I personally would advise against gsuite and office356 as well as it’s currently debated whether they can be used in accordance to the GDPR. That’s not stopping institutions and organizations… Both are very popular products, but I’d be cautious and not put any sensitive stuff or personal stuff or pictures there. And not hand out logins to other people, especially not minors.

I don’t think the BSA compare to the major German scouting associations. Different organization structure and substantially different ideology and activities. Also none of the big controversies surrounding the BSA. But I suppose idiots are everywhere, at least that’s my general life experience 😅 It is very unfortunate once they start to ruin things.

Idk. Really depends on what you put there. And Nextcloud does file sync. Even if the server becomes unavailable, you’d still have your directories and calendar on your devices. Just collaborating and uploading stuff won’t work.

And creativity and problem-solving are core scout skills, so I guess bulding that thing for no money would be an interesting exercise in that. Though you’re right. At some point you’ll have to think about maintainability and reliability. I guess that wouldn’t stop me from starting the project, but everyone has to decide for themselves.

(And yes, a proper VPS would be a preferrable solution for a multitude of reasons.)

Asking for a discount is a great idea. Some companies do this. And in rare occurences the boss is an old boy scout themselves and they’ll give you a 100% discount on some smaller things…

Good luck, though. I believe first-hand experience with living a self-determined life - including online services - aligns nicely with scout ideals. And trying to convey the media-literacy that allows people to make informed choices.

And I can see some benefits with having documents available to everyone, templates, and collaborate on the paperwork…

Glad to hear other groups in the area have success with Nextcloud… Another idea would be to somehow unite and share the hosting bill for a slightly bigger Nextcloud… But I still think the old laptop idea might be promising to get started… depending on the network situation in the building and whether you can configure port forwards and all the things that need to be done. Just make sure to have some kind of backup strategy if you put documents there. Can’t be too hard, as Nextcloud is made for syncing data… And I wouldn’t put personal information about kids there unless the admin knows what they’re doing. But there’s plenty other stuff to put there.

Given someone already pays for electricity and internet at the location, I’d say the cheapest option would be to ask all the members if someone has an old laptop to donate, maybe even with a broken display or whatever, main thing is it still somehow runs. Rip out the battery, Install Linux, Nextcloud (maybe Yunohost), and put it somewhere without public access. That’d be entirely for free, minus the work to set it up and maintain it.

My smaller VPS costs somewhere around 70€ a year, guess that could be worth it as well as long as it contributes something meaningful.

And be prepared to be disappointed, 99% of my scout group never used the selfhosted services I tried. I guess that’s somehow okay. They were focused on the real life activities and no one had any interest to do office work or remember logins… Was always the same 2 people who did paperwork and they didn’t need a cloud, so I scrapped it. Your story could be different, I’m not saying it needs to turn out that way.

Lol. I suppose it’s a promising way to learn how someone thinks and reacts, see if they’re focused on solving issues or focused on drama… And how deep they are into Linux lore. And whether they understand it or parrot someone else’s talking points.

Idk. I rarely have long nerd discussions, but once I’m done with the latest Star Trek show, I occasionally ask people about their stance on SystemD, some instant messenger or whether we should stick to C99. And either we skip that, or maybe I’ll hear some interesting, unique perspective shaped by what they do.

And Linux has quite some pragmatic people as well, first of all Linus Torvalds himself, who has kind of a down-to-earth approach towards ideology.

I’ve not yet talked to a SystemD hater in real life, that seems to be more predominant between random people on the internet. And I myself prefer writing SystemD unit files over what I had to do before that was a thing.

Yeah, people stare if I hop on the commuter train with the the large one that fits camping gear and supplies for 2 weeks. And I don’t own anything in between.

People who carry it around and don’t just use it as a desktop replacement… With an open lid it doesn’t quite fit into my bag pack.

At least the Arch Wiki is always there for us…

And I think what people really want to avoid is the pre-installed operating system. That has all kinds of stuff in it and no one except the manufacturer knows what’s inside. And Google’s Play services are deeply embedded into the system and will leak lots of personal data and metadata or outright copy them to Google’s servers. For the regular user that means Google has all your pictures, 24/7 location data, your contacts… None of that is E2EE either. We don’t know what happens wit the data from all your contactless payments… It’s really a privacy nightmare. And I’d say security isn’t great either if 2 parties already have pretty much complete access to the device out of the box. They can wipe it, remote install or remove apps… Everything. They do offer secure boot, though…

Well, we’d be back to the 80s and I’d ask my parents about life back then. Online banking would cease to exist and I have to go to the bank teller’s window to get or transfer money, also shops probably fall back to cash only. I’d need to open and start my car with a key unless that kind of cryptography is still okay and it’s just phones… I’d plug my laptop and smartphone in with a network cable becase I’d be afraid the neighbours commit crimes with my Wifi… My employer might want to resort to paper instead of computers because there isn’t any authentication for the company’s data… I could cancel my Netflix and Spotify subscriptions because they’d either cease to exist, or I could just watch them without paying. I’d talk to my wife in the evening instead of arrange stuff via an instant messenger… I guess all of that is doable. People did it that way a while ago. It just needs restructuring of the entire economy, society and our lifes would lack most of the modern convenience. (And if it’s just phones and every other cryptography is fine, I’d just get rid of the thing and use my laptop or whatever is still allowed for everything.)

And since the question was about the gameplan… First thing, I’d invest all my money into copper and fibre optic companies immediately, because people will need to install A LOT of additional, direct cables between things.

I think you’ll want to factor in the exact use case at that scale. Does speed matter? Is “a ton” really a ton? Last regular computer mainboard I bought has 6 SATA ports. And I think that’s a fairly common amount. If I look at current harddrives, best price per gigabyte should be somewhere around 14TB drives. So given a RAID5, that’s 70TB of storage, or 80TB if you go for 16TB hdds.

I think once you go considerably beyond that, and you don’t want to lose your data, you should think about buying proper hardware. I mean people do all kinds of crazy stuff, and at some point I extended my storage by simply plugging in 2 large external USB disks. And that worked surprisingly well… But these solutions aren’t super reliable. And neither are the cheap port expanders from Amazon.

I know. Guess I mainly wanted to say your given solution isn’t the entire story and the potential tool should decode the parameters as well, they might or might not be important. I’m often at the computer and I regularly do one-off tasks this way… But I’m aware it might not be an one-off task to you and you might not have a Linux terminal open 24/7 either 😉 Hope some of the other people have what you need. And btw… since I clicked on a few of the suggestions: I think the thing called URL encoding is a something different, that’s with all the percent signs and not base64 like here.

Well, the URL is a bit weird.

echo "aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuaG90ZG9nYmlsbHMuY29tL2hhbWJ1cmdlci1tb2xkcy9idXJnZXItZG9nLW1vbGQ" | base64 -d

gives me “https://www.hotdogbills.com/hamburger-molds/burger-dog-mold”. (Without the ‘s’.) And then there are about 176 characters left. I suppose the underscore is some delimiter. The rest is:

echo "c2lkPTY4MTNkMTljYzM0ZWJjZTE4NDA1ZGVjYSZzcz1QJnN0X3JpZD1udWxsJnV0bV9zb3VyY2U9bmV3c2xldHRlciZ1dG1fbWVkaXVtPWVtYWlsJnV0bV90ZXJtPWJyaWVmaW5nJnV0bV9jYW1wYWlnbj1zZmNfYml0ZWN1cmlvdXM" | base64 -d

“sid=6813d19cc34ebce18405deca&ss=P&st_rid=null&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=briefing&utm_campaign=sfc_bitecurious”

And I suppose the stuff after the last slash is there for some other reason, tracking or some hash or whatever. But the things before that are the URL and the parameters.

But the question remains whether we have some kind of tool to do this automatically and make it a bit easier…

There’s base64 -d on the command line.

