Roughly from high level to low level:

1. uBlock custom filters
2. Make pages unusable or less attractive by wonky per-site browser or extension settings
3. IP and DNS blocks on your local machine
4. Run a DNS proxy on your local machine and block domains with it
5. Host a pihole server on a different machine, make it your DNS server and block domains there
6. IP and DNS blocks in your router (if your current one has no option for this, consider buying another, preferably used)

Best apply the methods arbitrarily, so that you get even more confused about how you might restore access to a given website.

Options 5 and 6 may be the only viable ones for locking down certain smartphones or tablets.

Hardware: either

1. use whatever you have lying around, e.g. an old laptop, or
2. get a used thin client like e.g. a Dell Wyse. (passive cooling = no noise)

A Raspberry Pi is needlessly expensive for self-hosting, since it comes with GPIO pins etc. for controlling custom electronics.

Now, if you’re one of the lawyers for Bambu labs, … I sincerely hope that you are not taking this case on contingency by the way—please charge an hourly fee

Nice.

I recall the general observation that a lot of Chinese EV companies were being built up, quickly building production capacities that, taken together, greatly exceed demand, each company hoping to be among the few that eventually survive. So that what we’re now seeing would be this show down

Apart from not being that interesting for now, the first line of defence for most is manually-approved sign ups, as far as I can tell.

When the Fediverse grows, I think that weeding out accounts that post slop will be the “easy” part; the hardest part will be to identify the silent bot accounts that do nothing but upvote.

Relevant Doctorow post: The enshittification of tech jobs (27 Apr 2025)

What hardware do you currently use and what software do you intend to run on the new machine? And what’s your budget situation?

In any case, I would always recommend to buy used or refurbished hardware. Even if it’s not necessary financially, it’s better for the environment.

There’s a provision that says the trust structure can be changed without everyone’s consent if the intended change is in the interest of all trustees. Rupert, Lachlan and their team want to exploit this by arguing that the ongoing financial success of the media empire is dependent on it retaining its staunchly conservative editorial line, so that it is in fact (from a financial point of view) in the interest of the three non-conservative children if they don’t get to have any influence. The first judge wasn’t buying it; let’s hope that the others will rule the same way. (One argument in their favor is that the $787 million settlement that Fox News has to pay to Dominion Voting System due to a defamation lawsuit was a consequence of Rupert’s or Lachlan’s die-hard conservative messaging.)

What’s less good: I remember dimly that, should Rupert live long enough (past theö year 2030?), he can change the trust at will again.

The Atlantic article that I linked in the post description talks at length about the spicy shit (especially about the family relations and only comparatively little about the legal aspects).

Rather than running a Tor relay, running a simple Tor bridge (e.g. via the browser add-on Snowflake as suggested by @ryokimball@infosec.pub) is probably the best thing to do with one’s home hardware.

Actual relays must suffice certain requirements, according to the Tor project:

Requirements for Tor relays depend on the type of relay and the bandwidth they provide. ==== Bandwidth and Connections ====

A non-exit relay should be able to handle at least 7000 concurrent connections. This can overwhelm consumer-level routers. If you run the Tor relay from a server (virtual or dedicated) in a data center you will be fine. If you run it behind a consumer-level router at home you will have to try and see if your home router can handle it or if it starts failing. Fast exit relays (>=100 Mbit/s) usually have to handle a lot more concurrent connections (>100k).

It is recommended that a relay have at least 16 Mbit/s (Mbps) upload bandwidth and 16 Mbit/s (Mbps) download bandwidth available for Tor. More is better. The minimum requirements for a relay are 10 Mbit/s (Mbps). If you have less than 10 Mbit/s but at least 1 Mbit/s we recommend you run a [/wiki/doc/PluggableTransports/obfs4proxy bridge with obfs4 support]. If you do not know your bandwidth you can use http://beta.speedtest.net/ to measure it.

As for exit relays aka exit nodes, the obligatory advice is of course to not run them at all unless you know exactly what you are doing both legally and technically, and probably only if you’re a foundation or something.

In case anyone wonders about the context, this is the paragraph:

In April, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale got into a brawl with former Coinbase chief technology officer and Network State advocate Balaji Srinivasan. It wasn’t on a prominent stage or even Twitter/X; it happened in a Signal group chat that’s become a virtual gathering place for influential tech figures. Srinivasan wasn’t going along with the tech right’s aggressive anti-China rhetoric, so Lonsdale accused him of “insane CCP thinking.” “Not sure what leaders hang out w you in Singapore but on this you have been taken over by a crazy China mind virus,” he wrote.