Surround sound receiver that works via optical or HDMI. That’s what I would recommend

Those are both digital outputs, not analog. Maybe you’re confusing digital with internet connected?

I’m not advocating internet-connected audio gear, but plenty of people like the utility of networked audio for automation, in-home streaming, and multi-room setups. But again, those can be isolated from the internet.

Encrypted apps like Signal encrypt messages in a way that only you and the recipient can decrypt and read. Not even Signal can decrypt them. However it has always been the case that another person could look over your shoulder and read the messages you send, who you’re sending them to, and so on. Pretty obvious, right?

What the author and Signal are calling out here is that all major commercial OSes are now building in features that “look over your shoulder.” But it’s worse than that because they also record every other device sensor’s data.

Windows Recall is the easiest to understand. It is a tool build into windows (and enabled by default) that takes a screenshot a few times per second. This effectively capture a stream of everything you do while using windows; what you browse, who you chat with, the pron you watch, the games you play, where you travel, and who you travel with or near. If you use “private” message tools like Signal, they’ll be able to see who you are messaging and read the conversations, just as if they were looking over your shoulder, permanently.

They claim that for an AI agent to serve you well, it needs to know everything it can about you. They also make dubious claims that they’ll never use any of this against you, but they also acknowledge that they comply with court orders and government requests (to varying degrees). So… if you trust all of these companies and every government in the world, there’s nothing to worry about.

If OP wants surround, Atmos, etc., this isn’t gonna work. Analog outputs can’t handle ambisonics, and TVs don’t have discrete 6 channel outputs. If you want 2.1, 5.1, Atmos, MPEG-H or whatever, you’ll need a digital output to your sink device (AVR/soundbar, etc.). Digital doesn’t mean internet connected. And there’s no real benefit to forcing an analog output from your TV. It’s DAC probably isn’t better than the DAC in an AVR or soundbar.

Test it. Seriously.

There are likely roadblocks you haven’t seen. For example, it is increasingly true that login & password aren’t good enough to access most commercial systems. So many businesses rely on active session cookies to determine identity, and if that’s missing, they’ll fallback to email or SMS based one-time passwords. And if they don’t have access to your laptop or phone, it might be impossible for them to gain access.

I do, and it’s probably the main reason I started self hosting.

Managing parents estate made me want to get my shit in order for my own kids in the event I die. There’s a good chance that if I die, my cell phone is gonna die with me. And commercial services from Apple, Google, banks, and other institutions are increasingly tied to a single cell phone as “identity.” If you try to login on a device with no session cookies, they treat it as hostile, and do all sorts of oddball stuff that almost always requires the cellphone to access. And if you don’t have that phone, it’s incredibly hard.

By self hosting, I can choose to make access to that most of that data much easier for my family if I die and my cellphone dies with me. I don’t expect them to continue self-hosting, but I do want them to have easy access to files so they can move them to some system they are comfortable with.

Harris did pretty bad during the Primary back in 2020

Harris actually dropped out months before the primaries in 2020. She was something like 16th most popular candidate at the time she withdrew. She was a pretty unpopular AG in California at the time and likely would not have even won her own state primary.

couldn’t get my small group of gamer friends to switch

The hardest part of any change right there.

I’ve had pangolin running for a while, doing tunneling to some self hosted resources, and I’m confused by this announcement and update. It seems like they’re suggesting to use an Android/iOS client to connect to Pangolin protected resources, which seems like a shitload more work and overhead than just using wireguard to do the same thing. Am i missing something here?

Agreed. Wrong word choice. And its an important, major correction. Not a small one. :-)

I don’t know about intentionally designing that. It would violate contracts and have to be a hidden, but broadly conspiratorial activity. I have some professional experience in consumer electronics, and I remember when TPMs started becoming a required component for CE. It took several years to become commonplace; a slow transition from security by obscurity to sensible practices when devices started to be internet connected.

Nevertheless, from my experience, I’d say the TPMs aren’t there for user security, they are there to keep Hollywood movies safe.

+100. People forget, or chose not to pay attention to the fact that Google sensor vault data was key evidence in convicting the January 6 insurrectionists (who were exonerated to become ICE). Surveillance capitalism doesn’t care which side you are on.

Just to clarify… my question wasn’t “do sleepers exist” it was should we continue to call them sleepers when they have broad access to the administrative branch of the US government.

And then, unless you jumped through hoops to disable it, your PC sends the key to Microsoft so they can just keep it linked to your account.

You’d probably also have to jump through the hoops to disable windows recall too.

Are they really sleepers any more?

I’ve got a few domains. I use Porkbun as registrar. They’re awesome, and the domains were pretty cheap. Under $10 a year each.

Fully agree that the DE doesn’t matter much. I’ve used KDE and XFCE the most over the years, and cinnamon, gnome, and even enlightenment a bit over the years. I was never a big fan of gnome, however I recently got a 2in1 laptop, and after a few days of tinkering… I think gnome is a bit better for that kind of interaction than than the others.

There are things to like and dislike with all of them I’d say.