Recently I needed to generate a bunch of short videos for a project I’m working on.  I’m working on a YouTube series for LowEndBoxTV and some parts of the video are more talking than showing.  I’m using some stock footage, but I thought, why not see what AI can do.

There’s OpenAI’s Sora, which does produce very nice videos.  There’s also Leonardo, which offers various models, but it’s relatively expensive.  But then I saw Adobe Firefly was having a promo.  Sign up and you get unlimited generations through March 18.  Woot!

So I signed up, spent my $29.99, and…OMG.

First, the unlimited free generations come with some serious limitations.  You can only use Adobe’s engine, Firefly, and not any of their partner videos, but this is Adobe, so their flagship model must be pretty premium, right?  Only 1080 and 8 seconds, but I can live with that.

What I can’t live with are the horrible videos.  The couple dozen videos I’ve generated have all suffered from

• mutated fingers and hands
• jerky faces
• weird shadows
• bizarre artifacts
• and just forget about any kind of word sync

Some of these exact prompts work perfectly in Leonardo video gen, Sora, etc.

It’s like using Midjourney in 2023.  Remember that era?  Where you avoided hands and feet because they were always wrong and you’d generate 8 images just to hope to have 1 that wasn’t completely psycho.  That’s what Adobe Firefly is like.

And Adobe is pricing it like this is a premium product!

Check out these fine gens:

The post Adobe Firefly is the Worst $29.99 I Ever Spent appeared first on LowEndBox.

AffordableBytes is saying “F** the RAM Shortage!”  Does that mean Fight the RAM Shortage, or…

Well, however you want to expand that wildcard, what’s unambiguous is the tremendously cheap, high-RAM VPSes on offer!  Service is in Frankfurt am Main, Germany.

But you’ll have to act fast!  They’ve been completely sold out for months, they have a “tiny bit of capacity” again, so jump in on these NOW.

We have been running AffordableBytes for a while but mostly in the background. We own all our hardware, and we have a nice custom panel and site from scratch. Please take a look at our website, we are genuinely proud of it. We are happy to finally share it here. The prices you see are the prices you will keep. They do not change at renewal.

Limited-Time Offers & Deals

And That’s Just a Sample!

They also have Xeon Gold 6150 and Ryzen 9 5900X offers, which also have lots of RAM!

You really need to head over to their LowEndTalk thread to see the full range of offers.

Important Information

• Test IPv4: 45.133.74.135
• Looking Glass: https://affordablebytes.com/looking-glass
• Website: https://affordablebytes.com
• Payment Methods: PayPal, Stripe and Cryptocurrency
• Refund Policy: 48 hour money-back guarantee
• Company: Registered in Denmark, CVR 44291002
• VAT ID: DK44291002
• Terms of Service
• Privacy Policy

The post F*** the RAM Shortage! Get a Big RAM VPS from AffordableBytes! 14 GB RAM VPS for Only €7.99 per month appeared first on LowEndBox.

When I started using Unix back before some LEB readers were born, configuring swap was crucial.

For those who might not know, swap is the use of a disk drive for RAM substitution.  If you have a VPS with 1024MB of RAM and you have no swap, when you try allocate the 1025th MB of RAM, it’s going to fail.  If you have some swap space, then the kernel will look for some RAM that isn’t in use.  You may have some background processes (or even running processes) that have allocated RAM but aren’t using it at the moment or haven’t touched it in a while.  The kernel will take those RAM pages and write their contents to disk, freeing the RAM.  Then later if the process needs to access those pages, they’re read from disk and brought back into RAM.

I’m simplifying slightly, because there are actually a couple different flavors.  “Paging” is the modern method of moving individual pages of RAM to disk, while “swapping” is an older technology that moved entire processes.  But it’s the same idea.

All of this happens transparently, nut not without cost.  Disk is at least an order of magnitude slower than RAM, so using swap is much slower than RAM.  Additionally, it can introduce janky latencies in applications because at random times a memory fetch has to go to slower disk.

