Risks of self-hosting a public-facing forum?
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This is especially necessary to consider if you live in the US right now. One of the things the current administration is pushing for even harder than past administrations is removal of Section 230 of the communications act that was enacted in the 90s. This provides a defense against liability for the content you host as long as you make a reasonable effort to remove content that is illegal. Problem is that this makes it really difficult to censor (maliciously or otherwise) content because it's hard to go after the poster of the content and easier to go after the host or for the host to be under threat to stop it from being posted in the first place. But it's a totally unreasonable thing, so it basically would mean every website would have to screen every piece of content manually with a legal team and thus would mean user generates content would go away because it would be extremely expensive to implement (to the chagrin of the broadcast content industries).
The DMCA created way for censors to file a complaint and have content taken down immediately before review, but that means the censors have to do a lot of work to implement it, so they've continued to push for total elimination of Section 230. Since it's a problematic thing for fascism, the current administration has also been working hard to build a case so the current biased supreme court can remove it since legislation is unlikely to get through since those people have to get reelected whereas supreme court justices don't care about their reputation.
So, check your local laws and if in the US, keep an eye on Section 230 news as well as making sure you have a proper way to handle DMCA takedown notices.
Sounds like hosting outside the US is a possible solution. Many things to be careful of, regardless.
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You’re just not a pleasant person, are you? Every time you’ve replied to one of my posts, it’s to be a twatwaffle.
An ignorant twatwaffle, considering you obviously have no idea how Cloudflare certs work. Which ends up making me look like I’m smarter than I really am, so thanks!
says the self proclaimed anarchist that fights for....civil rights? they teach you that at the anarchist meetings?
now I know for sure, you're just trying very hard to act intelligent but have no idea what you're actually doing.
now I feel bad for arguing with a child.
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By then you would have racked up thousands of dollars in legal fees. Not to mention if anyone posts anything negative about the current administration you could be used as an example.
We already have students on visas being kidnapped off the streets, let’s stop pretending the law actually matters for the people in power.
it's settled law that you are absolved of responsibility if you don't moderate.
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says the self proclaimed anarchist that fights for....civil rights? they teach you that at the anarchist meetings?
now I know for sure, you're just trying very hard to act intelligent but have no idea what you're actually doing.
now I feel bad for arguing with a child.
Well, if you were so smart yourself, you would know the Cloudflare certs aren’t for public use. The certs your site uses to communicate with the user are shared among multiple Cloudflare users, and aren’t accessible to anyone but Cloudflare. You can’t generate, revoke, view, or download them. The decade long certs you generate are for communication between your origin server and Cloudflare, they aren’t exposed to the public internet. If you use an Argo tunnel, which many selfhosters do, they’re used for the secure VPN tunnel between yourself and Cloudflare. Since all your traffic comes from Cloudflare, a smart user would whitelist those IPs and ignore web traffic from everything else if they weren’t going to use a tunnel. Even if someone got ahold of them, which is unlikely, they wouldn’t do anyone any good, because they would need access to your Cloudflare account as well to change the origin server.
But then, you aren’t so smart yourself. You’re just some random nobody on the internet that decided to start using their arsehole for speaking. And as is typical in such a situation, everything you say reeks of shit.
Now, do you want to continue embarrassing yourself? Because you’re not hurting my feelings by doing so.
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Sounds like hosting outside the US is a possible solution. Many things to be careful of, regardless.
Yeah, other countries have similar or even more strict requirements, so yeah it all depends on the jurisdiction. You have to also understand that just hosting something externally, doesn't mean you don't fall under laws of another country. It's the internet. And if you live in a country, you may be held responsible for obeying their laws. I'm not a lawyer, so it's something to be careful of even if externally hosted.
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Yeah, other countries have similar or even more strict requirements, so yeah it all depends on the jurisdiction. You have to also understand that just hosting something externally, doesn't mean you don't fall under laws of another country. It's the internet. And if you live in a country, you may be held responsible for obeying their laws. I'm not a lawyer, so it's something to be careful of even if externally hosted.
Somehow 4chan admins have largely escaped legal consequences for this stuff, and I don't think it's just because of sec230.
Not a fan of 4chan, but I do note both their and the pirate bay's operation scheme.
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I agree. Just run it. that's how I learned decades ago. Don't ignore it either if you wanna get better.
The risks are just as bad as owning some amazon IoT device
Great point about IoT
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Well, if you were so smart yourself, you would know the Cloudflare certs aren’t for public use. The certs your site uses to communicate with the user are shared among multiple Cloudflare users, and aren’t accessible to anyone but Cloudflare. You can’t generate, revoke, view, or download them. The decade long certs you generate are for communication between your origin server and Cloudflare, they aren’t exposed to the public internet. If you use an Argo tunnel, which many selfhosters do, they’re used for the secure VPN tunnel between yourself and Cloudflare. Since all your traffic comes from Cloudflare, a smart user would whitelist those IPs and ignore web traffic from everything else if they weren’t going to use a tunnel. Even if someone got ahold of them, which is unlikely, they wouldn’t do anyone any good, because they would need access to your Cloudflare account as well to change the origin server.
