In March 2019, I left my job at Tower Research Capital, to take a small break from work and live aimlessly for a while. My mental health had been declining steadily for the last few years, and going away for a while seemed like the only way out.
Disclaimer: I have not worked as a sysadmin anywhere in my professional life, nor do I consider myself to be very good at it.
I’ve self-hosted a small part of my personal infrastructure (IRC bouncer, VPN server, torrent client, etc) for a while now. These services were set up over the course of a week on the tiniest DigitalOcean instance five years ago, never to be touched again for the next three years.
Two years ago, at Hackbeach 2017, Arun Singh gave a small talk on Infrastructure as code and Terraform. Around then, I had recently started frequenting /r/selfhosted, and decided to start self-hosting more of my services. Upon finally logging in into my server after three years, I couldn’t understand anything about the way it was set up. Port 443 seemed to be occupied by OpenVPN (for punching through restrictive firewalls), which proxied HTTP traffic to HAProxy which proxied it to a web server, and so on.
This Forbes article says that Faceapp is evil because they are harvesting user-data:
That (Faceapp’s TOS) may not be dangerous and your likeness may stay on Amazon servers in America, as Forbes has determined, but they still own a license to do whatever they want with it. That doesn’t mean the app’s Russian parent company, Wireless Labs, will offer your face to the FSB, but it does have consequences, as PhoneArena’s Peter Kostadinov says:
You might end up on a billboard somewhere in Moscow, but your face will most likely end up training some AI facial-recognition algorithm.
For context, here’s the lines from FaceApp’s Terms of Service which are been targeted:
You grant FaceApp a perpetual, irrevocable, nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide, fully-paid, transferable sub-licensable license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, publicly perform and display your User Content and any name, username or likeness provided in connection with your User Content in all media formats and channels now known or later developed, without compensation to you. When you post or otherwise share User Content on or through our Services, you understand that your User Content and any associated information (such as your [username], location or profile photo) will be visible to the public.
In comparison, here are a few current (and one defunct) websites where users are known to share their faces quite a bit: