https://blog.cloudflare.com/updated-tos/

Finally, we made it clear that customers can serve video and other large files using the CDN so long as that content is hosted by a Cloudflare service like Stream, Images, or R2.

I mean… Yeah. That’s why they went to a therapist…

No advertising platform has any incentive to prevent bot traffic; they actively profit from ‘failing’ to prevent it.

You can’t block youtube ads with DNS blocking; youtube serves ads from the same domains it serves the actual video from.

You need a custom youtube client like Revanced.

You could use something like DroidCam to make your phone available as a web cam on your pc, then capture it with OBS or similar. Use a vpn to keep the devices on the same network.

You’d either have to leave the pc recording all the time or use remote desktop to start the recording.

Another option is to look at software to turn your pc into an NVR and find an app that essentially lets you use your phone like an IP Security Camera. Again, using a VPN to keep them in the same network.

I will always recommend Borg backup just because of it’s compression+de-duplication algorithms:

550gb of raw data, 20 historical backups going back over a year (10.98tb of data total), only 400gb of disc space used to store them all…

You can backup directly to remote servers via ssh, nfs, or directly between two borg instances, optionally encrypted in transit and at rest.

Borg is a CLI tool normally, but there are a number of GUI frontends you can use if you really want: Vorta, BorgWeb, and BorgWarehouse for example. (I’ve not used any of these, just examples from a google search)

95% of things I just don’t expose to the net; so I don’t worry about them.

Most of what I do expose doesn’t really have access to any sensitive info; at most an attacker could delete some replaceable media. Big whoop.

The only thing I expose that has the potential for massive damage is OpenVPN, and there’s enough of a community and money invested in that protocol/project that I trust issues will be found and fixed promptly.

Overall I have very little available to attack, and a pretty low public presence. I don’t really host any services for public use, so there’s very little reason to even find my domain/ip, let alone attack it.

This part always confuses me, so I won’t be able to give specifics; just a general direction. Most guides explain how to route traffic from a vpn client to the lan of the vpn host. You need to route traffic from the vpn host/lan to a client of the vpn.

You need to change the routing table on the VPS, adding a static route to route traffic heading for your VPNs subnet to the VPN host instead of out the default gateway.

How exactly to do that I’ll have to leave to someone else unfortunately. Network config confuses the hell out of me.

I run Borg nightly, backing up the majority of the data on my boot disk, incl docker volumes and config + a few extra folders.

Each individual archive is around 550gb, but because of the de-duplication and compression it’s only ~800mb of new data each day taking around 3min to complete the backup.

Borgs de-duplication is honestly incredible. I keep 7 daily backups, 3 weekly, 11 monthly, then one for each year beyond that. The 21 historical backups I have right now RAW would be 10.98tb of data. After de-duplication and compression it only takes up 407.98gb on disk.

With that kind of space savings, I see no reason not to keep such frequent backups. Hell, the whole archive takes up less space than one copy of the original data.