Kid_Thunder

@[email protected]

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. View on remote instance

Self-hosted website for posting web novel/fiction

Hey hello, self-hosting noob here. I just want to know if anyone would know a good way to host my writing. Something akin to those webcomic sites, except for writing. Multiple stories with their own "sections" (?) and a chapter selection for each. Maybe a home page or profile page to just briefly detail myself or whatever, I...

Kid_Thunder ,

Just to be clear, if you're in the US, you 100% have copyright protection as soon as you put pen to paper.

Kid_Thunder ,

I see some comments recommending wordpress but wordpress is a security problem, especially if you're using 3rd party plugins. It is such a bad problem that their are 'wordpress security' applications but even then wordpress sites get hacked all the time. If you are going to use it, it is best to let some other host handle it for you if you don't know a whole lot about what you're doing.

There are many, many other content management systems out there. Some are lighter than wordpress and some heavier. They are all about posting and managing content. Most of them have some sort of user and authoring system. Once you're webserver is set up, many are written in a mixture of php and python so setting them up is generally drag and drop with either minor configuration file edits or wizards. Many of them have sections that you can set up using a labeling/tagging system. Most of them allow you to have the 'stories' as private or draft where you have to actually click publish before people can view them. Some have user roles systems where you can limit viewing and even editing between different roles for sections.

Generally, once their setup is done, they are point and click to do everything.

Here's a nice list of FOSS CMS' (which includes Wordpress of course).

Google Cloud accidentally deletes UniSuper’s online account due to ‘unprecedented misconfiguration’ ( www.theguardian.com )

More than half a million UniSuper fund members went a week with no access to their superannuation accounts after a “one-of-a-kind” Google Cloud “misconfiguration” led to the financial services provider’s private cloud account being deleted, Google and UniSuper have revealed.

Kid_Thunder ,

And the crazy part is that it sounds like Google didn't have backups of this data after the account was deleted. The only reason they were able to restore the data was because UniSuper had a backup on another provider.

This should make anyone really think hard about the situation before using Google's cloud. Sure, it is good practice and frankly refreshing to hear that a company actually backed up away from their primary cloud infrastructure but I'm surprised Google themselves do not keep backups for awhile after an account is deleted.

Kid_Thunder ,

Actually, it highlights the importance of a proper distributed backup strategy and disaster recovery plan.

Uh, yeah, that's why I said

it is good practice and frankly refreshing to hear that a company actually backed up away from their primary cloud infrastructure

The same can probably happen on AWS, Azure, any data center really

Sure, if you colocate in another datacenter and it isn't your own, they aren't backing your data up without some sort of other agreement and configuration. I'm not sure about AWS but Azure actually has offline geographically separate backup options.

Kid_Thunder ,

Google Cloud definitely backs up data. Specifically I said

after an account is deleted.

The surprise here being that those backups are gone (or unrecoverable) immediately after the account is deleted.

EA wants to place in-game ads in its full-price AAA games, again ( www.techspot.com )

EA has tried this before, with predictable results. In 2020, EA Sports UFC 4 included full-screen ads for the Amazon Prime series The Boys that would appear during 'Replay' moments. These were absent from the game when it launched, with EA introducing the ads about a month later, thereby preventing them from being highlighted in...

Kid_Thunder ,

Even though costs of AAA games have gone up for some games (certainly not all) because of the size of teams/labor hours, so have the volume of sales. Publishers have made more and more profit while the average price of AAA games had stayed about the same for a long time.

Games selling in the hundreds of thousands was considered really good decades ago but now those are in the tens of millions.

Publishers aren't having problems with profitability, so much so that they've been buying up large swaths of development houses and IPs and then dismantling them when they have a single flop.

EA's gross profit in 2010 was $1.6B, in 2014 was $3.03B and in the past 12 months have been $5.8B right now according to macrotrends.

But the current trends are unsustainable

The current trend in profitability is increasing, not decreasing. It isn't a minor trend or minor increases either.

Major publisher profitability has vastly increased in spite of stagnant game prices. They don't have to increase prices to increase growth. It is simply that the market allows the increase of the price with more profitability and so they do.

Kid_Thunder ,

The problem historically isn't that streaming services are paying for fast lanes but that they have to pay not to be throttled below normal traffic. In other words, they have to pay more to be treated like other traffic.

Even crazier is remember that there are actual peering agreements between folks like cogentco, Level 3, comcast, Hurricane Electric, AT&T, etc. What comcast did that caused the spotlight was to bypass their peering agreement with Level 3 and went direct to their end customer (netflix) and told them they'd specifically throttle them if they didn't pay a premium which also undermined Level3's peering agreement with Comcast.

