NaibofTabr

Mozilla is the primary developer of the Gecko web engine which Firefox uses. Open source or no, web engines are complicated things to develop and maintain. Even Microsoft gave up and just started using Chromium.

Would it continue to work without a significant organization dedicated to maintaining it? Sure, probably, for awhile. Would it continue to be safe to use for things like finances? No.

Is there any point to switching web browsers to one that is based on the same engine? Not really, no, the browser application is basically just a wrapper for the engine… a skin, a theme, like having an SUV shell vs a pickup shell on the same frame and drivetrain.

it’s easy as fuck to change browsers these days

Is it? Switch to what, exactly?

You’re welcome. I tried to do basically the same thing a few years back (run a WordPress site from a RPi on my home network - and also a Minecraft server) and so I tried to write up the problems I ran into - I probably forgot some, but those are the major hurdles. I learned a lot along the way.

I should also point out that if you rent hosting space (from linode or inmotion or digitalocean or many other options) then problems 1 & 4 become much easier, and 2 & 3 go away entirely (most people don’t host public websites on their home networks because of these and other issues).

Happy to help. If you’re interested in learning networking more thoroughly, I want to point you to Professor Messer especially the Network+ content. He has far more complete explanations than I could write (and it’s free!). Even if you’re not interested in getting any certs, the explanations will be helpful.

So your goal is to host a publicly accessible static website from a computer in your home. There are a few problems you need to overcome before even worrying about configuring any software. You need some more basic networking knowledge first.

0. Basic Networking Theory - you should read a brief explanation of the OSI 7-layer network model. You don’t have to try to memorize this and you won’t really understand it until you start actually doing stuff, but you should read it for some basic terminology and to understand that there are distinct steps through which communication between computers happens.

   When you start running into problems (“why can’t I access the server? I did all the tutorial steps”), figuring out which layer the problem is in will help guide you to the solution:

   • is there a bad cable? -> 1. Physical
   • do I have the right IP address? -> 3. Network
   • is the firewall port closed? -> 4. Transport

1. Privacy/Security/Safety - don’t host a publicly accessible website from your personal computer. Just don’t. To make this happen you will have to open a hole in your network security that makes your computer accessible from the public internet. Don’t do this on your daily driver computer. Don’t do this with any device that has any files on it that you care about or any access to any personal information. Don’t.

   Set up your web server/learning environment on a clean, dedicated system. This could be an old laptop or a Raspberry Pi (an older 3B model will work just fine for this) or whatever cheap computer hardware you have, as long as it can run Linux and has a physical network port (using WiFi will give you extra headaches for getting this working). If you think you might want to expand your projects in the future, you can get a used Dell server for very little money, and add more hard drives as needed. Wipe the hard drive and install Debian or Ubuntu server as a base, there’s lots of resources out there for setting up web services on either.

2. Restricted Ports - you are most likely on a residential internet connection. Most residential ISPs close ports for security reasons, especially 80. For example, here is Cox’s list of restricted ports. You will need to find your ISP’s equivalent list and understand what you can and can’t do with your connection.

   There are workarounds, primarily through port forwarding. You will need admin access to your router to set this up. I recommend that you read that entire article because it probably applies directly to your situation.

3. Dynamic IP Address - most people still find it easier to work with IPv4 addresses - I won’t go into IPv6 right now, but you should read a little about it just for awareness. Your residential internet most likely has a dynamic IPv4 address, which means you can’t rely on that address staying the same forever (or even until next week), which means that you can’t configure your Cloudflare domain name to point to a single IPv4 address.

   Dynamic DNS is the solution for this, and again you’ll need admin access to your router to set it up.

4. HTTPS/TLS/SSL - if you get through all those issues then you probably have a working website, but now you’re seeing something like this when you try to view it in your browser:

   This doesn’t mean that you can’t get to your website - it just means that you can only do it via HTTP and not HTTPS, which the browser is warning you (and anyone else trying to view your website) is not secure. You can either just accept that this alert will always come up, and that you have to click through it, or you can learn about TLS and getting an SSL/TLS certificate. This is a later topic - it doesn’t matter and probably won’t make sense until after you’ve got your web server online.

Alternatively, Material Files (available in F-Droid) can easily create a local FTP server or connect to a NAS. It’s also a pretty good file manager app.

Yup, and it might be necessary to reproduce a lot of the answers that people used to find on reddit.

See also: BOFH

Yeah, it’s a good concept and I’d like to see more options like it on the market, but it kind of runs against the current consumer electronics profit model and the way the electronics supply chain is structured.

It does seem like consumer awareness is changing, and there’s more and more demand for sustainable and long-life products. Hopefully that continues. I think “vote with your wallet” applies to this sort of thing.

Fairphone is offering a solution to this by designing devices that are repairable and have guaranteed software updates, though it requires some compromises.