Yes. Though I think predictive policing is directly ethically wrong. I mean first of all there is no such thing as a thought crime. So I think you can’t make people suffer consequences before they did anything. And it comes with consequences. If you’re living in a poor neighborhood or you have darker skin color or have some records in their databases, for whatever reason… Life will become difficult. And you might not be able to live up to your potential any more. Possibly lots of people won’t. Also mistakes will happen and we have to find a way to minimize the amount of innocent people in jail. Or you might want to become politically active. But then you can’t because that’s going to mess with your job and life. And you can ask these people today how fair the system is to them.

And I’m not sure if it’s a slippery slope either. I mean we have China with a social score system. And several other countries with prevalent surveillance. And we know since Snowden that the US also keeps large databases about all of us. It’s already there.

I think it’s more a salami swindle. In the early days, the internet was relatively free, then we had a corporate takeover. And more recently governments are actually cracking down and we don’t have Pornhub in Texas anymore. The UK is also very eager to restrict freedom, porn and unwanted things. Several smaller forums hosted in the UK were killed last year by the new laws. I had occasionally used some of them. Now they’re gone. Then they want your Social media accounts at the borders these days and small amount of people get sent back home for exercising free speech. Also small things increased like someone wanting to pat me down and look inside my bag before I visit an evening show. I cant take my swiss army knife to some locations any more and 5-10years ago that thing was constantly in my bagpack. Surveillance cameras are getting more and more, and does it make crime actually go down? Or is is just a thing in itself? Private companies do the same. I can barely use a messenger these days without revealing my phone number and letting them track me forever. Google gets embedded deeper in all our devices and lifes each day and of course they don’t necessarily want a dystopia… But they definitely want to manipulate you. That’s kind of the core of advertising.

I definitely feel some of the consequences. Some of the changes happened for valid reasons. Some didn’t. And I don’t think “Predictive policing is here whether we like it or not”… It’s a choice… Just because technology exists, doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to use it. That’s a fallacy as well.

And then we have Palantir and the arms industry. And I don’t think that’s much of a slippery slope anymore. These systems already decide on some abstract and intransparent intelligence if a potential terrorist is worth murdering 30 or 80 woman and children in the process, and that indeed sounds pretty dystopian to me. But nonethess, exactly that was used to kill a good amount of people fairly recently. Until they took the more wholesome approach to level the entire place… I’m not saying war is easy or there’s a right way to wage war. But I don’t think technology like that is justifiable when used like that.

I think policing is a complex issue. And the US for example has almost ten times the homicide rate of the average European country. They have a lot of gang violence, school-schootings and everything is more extreme in the USA, for the better or the worse. I’d say it’s likely a comprehensive approach. Police needs equipment and good training. They need to be staffed. They also need good guidelines and strict oversight. We can’t have bad people or power abuse. And lawmakers and courts need to facilitate an environment in which things go into the right direction. Everything from the local to the national level. Then society has to agree to pull in the same direction. And it’s kind of an investment into all kinds of things. That will certainly pay off later, big time. But includes things like invest in healtcare for mentally ill people, invest in integration with immigrants. And invest in the proper solution for online crime. And then there’s neoliberalism and our overall concept of a society we want to live in. Of course people are more likely to commit crimes if they’re miserable or hungry or don’t have anything to lose. So we need a society where everyone has some decent living conditions, also feels alright and is integrated into society in some form. And for me it also includes some fairness and individual freedom.
I’d say it’s solvable. I mean not a 100% “perfect” world, but we can have a look at different countries and see how they do things and what it does to them. And there will always be crime, and always room for improvement.

I’ve moved my instant messenger onto a VPS and that has a good uptime. And I’m somewhat okay if my Nextcloud and calendars don’t sync. Most important data is synced anyway.

Other than that I’ve called my ISP a bunch of times to give me a new router, they refused, I canceled the subscription and made a new one and got a new router. And that one is better. And in doubt I’ll call a family member.