I‘d probably go with a VPS. It probably won‘t cost more than 10$/month, maybe even less, depending on how much heavy usage your Nextcloud instance requires. And you won‘t have to worry about keeping your hardware and network running, which pretty much always takes up more time than expected.

Some web hosters (I‘ve had very good experiences with Hetzner) charge an hourly rate and allow you to preconfigure VPSes with software like Nextcloud. So unless you have specific needs, you could just spin up an instance, check if it suits your needs and, if not, only pay a few cents.

That really depends on what you mean by privacy. They probably won‘t sell your data or even look at the stuff you‘re doing with your server, if you‘re not disrupting their service. But they definitely will cooperate with law enforcement if your server is used for illegal stuff and someone reports it.

In the end, you’ll always have to trust your server host to some degree. Some other hosts, like Hetzner, allow you to install your own operating systems on their dedicated servers, so you can set up full disk encryption. But even though this is definitely better than unencrypted disks, it‘s still not a reliable way of preventing access while your server is running.

So if you’re just wondering if you can host a Nextcloud instance at hostinger without your files being sold by them: Almost certainly, yes. If you, on the other hand, plan to host manuals for building bombs or, even worse, offer downloads of old Nintendo games, they‘re probably not going to respect your privacy for long.

I’m not an expert, so take my findings with a grain of salt, but the current scientific consensus seems to be:

We don’t know.

Recent studies suggest that the behavior of spiders is more complex than previously thought. They show behavior that can’t be explained by simple automatisms, such as the development of hunting strategies depending on their prey.

Keep in mind that these findings do not indicate any capability to love or to grow fond of someone. But there is an ongoing discussion about whether invertebrates should be considered sentient.

If I understand that article correctly, this should be the case, yes. Unfortunately I’m unable to find any official statistics on that matter.

According to the second source „energy recovery“ isn‘t included in this statistic.

Oh boy, here I go ranting against misinformation about recycling again.

Your claim that 60% of these bottles will be burned is false. The recycling quota for single-use plastic bottles in Germany is 97.6% (2023; source).

60% was the quota of all non-recycled plastic packaging material combined, back in 2018. This quota has further decreased since, and is now at about 30% (2023, source), so almost 70% of all plastic packaging in Germany is recycled. It’s still not perfect, but far, far better than just burning everything.

Recycling isn’t an easy and cheap process, but it can definitely work and be steadily improved, if it’s properly implemented. I’m so tired of this dumb suggestion, that recycling is bad because it’s not perfect (or, in the case of the US, full of corruption). Every bit of plastic that isn’t polluting the environment is a win. And recycling is definitely helping with that. As opposed to propagating false information on the internet.

Cool project, but it seems to be very similar to PairDrop with the major downside of not being open-source. What would be the advantages of using this project over existing FOSS-solutions?

I think Ghostfolio might be what you’re looking for.

I disagree with that assertion.

While not in power, the conservatives have shifted their position to what was considered to be the far right only a few years ago. For example, one of their main messages during their campaign was to close Germany‘s borders for refugees, a position that was only supported by the far-right AfD beforehand (and which is violating EU law).

Their main target during the lead-up to this election wasn‘t the far-right, it was the green and left-wing parties. They ranted against renewable energy, taxes on gas, the legalization of Cannabis and such, instead of fighting against the rising far-right extremists.

Friedrich Merz, the conservative’s candidate and likely future chancellor, is an opportunist. If he expects to win something from the talking points of the right-wing extremists, he has absolutely no issues embracing them. He’s very, very different from Angela Merkel.

He already voted with the AfD against the other democratic parties a few weeks ago, which he explicitly ruled out only two months earlier. I have no reason to believe him, if he says he won‘t cooperate with them again.

My educated guess would be that it would require a lot more work for very little benefit.

Officially supporting another platform is just more work for the developers, QA and the support team. Their games do run very well on Linux using Proton. Diablo 4 has even been marked as Steam Deck Verified before its launch on Steam.

And they work without them having to implement things like a Vulkan renderer, having to test on even more system configurations and having to teach the support team how to handle issue reports on Linux.

So I think they‘re okay with how things are right now. Everyone can play their games on Linux, but if something breaks, it‘s not their problem.

And, having played their games on Linux for many years now, I‘m personally okay with that. Proton, DXVK and all the other tools are so advanced by now, that I don‘t think there would be much of a difference if they offered native game builds for Linux.

I‘ve been using Kagi since September 2023.

The biggest difference to other search engines is really the quality of the results. Before Kagi, I‘ve used DuckDuckGo for a few years, but had to switch to Google more often than not, as I just didn‘t find what I was looking for. Most alternative search engines only use Bing‘s index, which just isn‘t any good in my experience. Kagi‘s results are built from quite a few different sources as well as their own index. Seeing how crappy Google‘s results are at this point, I don‘t think you can get better search results right now.

Also, the ability to rank and block specific domains in my results is something I really like and wouldn‘t want to miss anymore.

Lastly, I really enjoy using a search engine that isn‘t being optimized for advertisers, but for the user. Kagi‘s team is very receptive for feedback. For example, they’ve implemented an icon for search results with paywalls, because users asked for it. There are many small, nice details like that, which can save you a few clicks or just improve your general experience.

After spending ten minutes on the toilet pondering, I think „growing facial hair“ is the best counter-example I can come up with.

Or I just don‘t know enough women who like growing facial hair.

While this is definitely a great read and an interesting attack vector, I think the term „deanonymization“ is stretching it here.

As far as I can see, this attack would only let you determine which Cloudflare datacenter the target has been accessing. This would, in most cases, be one near the target, but it wouldn‘t get you a precise position or any personal information about the target. You‘d just get a pretty unreliable and very large radius of where your target might be.

It‘s also worth mentioning that Monitor anonymizes your data before checking it for breaches.

So there shouldn‘t be any serious privacy issues.