I mainly protect my company secrets by encrypting it and hope for the best. Else, it’s just the normal stuff, that is nobody else’s business. But then, i am glad that i am old and likely won’t have to live in a dystopian place like this world seems to be going towards.

Back in the mid 2000s, we (my company) were on Windows, including three Windows 2000 Server licences. And we needed to upgrade. But it wasn’t sustainable for the small company to pay for all these licences, when a free option was available.

So we slowly moved all applications over to cross-platform alternatives, Outlook to Thunderbird (called Firebird in those days), office to OpenOffice (now LibreOffice), Internet Explorer to Firefox, Corel Draw to Gimp, Company software like accounting to a XAMPP stack etc.

Once this was established and running well, we just changed the underlying platform from Windows to Ubuntu/Gnome, cursed for a few days and went on with our lives. And it worked for the past 20 years and counting. Now I am cursing, when I am forced to use Windows and can’t find my butt using it.

So the mindset, if you want, was that of methodical planning and going slow, step by step. This is likely different if you’re a gamer, or you need some very specialised apps, but for me, this was not the case. The games that I play, like Sudoku and Solitaire, work on any platform.

You mean a “contact form?” They’re everywhere.

Yes, I tried to “wget -S” some of that stuff in the Linux console. Yikes!

Yes, personally I use DDG more than Google, but we are in our 70ies, so it would be hard to convince the wife (who has been a dev 40 years ago) to change her habits. I am already looking into SearXNG, though.

I use external hard drives. Two of them, and they get rsynced every time something changes, so there’s a copy if one drive should fail. Once a month, I encrypt the whole shebang with gpg and send it off into an AWS bucket.

Terminator for me. It has tiles and tabs and does everything I need.

Not sure, whether it is relevant for this thread, but my phone (POCO F3) does not get any notifications if Google Play Services has no access to the internet. I scratched my head for a while to find out, why I never got them on mobile data. Not sure, what it does, if you disable the store.

Nope, Desktop computer with Linux, Firefox with uBlock, noScript etc.

I’ll look into it, thank you!

Also, don’t use YouTube directly, use Invidious or Piped, and this particular issue would be gone.

It’s the convenience. If you want to run a channel, you’re kind of damned to sell your soul. 🙃 The question is for how much you’d sell yourself out completely.

Not sure, if these apps run on a desktop computer, though, which is my main workhorse.

So I may try out Firefox’s sandboxing capabilities. That should take care of cookies, but I am not sure about fingerprinting.

Do you have the Amazon app installed on the same device

Linux pc. There is no Amazon nor YouTube app for that, that I know of.

what prompted you to look up the horses stuff?

Nothing really. I am more interested in dogs, but wanted to know how other animals are trained and possibly learn something new from their techniques.

I could try Firefox’s sandboxing, maybe.

I use DokuWiki for this type of thing. With a few add-ons it is nicely configurable (galleries, discussions etc), could be run from any webspace, and doesn’t need a database. You can have ACLs that make sure that only registered users get access. But it is a bit of a DIY solution, and takes a bit of work to set up.

My oldest “security camera” of this type has been online 24/7 since June 2019 and permanently connected to a charger of the smallest type I could find at that time. The battery still holds a charge when I take the phone down for cleaning. Not sure how old the phone itself is (a small Kyocera), probably a 2014 or 2015 model. So, for my requirements, I’d say, it’s reasonably reliable.

OTOH, you may be right, and they don’t make them like they used to in the olden days, haha.

My cheap and cheerful, but not very secure homebrew solution is a used smartphone, then load any of the motion-detection apps onto it, plus an FTP server app. Then place the phone anywhere within Wi-Fi reach. Run a script once a day on my home server that downloads and deletes the videos from the phone via FTP, and also deletes that footage after 30 days. So the “system” can run indefinitely without running out of memory. The old phones just need to be rebooted once in a while for some odd reason.

I have been using Terminator for years now, because you can easily slice and dice the window into several terminals, and it is reasonably configurable. But then, as I am completely happy with it, I never ventured out to find an even better one, so YMMV.

The shareholders of the pharma-industry will not be happy. You have to manage a disease, not heal it; that would be detrimental for the balance sheet.

And unhappy shareholders of big pharma is definitely not what we want; if they are happy, we will be happy.

Thre could be two other things that I can think of:

Permissions maybe: Try “sudo chmod +x /path/yourscript.sh” to make your script explicitly executable.

Also, the environment of cron doing something may be different from when you do it as root or user. So you should always use the full path to every command in your script; like “/bin/tar” instead of just “tar”. To find out, where things are, you can use “whereis tar”, and it will tell you, whether it’s in /bin, /usr/bin or elsewhere.