Swap was Dead

Back when a big server had 256MB of RAM, swap was crucial.  Configuring it, sizing it, and monitoring it was part of sysadmin life.  We all had monitors that alerted when swapping was happening.

But once RAM got into the multi-gigabyte range, swap became a lot less important.  When a server is small, the core parts of the OS – kernel, background processes, etc. – take up a large part of the overall RAM.  Let’s say they take 125MB.  That’s half of RAM if your server has 256MB.  But when your server has 8GB of RAM, it’s less than 2%.

In recent years, a lot of people just haven’t bothered.  I’ve provisioned VMs that don’t have minimal swap and it rarely seems to be used.

But that was before the RAM price apocalypse.

Swap is Back

Now that memory prices are spiking, VPS plans may increasingly ship with stingier RAM, or the price of the plans may go up.  This means we all may need to learn to live with swap again.

The good news is that instead of putting swap on old spinning hard drives, you’re putting it on NVMe, which is much faster.  But it’s still not nearly as fast as RAM.

And the swapping technology itself is better.  Modern Linux kernels use zswap, which compresses pages before writing them to disk.  Sure, you need to uncompress them to use them, but most systems have extra CPU power to burn.

Long story short…you probably are going to need to shake the dust off your swap management skills.

Swap File vs Swap Partition

Historically Linux used swap partitions, but today swap files are usually better.  Swap partitions have slightly less overhead and are always available early during boot, but they’re harder to resize, require the forethought to partition your disk for them, and you really shouldn’t need them at any point in the boot process.

Swapfiles are just a file, like /swapfile.   They’re easy to create or resize and don’t require pre-planning with partitions.

How to Create Swap (Step-by-Step)

Here is a typical example creating a 2 GB swap file.  All these commands assume you’re root.

First, create the file:

fallocate -l 2G /swapfile

Or:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile bs=1M count=2048

and then:

chmod 600 /swapfile

Next, format it as swap:

mkswap /swapfile

Finally, enable it:

swapon /swapfile

You can use free(1) to check

# free -h
               total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:           3.8Gi       559Mi       3.2Gi       111Mi       512Mi       3.3Gi
Swap:          1.0Gi       706Mi       315Mi

Be sure to add an entry in /etc/fstabto enable at boot:

/swapfile none swap sw 0 0

Swappiness

In Linux, the swappiness parameter controls how aggressively the kernel moves pages from RAM to swap.  Values range from 0 to 100.

Most servers benefit from lowering swappiness.

You can check the current value by examining /proc:

cat /proc/sys/vm/swappiness

Default is usually 60.

To change it, use sysctl:

sysctl vm.swappiness=10

And to make this change permanent, edit /etc/sysctl.conf:

vm.swappiness = 10

And then apply it:

sysctl -p

Recommended Swap Sizes

This is really a black art and it all depends on what you’re doing.  Here’s some good starting points:

Not sure?  2GB.

The post Swap Is Back: High RAM Prices Are Bringing Back an Old Technology appeared first on LowEndBox.

You’re going to love this offer.

Get a 1GB VPS with unmetered bandwidth (including IPv4) in six locations – including North American, Europe, Asia and Australia – for only $9.90/YEAR!

What more needs to be said!  This is outstanding.

This offer is brought to you by community provider Rabisu.  They’re a Turkish company and are offering service in their native country, plus Bulgaria, Germany, New York, Australia, and Singapore.

Rabisu is an infrastructure provider offering VPS, VDS, dedicated servers, and web hosting across 12+ global locations. We focus on low latency, scalability, and reliability with AMD Ryzen and Intel Xeon hardware, NVMe Gen4 storage, and DDR5 ECC RAM. Our network uses Tier-1 providers with 10 Gbps ports, DDoS protection, and 99.99% uptime targets. We provide 24/7 support via ticket and live chat, automated provisioning (deployment in under 60 seconds), free daily backups, and one-click OS installs. Customers can scale resources without downtime. We serve 1,000+ active customers and thousands of deployed servers, with strong feedback on Google, Trustpilot, and Facebook.

