I guarantee that you will. That is a nightmare that you can not choose to avoid unless you are willing to sacrifice your social life.
Remember how raising awareness about smartphones, always on microphones, closed source communication services/apps worked? I do not.
I run an Android (Google free) smartphone with a custom ROM, only use free software apps on it.
How does it help when I am surrounded by people using these kind of technologies (privacy violating ones)? I does not. How will it help when everyone will have his/her personal assistant (robot, drone, smart wearable, smart-thing, whatever) and you (and I) won't? It will not.
None of my friends, family, colleagues (even the security/privacy aware engineers) bother. Some of them because they do not have the technical knowledge to do so, most of them because they do not want to sacrifice any bit of convenience/comfort (and maybe rightfully so, I am not judging them - life is short, I do get that people do not want to waste precious time maintaining arcane infra, devices, config,... themselves).
I am a privacy and free software advocate and an engineer; whenever I can (and when there is a tiny bit of will on their side or when I have lever), I try to get people off surveillance/ad-backed companies services.
It rarely works or lasts. Sometimes it does though so it is worth (to me) keep on trying.
It generally works or lasts when I have lever: I manage various sports team, only share schedules etc via Signal ; family wants to get pictures from me, I will only share the link (to my Nextcloud instance) or photos themselves via Signal, etc.
Sometimes it sticks with people because it's close enough to whatsapp/messenger/whatever if most (all) of their contacts are their. But as soon as you have that one person that will not or can not install Signal, alternatives groups get created on whatsapp/messenger/whatever.
Overcoming the network effect is tremendously hard to borderline impossible.
Believing that you can escape it is a fallacy. It does not mean that is not worth fight for our rights, but believing that you can escape it altogether (without becoming and hermit) would be setting, I believe, an unachievable goal (with all the psychological impact that it can/will have).
Think about it in terms of what is rational. If there were serious costs to having your data leaked out like this people would rationally have a bit more trepidation. On the other hand, we are in the era where everyone by now has probably been pwned a half dozen times or more, to no effect usually on your real life. You might get disgusted that instagram watches what you watch to serve you more of that stuff and keep you on longer, other people love that sort of content optimization, I literally hear them gloat how their social media content feeds at this point have been so perfectly honed to show them whatever hobbies or sports they are interested in. Take a picture and it pushes to 5 services and people love that. Having an app already pull your contacts for you and match them up to existing users is great in the eyes of most people.
You are right that on the one hand these things could be used for really bad purposes, but they are pretty benign. Now if you start going "well social media posts can influence elections," sure, but so can TV, newspapers, the radio, a banner hauled by a prop plane, whatever, not like anythings changed. If anything its a safer environment for combating a slip to fascism now vs in the mid century when there were like three channels on TV and a handful of radio programs carefully regulated by the FCC and that's all the free flow of info you have short of smuggling the printed word like its the 1400s.
Given all of this, I can't really blame people for accepting the game they didn't create for how it is and gleaming convenience from it. Take smartphones out of the equation, take the internet out, take out computers, and our present dystopia is still functionally the same.
Same in France/Belgium, kids can write a letter to "Santa" (i.e. "Père Noël" or "Papa Noël"), no need for a postcode, or anything else than the name :-)
(it is also processed [my guess would be by volunteers too] and kids receive a proper answer letter back from "Santa, North Pole")
I run Nextcloud "locally" too. It's "local" in the sense that it sits on an laptop-turned-server by my desk [0]. Add a domain name, a simple dynamic DNS [1] and a forwarding rule on your router ; your local machine is now reachable from everywhere.
No (useless for that usecase) additional intermediary like Tailscale in the middle. It has the added benefit of allowing you to share everything that is on Nextcloud with people without requiring them to use any VPN/etc.
[0] the fact that it runs an a laptop (with its battery) rather than on a workstation provides a UPS on the cheap
I wouldnt call Tailscale "useless" in that case. If you use Tailscale there, you dont have to port forward, so you have no exposure to the general internet. No one bashing on your port, looking for vulnerabilities. You don't need a DDNS, since Tailscale gives you a fixed address for your machine that persists. So you can set a single CNAME record with your Domain hosting service and you're done. And Tailscale has clients for all platforms, including mobile, so it "just works" with all your devices. It's free for up to 20 devices.
Re: dynamic dns, I've just started self-hosting some services and piping them through cloudflare, and I use the docker container oznu/cloudflare-ddns to handle IP changes.
Bonus is that I can restrict incoming traffic on the router to cloudflare ip ranges, and use cloudflare tools to restrict traffic.
I suppose you could accomplish the same with a VPS but this is all free.
This would definitely be the ideal solution, and it is certainly how the Internet was intended to be used, but a lot of residential ISPs either frown on hosting services on a residential link, or outright forbid it. Plus, CGNAT is more or less inevitable at this point, might as well embrace it.
Like you mention, services like tailscale and cloudflare tunnels are a way around it, but that introduces complexity and additional trust in another company.
The main reason I host my stuff on a VPS is because if an attacker finds their way in, I don't want them to have unrestricted access to my home network as well. (And I'm to lazy to set up a DMZ...)
Lack of hairpin NAT makes that very challenging on my network, I mean I can access things from inside and outside the network but I have to use different domain names.
That's a weird take. I am French, I have never heard (except for Téléphone's song) that expression. The closest thing that comes to mind is "plouf plouf".
Wouldn't it simply be because you have been using (and publicly disclosing) that mail address for quite some time and it probably became part of each and every email list script kiddies are able to get their hands on?
Belgian here. I don’t use "ploum ploum" either (else I would never have this pseudo) but realized over the years that a number of people use this expression. (look on twitter for "ploum ploum" for example).
And, yes, lot of spam is because this email was in multiple exposed account but I’ve received lot and lot of "fresh subscription/confirm your emails" where it was obvious people were simply writing whatever in a field.
I ignore what standard the page follows but the code looks like it was generated or written by someone with little knowledge about CSS. Among other things, code is duplicated all over the place ; everything is globally centered, before every element being individually aligned to left.
This is what it would look like with proper "boring old" html/css written back in the days https://jsfiddle.net/dgtvjn5x/ (more readable and slightly lighter)
For the sake of completeness:
-it would require a more verbose doctype or none depending on when it was written ;
- the "style" element would also require a "type" attribute until some point in time ;
- "border: none" isn't required anymore, browsers have stopped adding border around images.
PS. this is just a comment about how html/css can still be easy and straightforward these days. I do not mean to undermine the fact that the owner did the right thing with regard to standing for and protecting the domain (and promoting eff :)).
Remember how raising awareness about smartphones, always on microphones, closed source communication services/apps worked? I do not.
I run an Android (Google free) smartphone with a custom ROM, only use free software apps on it.
How does it help when I am surrounded by people using these kind of technologies (privacy violating ones)? I does not. How will it help when everyone will have his/her personal assistant (robot, drone, smart wearable, smart-thing, whatever) and you (and I) won't? It will not.
None of my friends, family, colleagues (even the security/privacy aware engineers) bother. Some of them because they do not have the technical knowledge to do so, most of them because they do not want to sacrifice any bit of convenience/comfort (and maybe rightfully so, I am not judging them - life is short, I do get that people do not want to waste precious time maintaining arcane infra, devices, config,... themselves).
I am a privacy and free software advocate and an engineer; whenever I can (and when there is a tiny bit of will on their side or when I have lever), I try to get people off surveillance/ad-backed companies services.
It rarely works or lasts. Sometimes it does though so it is worth (to me) keep on trying.
It generally works or lasts when I have lever: I manage various sports team, only share schedules etc via Signal ; family wants to get pictures from me, I will only share the link (to my Nextcloud instance) or photos themselves via Signal, etc.
Sometimes it sticks with people because it's close enough to whatsapp/messenger/whatever if most (all) of their contacts are their. But as soon as you have that one person that will not or can not install Signal, alternatives groups get created on whatsapp/messenger/whatever.
Overcoming the network effect is tremendously hard to borderline impossible.
Believing that you can escape it is a fallacy. It does not mean that is not worth fight for our rights, but believing that you can escape it altogether (without becoming and hermit) would be setting, I believe, an unachievable goal (with all the psychological impact that it can/will have).
Edit: fixed typos