But then, you aren’t so smart yourself. You’re just some random nobody on the internet that decided to start using their arsehole for speaking. And as is typical in such a situation, everything you say reeks of shit.
Now, do you want to continue embarrassing yourself? Because you’re not hurting my feelings by doing so.
I don't use shit-tier products like cloudflare so I don't bother knowing what their product line is or what it does.
not knowing how a platform specific product works doesn't dictate intelligence.
also, in your original comment you said "SSL cert" and never mentioned it was a platform specific cert.
be clear when you say shit and people won't misunderstand you and treat you like a fucking moron.
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The DMZ is the right idea. But it's the old way. You definitely want whatever is serving your website to be separated out from your house. You're hosting should be on an isolated VLAN. The internet should only be able to talk to the server it needs to talk to, no other ports. That box should only be allowed to talk to what it absolutely must talk to and only on the ports that are required. You should run an independent firewall on each one of the boxes that are involved in the hosting with only the proper ports open.
Giving up your private IP Will definitely give away your general location to everyone and your precise location to the authorities.
I would highly recommend using cloudflare or one of the other funnel options. A lot of people don't like cloud flare because they can capitalize on your traffic, The cloudflare also just won't shut you down and sell you out like your ISP will at the first request, They don't do shit about anything until there's a warrant or a court filing. On the upside you don't give out your private IP to anyone. You have DDOS protection, and a reasonable layer of anominity.
You need to check daily to make sure all of your software is updated. We're talking OS, middleware, plugins, application. Preferably via automation. All of the software and plugins you use for this type of hosting end up getting vulnerabilities.
Security is especially difficult on forums.
There's lots of opportunities there for skilled people who are pissed off at what you or someone else is saying to get butthurt. People know exactly what you're running, then they do some magic behind the scenes next thing you know there's a bunch of admins you didn't create.You don't need to be hosting your own email but you are going to need an SMTP provider, most free services won't let you masquerade the from address.
Doesn't Cloudflare cost money for DDoS protection?
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it's settled law that you are absolved of responsibility if you don't moderate.
You chose to ignore OP's point.
let’s stop pretending the law actually matters for the people in power.
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You chose to ignore OP's point.
let’s stop pretending the law actually matters for the people in power.
i mean... we're talking about civil torts here, not constitutional law. i think you can still count on a court to throw this out even with a pro se defense.
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generating a decade long cert is a terrible idea.
what if a malicious actor gets your private keys and can spoof you now?
you're fucked unless you work through the vendor to blacklist that cert, which is a huge pita.
certs should be done yearly at most. quarterly at best.
Plus certbot and acme easily auto renew the certs.
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I've wanted to do this for a long time. My current ADHD hyperfixation is NodeBB, but I think my questions fit most anything that you want to be available to the general public and not just yourself and your friends.
Basically, I want to host a NodeBB instance intended for the general public out of my house. What are the risks of doing this? In particular, what are the risks of doling out a web address that points to my personal IP address? Is this even a good idea? Or should I just rent a VPS? This is 80% me wanting to improve my sysadmin skills, and 20% me wanting to create a community.
I have a DMZ in place. Hosts in the DMZ cannot reach the LAN, but LAN hosts can reach the DMZ. If necessary, I can make sure DMZ hosts can't communicate with each other.
I have synchronous 1 Gb fiber internet. Based on the user traffic of similar forums, I don't anticipate a crush of people.
I know the basics of how to set up a NodeBB instance, and I've successfully backed up and restored an instance on another machine.
I'm not 100% on things like HTTPS certs. I can paste a certbot command from a tutorial, that's it.
Anything else I should know? Thanks!
Its so cheap to just get a vps from a littlecreekhosting deal, I checked them all on lowendtalk and its the cheapest for highest specs, you do have to comment your invoice to double ram, but its 4 core 8gb ram for 3.50 a month and 8core 16gb 7$ cogent amd epyc, and solid ssd space 140-160 idr exactly, they have multiple deals posted, the one with the prices I mention is the best one, they also had windows vps deals. Spent way too long testing hella, its not the best ping out there for me since I'm fairly far but I'm not hosting gameservers so its a non issue.
There are many other deals on lowendtalk but they are typically for way less resources or way more expensive for a lot more resources
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I don't use shit-tier products like cloudflare so I don't bother knowing what their product line is or what it does.
not knowing how a platform specific product works doesn't dictate intelligence.
also, in your original comment you said "SSL cert" and never mentioned it was a platform specific cert.
be clear when you say shit and people won't misunderstand you and treat you like a fucking moron.
be clear when you say shit and people won’t misunderstand you and treat you like a fucking moron.
