mea_rah @ mea_rah @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

I agree it's bad idea to do this, but it looks like most people didn't read the article past the headline and assume Kyiv is used as metonym for Ukraine. (In the same way as when Kremlin is used instead of russian government) Which is not the case here, it's literary just Kyiv city council doing this.

Right, so we can agree that neither of us claims that russia is on the verge of economic collapse.

To be fair, the onboarding experience in the app is impressively good. It's extremely straightforward with no unnecessary buttons or steps. So I kind of see why they might be hesitant to add complexity by supporting self-hosted backend as an option.

Never once did I claim that the Russian economy would overtake the United states

The article you shared did, which I pointed out. I'm disputing your article, I'm not saying you wrote it. Not sure where you came with that idea.

simply that the 2023 growth projections were higher for Russia than the United States

Higher in what sense? Comparing percentual growth of two economies that are not even in the same league is misleading at best. Somalia has predicted growth of 3.7% in 2024. What does that say compared to russia? Nothing really. It makes as much sense comparing percentual growth of US economy to russia's. USA could drop to 0.5% growth and russia could achieve whooping 5% growth and in actual absolute numbers, the US economy would still grow faster.

I’ll again ask for any support to your claim that Russia will collapse politically

By "claim" you probably mean my personal opinion which I declared as such?

I feel like you're just making up some non-existing claims and then keep disputing them. I have no time for that.

I have never claimed that russian economy is about to collapse. In fact if you scroll up the thread I actually said that I don't think it will. So I'm not sure why you felt like disputing that in reply to my comment.

If it does end up collapsing, it will be a statistical anomaly.

I have lived through one such collapse already. Russia collapsing is statistical inevitability. 😂(this is joke BTW, you don't need to dispute it)

I use Telegraf for most of the metrics.

Right, now if you stop cherrypicking sentences that fit your agenda and just look at the numbers, for 2022-2024, the prediction is for russia to have negative growth of -1.1% while for USA this all adds up to 4% growth.

And again, all of the previous stuff about sizes of economy applies.

It looks interesting as an app, but in context of self-hosting there are couple of speed bumps:

• The server side is quite complicated. (compared to Joplin for example) It's multiple services and it also needs Mongo, Redis and S3. Makes sense for them to do it this way to be able to scale up, but for few users hosted locally it's quite a lot of moving parts.
• You need to compile client apps to self-host. This effectively kills this as an option on iOS.

You provided fairytales about russian economy overtaking USA not sources.

No idea. It might be the perfect match to be honest. Russia will have lack of men due to war, China already has lack of women due to 1 child policy.. (Just kind of joking, I really have no idea)

You can do the gateway on a PC thing. You don't even need to have collaborator to do that, plenty of people run outdated systems riddled with malware.

But once you need actual working SIM (Telegram, Watsapp, etc..) you really need that SIM somewhere in Ukraine. And you need plenty of them. (see the pictures in the article, there's a ton) At minimum to activate the accounts and more realistically for occasional re-verification. (2fa) Sure you can then run actual bots in russia, but that need for physical presence is still there at least occasionally. The article mentions 100 individuals, when you consider that 150k SIMs were there, most of the operation indeed was in russia or somewhere else.

The triangulation is just a way to maybe correlate multiple SIMs in the same spot by Ukrainian officials once they had enough suspected malicious SIMs. (So that they know it's not just few random persons with malware on their phone, but it's indeed huge concentration of SIMs in one spot)

Yeah I see your point there. It is indeed a bit of chicken and egg problem, but it's not 35% for laptop with swap-able hardware. The customization is probably the main selling point. If you want Ethernet port in your laptop, that rules out pretty much any recent model out there. Add upgrade-able memory, storage (or an option for multiple storage devices), some more specific port selection (like full size HDMI) and you might only have handful of models to choose from.

Can you do a lot of that with USB-C dongle? Sure, but dongle isn't built in and also costs extra money. Are there many people out there that don't need any of these ports? Sure! But if you're one of those that do, this might be your only real option. Especially once we get to the more exotic modules like that RGB Macropad.

I'm personally not in that market at all, but I definitely see why people might want this and saying that it's 35% markup just for the ability to upgrade and repair is missing the point a bit.

Well you do if you want to receive the confirmation text. And while you're at it, you might as well use the same cell tower for data so that you get "residential" IP.

You can definitely fake geolocation and perhaps you could fake IP through some proxy, but you can't use commercial VPN services as their IPs are well known VPN IP ranges at this stage. (these SIMs might have been used as such proxies for some spamming besides being used for this specific botnet) Effectively the more you want to blend in with the actual Ukrainian end user traffic, the more you need to be present in the country and the more complicated it is to fake it otherwise. Especially if you're trying to hide from state level investigation, that has access to triangulation from cell towers, providers logs, etc..

