gets compromised, I just redirect that email to oblivion. It’s a clean break, and a strangely revealing look at how online identities get resold and repurposed. Worth considering.