I love the fact that fediverse was built from the ground up to be free, federated and interoperable. I have two questions that may come from my lack of expertise / knowledge, so I apologise in advance if they are dumb.

1. Bots can disrupt smaller instances:

What is stopping corpos from scraping everyone's posts and stuff from the fediverse and train their AI? What's stopping them then, to create loads of not accounts and spam / disrupt smaller communities? When an instances quality drops, the users may be more incentivised to migrate to bigger instances and go there. It's safe to say most Lemmy users are not going to spin their own instance and start communities from scratch. Meanwhile, the onslaught of bots can overwhelm these budding communities and instances.

2. Corpos can flood the fediverse with ads and crap:

Threads comes to mind on this point and how many instances have chosen not to defederate with them. Besides, they can create bridges, and have repost bots in all in

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/25519139

Gut health gone wild

I came across tools like nightshade that can poison images. That way, if someone steals an artist's work to train their AI, it learns the wrong stuff and can potentially begin spewing gibberish.

Is there something that I can use on PDFs? There are two scenarios for me:

1. Content that I already created that is available as a pdf.
2. I use LaTeX to make new documents and I want to poison those from scratch if possible rather than an ad hoc step once the PDF is created.

I am an EU citizen and I have heard about privacy.com for virtual cards. As I understand it is only for those US bank accounts and Credit Union accounts. Are similar services available for EU citizens where we can get disposable virtual cards?

I visit sites by Wiley, Elsevier, and Taylor and Francis a lot recently because I am trying out to do research in a specific topic.

Despite using uBlock, I find that some ads creep through. Also, they have trackers everywhere. How do I go about identifying their trackers?

Is there was a software (preferably on Linux) where I can drag and drop to quickly make a website with HTML and CSS and export the resulting code?

I know of a lot of online site that charge a lot of money for this, but I was hoping that an open source software exists for this.

P.S: I want to make a simple static personal website. Possible have a link from where they can download PDF samples of my writing/ literature / creative work.

I have an old OnePlus 5T that has LineageOS installed. I don't really do anything with it and I thought it would be cool to host my first ever website (static) on it.

What I've done so far:

1. Got the HTML file for my website.
2. Got the CSS style sheet for that site.
3. Purchased a domain name.

I request help/guidance with:

1. Minimal install of Debian, nginx, Docker, and Fail2ban. (I feel I need help with the Debian installation because the rest is seems easy enough).
2. Hosting my website from my home, so like if I should consider subnet or vlan for my home to protect other devices when I expose port 80 (http) and 443 (https) of my router so other servers can access my server phone.

I know this sounds like complicating matters for something I have never done before, but any help would be greatly appreciated. I have hosted stuff at home (pihole, LibreTranslate, etc) but I think this website project may not be straightforward.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/24024969

Sex trafficker Andrew Tate announces his own UK political party: "BRUV"

After I install Linux Mint (which is the distro I have settled on), I replace:

1. Thunderbird with Betterbird
2. Firefox with Librewolf (I also install Brave for web services that need a chromium browser).
3. Celluloid / Rythmbox with VLC player
4. Default Libreoffice with latest Libreoffice from source.
5. ClipIt/Parcellite with xfce4-clipman

I find this to be my optimal setup and these software give me the extra quality of life that make my workflows easier.

What software do you replace and install on your distro of choice?

Edit: I forgot to say I replace sudo with doas. That's something my friend told me to do although I personally don't find any immediate working advantage with it.

A while ago, I had requested help with using LLMs to manage all my teaching notes. I have since installed Ollama and been playing with it to get a feel for the setup.

I was also suggested the use of RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation ) and CA (cognitive architecture). However, I am unclear on good self hosted options for these two tasks. Could you please suggest a few?

For example, I tried ragflow.io and installed it on my system, but it seems I need to setup an account with a username and password to use it. It remains unclear if I can use the system offline like the base ollama model, and that information won't be sent from my computer system.

I have received a lot of PDF documents that I wish to convert to text formats such as docx/doc/odt.

I know there are some online tools that will do it for you, but some content may be sensitive with people's names and addresses and I'm not sure I can trust these websites.

Are there software that will convert a PDF to odt?

Things I know and tried:

1. Asked a friend to open PDF in Microsoft Word: Their license expired last month, so it doesn't let you save the file!
2. Tried to do the same on my LibreWriter: It doesn't support that format.
3. Tried to open in LibreDraw: untenable as I want to type more things in the document.

P.S: I use Linux, but reckon solutions for platforms would be fine.

There are many corrupt people in the government, both elected politicians and unelected officials. Many are p#do***les, other launder money, some rig elections, while others surveil and harass innocent people.

To protect our Parliament, and Constitution, all these politicians and their families should come under public scrutiny. All their financial records, their communications, their online search histories, should be in the public domain.

In other words, we need parity of privacy between the State and its People.

This sounds hair-brained and extreme, but the public is already under intensive surveillance. I think experience needs to be felt by the officials as well so they finally begin to value the fundamental right to privacy.

I rarely use my smartphone and find it a bit annoying to have to use it for 2FA through apps. I wish to get physical passkeys that will allow me to login to my laptop.

I have heard of YubiKey although I haven't given it any serious consideration since it is closed source. (My super-tin-foiled friend who introduced me to this world of privacy taught me to never trust a closed-source solution... _long _ story).

Are there any FLOSS versions of Yubikey? Can they be used to log into a Linux machine? Or for banking?

I understand that people enter the world of self hosting for various reasons. I am trying to dip my toes in this ocean to try and get away from privacy-offending centralised services such as Google, Cloudflare, AWS, etc.

As I spend more time here, I realise that it is practically impossible; especially for a newcomer, to setup any any usable self hosted web service without relying on these corporate behemoths.

I wanted to have my own little static website and alongside that run Immich, but I find that without Cloudflare, Google, and AWS, I run the risk of getting DDOSed or hacked. Also, since the physical server will be hosted at my home (to avoid AWS), there is a serious risk of infecting all devices at home as well (currently reading about VLANS to avoid this).

Am I correct in thinking that avoiding these corporations is impossible (and make peace with this situation), or are there ways to circumvent these giants and still have a good experience self hosting and using web service