“We are returning fire with guns that shoot pills, but the doc says it could take 2-3 weeks for it to build up in his system”

You do not need to port forward to share a Plex instance over the Internet. App.plex.tv manages the inbound connections automatically. All you need to do is manage invites to your friends. They log in with their email/password or with Google SSO to app.plex.tv and your content will be available over a secure connection with no port forwarding.

Plex should not be accessed externally using a port forward. Always use app.plex.tv as it prevents unauthenticated users from seeing the instance.

Play services actually works very well for containerizing work apps. Better actually than on iOS. My work can offer a set of apps that are available in this isolated container and apply policy to them that doesn’t impact other areas of the phone. I can also shut off all of them with a single button when I am on PTO. Microsoft’s apps require these services to build the container, and I believe Android phones in China do not have play services. It’s not perfect, but I personally think it works very well.

The costs are definitely a huge consideration and need to be optimized. A few years back we ran a POC of Open Shift in AWS that seemed to idle at like $3k/mo with barely anything running at all. That was a bad experiment. I could compare that to our new VMWare bill, which more than doubled this year following the Broadcom acquisition.

The products in AWS simplify costs into an opex model unlike anything that exists on prem and eliminate costly and time consuming hardware replacements. We just put in new load balancers recently because our previous ones were going EoL. They were a special model that ran us a about a half-mil for a few HA pairs including the pro services for installation assistance. How long will it take us to hit that amount using ALBs in AWS? What is the cost of the months that it took us to select the hardware, order, wait 90 days for delivery, rack-power-connect, configure with pro services, load hundreds of certs, gather testers, and run cutover meetings? What about the time spent patching for vulnerabilities? In 5-7 years it’ll be the same thing all over again.

Now think about having to do all of the above for routers, switches, firewalls, VM infra, storage, HVAC, carrier circuits, power, fire suppression.

The cloud today significantly different than the 2003 cpanel LAMP server. It’s a whole new landscape. Complex, highly-available architectures that cannot be replicated in an on-prem environment are easily built from code in minutes on AWS.

Those capabilities come with a steep learning curve on how to operate them in a secure and effective manor, but that’s always going to be the case in this industry. The people that can grow and learn will.

The core features of a WAF do require SSL offload, which of course means that the data needs to be unencrypted with your certificate on their edge nodes, then re-encrypted with your origin certificates. There is no other way in a WAF to protect from these exploits if the encryption is not broken, and WAF vendors can respond much faster than developers can to put protections in place for emerging threats.

I had never considered that Akamai or Cloudflare would be doing any deeper analytics on our data, as it would open them up to significant liability, same as I know for certain that AWS employees cannot see the data within our buckets.

As for the captcha prompts, I can’t speak to how those work in Cloudflare, though I do know that the AWS WAF does leave the sensitivity of the captcha prompts entirely up to the website owner. For free versions of CF there might be fewer configurable options.

Can you educate me on the negatives of Cloudflare?

My company is on Akamai, who has a pretty solid combined offering of WAF, DNS, and CDN, and yet I still feel like their platform is antiquated and well overdue for a refresh.

Thinking back to log4j, it was cloudflare who had the automatic protections in place well ahead of Akamai, who we had to ask for custom filters. Cloudflare also puts out many articles on Internet events and increase adoption of emerging best practices, sometimes through heavy shaming.

Very cool 😎 what a time to be alive for a handheld gamer. The Turnip drivers seem to have very active development, and even in the months I’ve owned the Odin 2, the updated drivers have solved several minor problems on Yuzu/Suyu/Sudachi.

If Linux or Steam Deck OS ever comes to the Odin 2 I will probably wait a long time before I consider trying it out. At this point in my life I don’t have as much mental energy after work to tinker and when I pick up the Odin 2 I really just want it to work. When the Retro Game Corps guide for Steam OS on Odin 2 drops I’ll know it’s time.

This is an entirely different segment of gaming but recently I have been reaching more for my AYN Odin 2 Pro. I love the size and battery life and how I feel like I can pick it up and jump into a game quickly.

Android isn’t perfect and emulation is in a funny spot right now with the switch emulators pivoting what feels like every few weeks, but it’s an incredible device.

That said, the Deck is quite a bit more capable with a higher quality library of games. Valve killed it with the Deck and the Odin is not nearly a full replacement.

Your link is to example.com

Eyyy yes! I just picked up an MZ-N505 a few months ago! It’s been great at work to quickly start music without staring at my phone for 5 minutes first.

Plex, as a company, definitely is aware of what items are in your library but streams don’t go through the Plex servers unless you use the Plex proxy service which is enabled by default but only used when the client connection speed is too slow to use the desired streaming setting.

Everyone who accesses their Plex externally should use app.plex.tv rather than NAT/port forwarding unless you’re also doing IP whitelisting on the NAT (not feasible for most remote access scenarios, as IPs are dynamic in most cases). Jellyfin should never be exposed externally.

I work in a highly regulated sector of IT and have learned that even the most robust software will have serious exploits at some point.

I have not looked into it for a while but I believe their servers broker a direct connection between the client and server.

I always wonder why some people are so dedicated to Jellyfin. Even if JF had full feature and experience parity, it would still not have secure remote access the way Plex does. There is no need to port forward or NAT Plex for external access if you use app.plex.tv to access. With the threat landscape the way it is today, that is worth a lot.

Checksums wouldnt work well for their purposes if they could easily be made to match any desired checksum. It’s one way math.

I was interested in Apple’s approach where they would look at checksums of the images to see if they matched checksums of known CSAM. Its trivial to defeat by changing even a single pixel, but it’s the only acceptable way to implement this scanning. Any other method is an overreach and a huge invasion of privacy.

For it to be tax deductible it needs to be a donation to a registered 501©(3) where no goods or services were received in exchange for the donation.

I was into film and digital photography for a while before I met my current girlfriend. Her family has always been into birdwatching. Once I realized the new challenge of photographing birds it was a whole new world of photography for me. It’s definitely part of my identity at this point. Enjoy this great blue heron.

It’s done by IP address not phone or laptop GPS.