Of course. Need to be extra cautious so you don't get a surprise bill for your birthday.

That's what I liked more about Oracle as compared to AWS or GCP etc', is that you need to manually upgrade your account to paid account. and if u don't then you just can't create another machine or another block storage.

But still it's extremely important to read every word so you know what you're getting yourself into.

that's not to wear off of the importance of awareness. you should be aware always, even if you don't take action.

Obviously I'm not avoiding it all together, but I'm taking a step in the right direction.

And it's not just replacing Google by CF, because CF has much less access in comparison as I explain.

you can deploy some zero trust models in your setup, and eliminate the threat even further. for example end to end encryption

looks really cool!

mind elaborating?

If I let them handle the TLS for me then I can see that. but if, for example, I'm using NextCloud, which implement end to end encryption from client to server, then I wouldn't care if they did, no?

tl;dr: classic convenience/privacy. depends on your threat model. surely better than Google. models of zero trust will help.

That's a great question, that I have asked myself before too. It doesn't have one answer, and any one would make their own choices based on their own respective threat model. I'll answer you with some of my thoughts, and why I do use their services.

I'll take as an example my usage of NextCloud, coming as a replacement to Google Drive for example.

let's break up the setups:

1. client (mobile app, desktop client, browser)
2. communication to server
3. server

It's oversimplified, but to the point: In Google's setup, you have control of 0 out of three things.

1. you use their closed source client, 2. they decide the communication to the server (if there's any CDN, where their servers located, TLS version), and 3. data is on their servers, wether encrypted or not is up to them.

In NextCloud's setup,

1. The clients are open source (you can varify them, or build your own),
2. communication to server is up to you. and in this case you trust your data with CF, that's right. gonna have to trust them.
3. server is your server, and you encrypt the files how you want.

From just this look, NC is clearly better off. now, it's not perfect, and each one will do their own convenience vs privacy deal and decide their deal.

If you deploy some sort of e2ee, the severity level of CF drops even more, because they're exposed to less data. specifically for NC they do do e2ee, but each solution to its own. https://nextcloud.com/encryption/ this goes as an example for zero trust model. if you handle the encryption yourself (like using an e2ee service), you don't have to trust the medium your data is going through. like the open internet.

gotta admit I haven't read the ToS, but I didn't encounter any problems. I'm streaming GBs of music via the tunnel and it still works. p2p I didn't try, but I don't really see a reason to?

So what if you took my king hostage? Yours gonna have nightmares from seeing my entire horde die before him! ha! you may have won the game, but ah.. ahhg.. you may have won! but I...! you'll see me!!

another option is to use Cloudflare's tunnels. it's free, I use it all the time. really great.

yeah that's very odd...

You can run your searxng on a VPS, and then it'll hide your IP address.

In most cloud provides you can also change your machine's IP address so there's also that.

that's gonna make it very slow tho...

Oracle have a great free tier. For free (not a trial, but forever free), you can get a virtual machine with 24gb RAM, and storage of 200gb. you might wanna consider that.

If you do choose to use oracle, I'll note you that you do need a credit card, tho it'll not be charged unless you manually upgrade your account to paid account.

I'm not advertising them, I just really think they're great and I'm using it myself.

yes. and no, it's not the bare minimum. You perceive a very specific definition of anarchism, and act like anything that's not exactly what you know/do is just not anarchism anymore and is just wannabe edgy liberals.

How can you even fence so hard a term such as anarchism? just let people be and believe what they want.

you're now just this conservative guy screaming in fear because the world is not what is used to be when you were at your 20s.

cool down. It's okay to be an anarchist just online, and it's okay to take "irl actions", as you call it, and not see yourself above everyone else.

that's some really dedicated gatekeeping for anarchism...

Time's not really something you can save or spend or waste, like you can with money or food.

I don't like terms that make it sound like that. "Save some time", "this is a waste of time" etc'. I'm really gonna philosophize about that for long, but I'll stop here.

Back in the day, people got their last names based on their profession.

Karl Marx was actually born without a last name. He was a bastard and didn't know his real parents.

Throughout his life he changed his last name a couple of times, but when the end was nearing, and he reflected on his life, he changed it one last (haha) time: from ThatCommunisWithTheBeard to Marx. And was quoted saying "lol what did I think going with this long last name. gonna cost a ton to write it on the gravestone. Also I'm a Marxist so it kinda make sense, right? right? is anybody here??"

But no one was there, when he took his last breathe, except for me of course. But that's a story for another time...

thanks! it actually makes much sense.

welp guess I was wrong. so back to .edu scraping!

I think it's running Raspberrian. I wanted something Debian based, and thought the official image will do (it does).

Specifically on my Pi, I've set it up in such a way that even if it loses power or internet, I won't need to do anything for it to be back up.

But I did have lottts of problems on my VPS. programs crashed, Out Of Memory crashed the OS... really, no shortage of errors. And I had service there I used all the time like music.

So what I did is use Termux on my phone. this way I could SSH to it from anywhere. Just click the button, run a few commands and be back on with my day. It's the most convenient way I've found. being able to do it from my phone on the go. And since it's CLI it was much easier to do. Just run the command needed and leave.

If you want I can elaborate on what Termux is and how I used it here.

I have a Raspberry Pi myself, and after the initial setup there's not much maintenance needed. it just works as expected. the services hosted on it have their own respective Web Pages or APIs or mobile apps, depending on the service.

note that installing additional software to access your Pi will take up system resources like memory, storage, and bandwidth. So take that into consideration, and how much the other services consume.