Obviously, when name Cloudflare specifically more than once, it can be so hard to tell which platform I mean. It's an easy mistake to make if you don't know how to read.
not knowing how a platform specific product works doesn’t dictate intelligence.
No, but using hostility as a way to distract from when you've gone and made yourself look like an idiot is certainly a defense commonly used by, as you put it, "fucking morons". Now, is there any other pearls of wisdom you want to offer us, Mr. Trump, or was your eternally youthful ardor spent on that one emission?
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Somehow 4chan admins have largely escaped legal consequences for this stuff, and I don't think it's just because of sec230.
Not a fan of 4chan, but I do note both their and the pirate bay's operation scheme.
I mean, in most cases this isn't criminal law (in the US at least), so it means you have to attract enough attention of a corporation since they're usually the only ones who can afford the legal costs to file the DMCA requests and responses for copyright violation. And with many other civil issues, often corporations with the money for it, don't have standing to sue, and if they did, would be required to sue each individual in the appropriate jurisdiction.
With the removal of Section 230, these costs will go down significantly as a single user's violation could be enough to bankrupt or shut down an entire site of violating content or, if serious criminal violations like child porn, put the person who hosts the site in prison who, will be much easier to identify and sue in a single jurisdiction or arrest than a random internet user.
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Its so cheap to just get a vps from a littlecreekhosting deal, I checked them all on lowendtalk and its the cheapest for highest specs, you do have to comment your invoice to double ram, but its 4 core 8gb ram for 3.50 a month and 8core 16gb 7$ cogent amd epyc, and solid ssd space 140-160 idr exactly, they have multiple deals posted, the one with the prices I mention is the best one, they also had windows vps deals. Spent way too long testing hella, its not the best ping out there for me since I'm fairly far but I'm not hosting gameservers so its a non issue.
There are many other deals on lowendtalk but they are typically for way less resources or way more expensive for a lot more resources
I've had good luck with these guys:
https://cloudfanatic.net/pricing/I think they would fall in the less resources category. But they offer unlimited data transfer, and you can use any distro you want. I run slackware btw.
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I've wanted to do this for a long time. My current ADHD hyperfixation is NodeBB, but I think my questions fit most anything that you want to be available to the general public and not just yourself and your friends.
Basically, I want to host a NodeBB instance intended for the general public out of my house. What are the risks of doing this? In particular, what are the risks of doling out a web address that points to my personal IP address? Is this even a good idea? Or should I just rent a VPS? This is 80% me wanting to improve my sysadmin skills, and 20% me wanting to create a community.
I have a DMZ in place. Hosts in the DMZ cannot reach the LAN, but LAN hosts can reach the DMZ. If necessary, I can make sure DMZ hosts can't communicate with each other.
I have synchronous 1 Gb fiber internet. Based on the user traffic of similar forums, I don't anticipate a crush of people.
I know the basics of how to set up a NodeBB instance, and I've successfully backed up and restored an instance on another machine.
I'm not 100% on things like HTTPS certs. I can paste a certbot command from a tutorial, that's it.
Anything else I should know? Thanks!
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Doesn't Cloudflare cost money for DDoS protection?
You get some coverage for free but if you're really getting slammed I wish to stay up they're not going to do everything for free. I believe They click here to prove you're not a butt is gratis.
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Don't do it.
Hosting a public service with no real knowledge of security can only end badly.
Get a vpc, do it there, learn from mistakes.
It's more than just HTTPS, you also need proper authentication, regular updates, emergency updates for critical vulnerabilities, ideally some sort of monitoring to detect potential misuse of the service or any escalations from the service to the OS.
Ask yourself this: If this was your first time driving a car, would you rather do it in an empty parking lot where at worst you will damage the car. Or would you rather do it in a busy street where at worst you can kill someone?
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be clear when you say shit and people won’t misunderstand you and treat you like a fucking moron.
Obviously, when name Cloudflare specifically more than once, it can be so hard to tell which platform I mean. It's an easy mistake to make if you don't know how to read.
not knowing how a platform specific product works doesn’t dictate intelligence.
No, but using hostility as a way to distract from when you've gone and made yourself look like an idiot is certainly a defense commonly used by, as you put it, "fucking morons". Now, is there any other pearls of wisdom you want to offer us, Mr. Trump, or was your eternally youthful ardor spent on that one emission?
take a chill pill and come back to read from start to finish.
you were the first one to respond with hostility, prick. I commented on how it's a bad idea to have SSL certs last for a decade.
that's when you responded with heavy sarcasm, like a angsty child.
maybe if you didn't have tissue paper for skin you could see how much of a petulant child you are. I can even see how fragile your ego is from all your interactions with others.
I don't know what's more pathetic, your overwhelming desire to be right or your desperate need to prove you're smarter than somebody else.
some friendly advice before I block you forever. if you think everyone around you is an asshole, you're the asshole.