• because the phone is not sealed, its waterproof/dustproof rating is lower
• the specs are lower than other phones in the same price range - this is probably due to the modular design and the need to assure the supply of replacement parts
• the phone is only designed for the EU - it may not support the network bands used in other parts of the world

Where is the OSM mention?

They don’t have an affiliate link that will generate click revenue for the author.

I plan to RAID1 them and use them as boot drives

This will not work unless the mainboard is handling the RAID control in firmware. If you are doing software RAID then the OS must boot before the array can be accessed.

If you just want to set up a NAS, you can get a used PowerEdge tower for very little money, and it will work a lot better than what you have planned.

Huh… and that’s repeatable? How long could you go on Linux before the blackouts, and did you run on Windows for a similar amount of time with no issues? also, when the blackout happens does it recover after a little time, or do you have to reboot to get video back? (is it just a screen blackout, or has the system crashed?) When the screen is black, can you reboot with busier backwards?

One issue that I’ve had on Linux installs is that the system doesn’t recover properly from hibernate. I’ve seen this on laptops and desktops over more than a decade. When this happens the screen goes black and the system doesn’t respond to any keyboard or mouse input, the only way to recover is to force a reboot. Maybe check your power management profile and disable hibernation.

Otherwise there are a lot of reasons that the screen might black out:

• power issues - what is your PSU model? Linux installs are frequently not as power efficient as Windows on the same hardware, generally because Windows does a lot more throttling by default.
• overheating - Windows (and the Windows hardware drivers) might be configured to throttle the CPU and/or GPU to manage the temperature automatically without telling you, while Linux might be giving you the full unthrottled system power and overheating.
• video drivers & multimonitor - as others have said already, this could be an issue with the Linux video drivers. You should verify which driver you’re using as EccTM@lemmy.ml said. Are all your monitors the same resolution? I’ve definitely had trouble with mulitple monitors if they were mismatched.
• bad CPU core - this one’s a long shot, but Windows tends to be a lot more single-threaded while Linux is more likely to try to balance operations across all CPU cores. Maybe one of your cores has an issue, and when Linux tries to use it it triggers a system crash, while Windows just never gets around to using that particular core for anything critical (and so never triggers the crash).
• SSD/swap file issue - most Linux distros will configure a swap partition on the root hard drive by default, which is used as an extension of the RAM. Windows doesn’t use a swap file. You have plenty of RAM so there’s not really a need for it, so you should try just disabling swap.

But whether a few hours or a few days, eventually I start having issues with the displays. Monitors will black out. Not boot. Eventually the whole system just stops working in a way that I can figure out.

This sounds more like a hardware issue than software. Can you provide more detail? Have you done basic troubleshooting steps like trying different power cords and surge protector/power strip? What is the full list of hardware for your system? Have you reseated the RAM? Replaced the CMOS battery? (a dead CMOS battery will prevent system boot)

You will own nothing and like it have no recourse.

read-only Friday

So this video is a pretty good explanation of quantum field theory.

Like Schreudinger’s cat, which can be dead or alive, and will be in a superposition of both until observation happens again.

This idea is based on a misunderstanding of what Schrödinger actually said. The concept of the cat existing in a superposition state was not meant to be taken literally and is not an example of anything that is currently believed to be true about the physical universe.

The problem with this is that even if a machine is conscious, there’s no reason it would be conscious like us. I fully agree that consciousness could take many forms, probably infinite forms - and there’s no reason to expect that one form would be functionally or technically compatible with another.

What does the idea “exact copy of our brain” mean to you? Would it involve emulating the physical structure of a human brain? Would it attempt to abstract the brain’s operations from the physical structure? Would it be a collection of electrical potentials? Simulations of the behavior of specific neurochemicals? What would it be in practice, that would not be hand-wavy fantasy?

Heh, well… I guess that depends on how you define “physical”… if quantum field theory is correct then everything we experience is the product of fluctuations in various fields, including the physical mass of protons, neutrons etc. “Reality” as we experience it might be more of an emergent property, as illusory as the apparent solidity of matter.

Well there’s no proof, it’s all speculative and even the concept of scanning all the information in a human brain is fantasy so there isn’t going to be a real answer for awhile.

But just as a conceptual argument, how do you figure that a one-time brain scan would be able to replicate active processes that occur over time? Or would you expect the brain scan to be done over the course of a year or something like that?

Even if it were possible to scan the contents of your brain and reproduce them in a digital form, there’s no reason that scan would be anything more than bits of data on the digital system. You could have a database of your brain… but it wouldn’t be conscious.

No one has any idea how to replicate the activity of the brain. As far as I know there aren’t any practical proposals in this area. All we have are vague theories about what might be going on, and a limited grasp of neurochemistry. It will be a very long time before reproducing the functions of a conscious mind is anything more than fantasy.