Peering agreements are basically like "I'll route your traffic, if you route my traffic" and that's how the Internet works.

Kid_Thunder ,

I found this wikipedia article about backbones and peering but it really isn't that great but in the results it also came up with this pretty good presentation from Carnegi Mellon. I was only going to browser a few of the slides but the information isn't really all that much and the illustrations are good. I think Prof. Nace did an excellent job here. Much better than I would have.

Kid_Thunder ,

I was trying to find the old Level 3 blog post but didn't because I believe they basically said that Comcast needed to upgrade its infrastructure and never did. Netflix was the cashcow they saw to essentially make them pay for it. As a Comcast customer, I see it as charging the customer twice -- first for the Internet service for the content and again because Netflix is going to pass that extra cost onto you (and everyone else who isn't a Comcast customer).

You're right on about CDNs and edge / egress/ingress PoPs. It also keeps it cheaper for the likes of Netflix/Amazon/etc. in the long run with the benefits of adding more availability.

How come liberals dont hate conservatives the way conservatives hate liberals

I constantly see angry mobs of people decrying "woke", "critical race theory", ""grooming"", and whatever other nonsense they made up this week. They march around with guns, constantly appending lib as a prefix to any word they can use to denigrate. They actively plot violence and spew hatred in the open....

Kid_Thunder ,

The conservative strategy has been to polarize politics in America in order to have a very aligned power. This means that if you aren't 100% behind them, then you are an enemy to them.

It is only through this that the GOP can both say that they are protecting individual freedoms but limiting or taking them away (of course opponents to this will be quick to point out the one and only counter point which is fighting against restrictions of the 2nd Amendment and only that), say that they are for smaller government but yet want private companies to be regulated that attempt to censor hate and misinformation (which has nothing to do with the 1st Amendment when it comes to non-government entities) yet still say that they are for businesses to operate as unrestricted as possible. They are anti-union because they are corrupt and take away accountability yet strongly support the worst of the worst of unions -- the police unions. The GOP constantly cries that there's a nanny government, yet they push laws to restrict people's choices, censor libraries and try to tear down citizen protections. The GOP cries that this country's deficit is out of control but when they are in power, they over spend. They complain that public schools indoctrinate but at the local and state levels attempt to indoctrinate in public schools. They talk about needing to stay in power to turn America around, yet when empowered in all three federal branches fails to pass meaningful legislation and run the government that they are overseeing and yet blame the government because they will eat each other alive for their own individual gains.

There so much more but the GOP is a party of hypocrites. Without polarization mixed with some fear mongering their party would likely cease to exist with any real power because they do not stand for the ideals that their own voting base supports.

The GOP constantly tries to create an environment of being constantly under attack and spews hate. Their voter base is simply a product of that.

Kid_Thunder ,

The best part is when the business customers had to use an AI chatbot for support which was as helpful as the AI Adbot.

Kid_Thunder ,

Former Googlers have always said that the big issue with sustaining products at Google is that it is highly competitive and Google rewards new products, not sustaining current products. So, most people want to continuously join/form teams for new products leaving little resources for current products. This has been the way since Google started becoming a large company -- so decades now.

This makes sense as to why Google puts out applications that seemingly do the same thing as something else but ever so slightly different and why there are sometimes cool new products that die on the vine years later and if there was no slightly different thing available it just dies or if there is then there is a half-assed migration.

In the Reddit AMA the Google Home team answered a few questions and only the very few softball ones. One interesting comment they made though is that because of the Nest products and generally new products, they believe it is a challenge to support the older hardware, including integrating Google and Nest hardware, so basically you get features removed to make it all work. Of course, there was the promise and supposed internal roadmap that puts these features back eventually, but we've seen that kind of promise over and over from Google and it rarely happens. They are trying to replace Assistant with their Gemini AI which you can do now but it comes with even less features (but parity is coming -- they promise!...one day!). Is that parity with current Assistant which seems to be supporting less and less and working worse?

Google is losing a lot of consumer trust in products I think and it's going to get worse for them as this trickles to the general consumer-base.

Kid_Thunder ,

For the big products, I think Google Assistant will be next followed by barely doing anything further with Android Auto until it dies a few years after GAS starts getting pushed out while it probably either won't or will stop supporting 'legacy' Android Auto apps, so AA dies 'because developers aren't supporting apps anymore -- totally not our fault and we're sorry to see this happen.'

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • kbinchat
  • All magazines