Pretty copypasta you have here. But there's a lot of obvious bullshit - I admit I didn't even bother reading it in full, but:

Russia is not on the verge of collapse, the IMF predicted that Russian GDP would rebound slightly in 2023 to 0.3 percent growth, and in 2024, the Russian economy is predicted to grow by 2.1 percent. That’s higher than the IMF’s projection for the United States, which it said would see only 1 percent GDP growth that year, and down from a predicted 1.4 percent in 2023, and the 2 percent the U.S. enjoyed in 2022.

I'm not sure where that article got those numbers, but we can check IMF report now to see that prediction for russia is 0.7% in 2023 and 1.3% for 2024. For USA that's 1.6% and 1.1% respectively. Yet somehow that article claims, that:

Russia's Economy Forecast to Outperform U.S. Within Two Years

First of all. This is at best sign of some recovery after -2.1% "growth" russia was experiencing last year. Compared to USA 2.1% growth last year. (notice the absence of minus sign there) So even percentage-wise this does not even place russia at the beginning of 2022. Remember that these add up. Meanwhile over these 3 years (if predictions are accurate) USA will see almost 5% increase.

Now overall that is still moot point ignoring the biggest elephant in the room that is the absolute size of the economies. The russian nominal GDP is about $2.2 trillion while USA is 10x bigger at around $25 trillion. So that 5% increase for USA means almost $1.3 trillion increase in absolute numbers. In other words USA's GDP (according to these predictions) will increase by almost half of entire russian GDP.

I'm not saying that russia is on verge of collapsing economically. Personally I'd say it will collapse politically before that. But that article is pure misinformation.

You're discussing with someone that is part of the botnet mentioned in the article. Just look at their history. Just report as off-topic and move on. No point talking to propaganda mouthpiece.

Depends what you mean by "faking". You can fake Ukrainian IP by using some VPN service, but then you're using VPN IP which is quite obvious. If you want many genuinely residential IPs, you could use some botnet and infected computers in Ukraine. This is more authentic and harder to filter out. But some services actually require phone number and at least capability to receive texts to verify the number, some use the number as user account. (Telegram and such) Then you need actual SIM cards (not to be confused with Sims 3, the game 😉) and you need to connect to local cell tower. (perhaps you could do roaming, but that would be quite obvious long term) Now to fake all that, you'd need at least some devices operated in Ukraine and at that stage it's probably easier to find some people willing to do this locally for money or because they are high on russian propaganda themselves.

I was kind of the same, but I still collected metrics, because I just love graphs.

Over time I ended up setting alerts for failures I wish I was aware of earlier. Some examples:

• HDD monitoring - usually drive is showing signs of failure couple days before it fails, so I have time to shop around for replacement. If I had no alert set, I'd probably only notice when both sides of a mirror failed which would mean couple days of downtime, lot of work with backup restoration and very limited time to find drive for reasonable price
• networking issues - especially VPN, it's much better to know that it is broken before you leave house
• some core services like DNS. With two Adguard instances it's much better to be alerted when one is down, than to realize that you suddenly have no DNS when both fail and you can't even google stuff without messing with your connection settings.
• SSD writes - same as HDDs, but in this case the alert is around 90% declared TBW lifetime claimed by manufacturer and I tend to replace them proactively as they are usually used as system disk without mirror, which holds no valuable data, but would again lead to extended unplanned downtime
• CPU usage being maxed out for long time - I had one service fail in a way where it consumed 100% of all cores. This had no impact on other services because process scheduler did its job, but I ended up burning kilowats of electricity as this continued unnoticed for weeks. This was before energy prices went up, but it was still noticeable power consumption. (Had double CPU server back then, that consumed a lot of juice when maxed out)

Not everyone wants lightbar or webcam notch. Early 2010s were peak MacBook designs IMO. It still was solid OS and the laptops had magsafe and fullsize USB.

That's fair. Wonder why that is, because my experience is quite the opposite.

The metrics I shared above actually had the Pihole running on much more powerful HW. (proper server with quite beefy CPU) The Adguard stats are from old Intel NUC which is perfomance-wise about on par with Rpi3B+. As you can see it barely uses any resources at all. So I'm surprised to see you reporting the performance as really bad.

I was testing Adguard on small openwrt based device and it still ran fine. Rpi3B+ has order of magnitude faster HW than that. I just don't see how would Adguard be slower or even noticeably slow. Or even Pihole. Both could run about 40 copies of the service on single Pi3.

Whis is not to say I don't trust you, it's just strange.

Ah thanks. Makes sense. Is there some way to see the edits?