Check out these features:

• AMD Ryzen and Intel Xeon CPUs; Samsung 990 PRO NVMe Gen4; DDR5 5200MHz ECC RAM.
• Free daily backups (2 backup points)
• DDoS protection
• 1 Gbps–10 Gbps shared port, fair-usage traffic
• 99.9% uptime guarantee
• Linux and Windows Server supported

Learn more about Rabisu on their web site, and be sure to read their TOS.  They accept credit cards and crypto.  You can reach out to @Rabisu on LowEndTalk if you have any questions.

Datacenter and Network Info

Looking Glass: https://www.rabisu.com/en/looking-glass

Special Offer for LET/LEB

• 1 GB RAM
• 1x vCPU
• 10 GB NVMe
• Unlimited transfer (fair usage)
• 1 Gbps uplink
• 1x Dedicated IPv4
• KVM
• Locations: (Turkey, Bulgaria, Germany, United States(NY), Australia, Singapore
• $9.90/year
• [ORDER]

The post A Big WOW From Rabisu: Get a 1GB VPS for $9.90/YEAR in 6 Locations with UNMETERED Bandwidth! appeared first on LowEndBox.

Just yesterday I was chatting with someone online who wanted to host a small app they’d found.  The conversation went like this:

“I’d really like to run this but it requires a server. The cheapest hosting I’ve found is $6 a month which is more than I want to spend.”

“What kind of specs does it need?”

“Like 1 or 2 GB”

“Then I have really good news for you…”

You can get a VPS with 1GB of RAM for only $1/month (on an annual prepay) from Servitro, with hosting service in Germany.  Or get 4GB of RAM for $3.20/month.  They have offers all the way up to 16GB of RAM.

At Servitro, we offer performance-oriented, scalable, and low-cost VPS and game server solutions in Frankfurt am Main intended for individuals requiring speed, reliability, and stability. With latest-generation hardware, ultra-low latency, and assigned resources, our VPS offers reliable performance with no shared bottlenecks.

We value transparent pricing, elastic scalability, and personal support, differentiating ourselves in an industry where dependability is most critical. Whether hosting a game server, operating business applications, or building projects, Servitro provides the power, performance, and stability you require without compromise.

Bonus!

Get free double disk and CPU!  Just open a ticket after placing your order and mention this post.

Learn More About Servitro

• Visit their web site.
• Ping @Servitro on LowEndTalk if you have questions.
• Be sure to read their terms and other policies.
• They accept PayPal, Crypto, and credit cards via Stripe.

Datacenter and Network Info

Interwerk Datacenter, Frankfurt am Main, Germany
Test IPv4: 77.90.40.2
Test IPv6: 2a0f:85c1:b73:1::a
Looking glass: https://lg-fra.servitro.com/

Host Node Specs

AMD EPYC 7443P CPU
512GB DDR4 RegECC RAM
1x 512GB NVMe
1x 1TB NVMe
2x 4TB NVMe
No Raid
10Gbps uplink

AMD Ryzen 9 9950X CPU
192GB DDR5 RAM
1x 512GB NVMe
1x 4TB NVMe
No Raid
10Gbps uplink

VPS Offers

The post Dollar-a-Month VPS! Check Out These Servitro Offers in Germany! appeared first on LowEndBox.

If you had to guess the percentage of American adults who say they have a “personal” relationship with an AI chatbot, what would be your guess?  And what percentage of those would describe it as “romantic”?

According to a study conducted last fall, 54% of American adults describe having a personal relationship with an AI chatbot.  Not just “I use AI to help me code” or “I ask ChatGPT questions” but a personal relationship with an AI companion.

And of those 54%, more than half say they have “at least one intimate, romantic relationship“.

Wow!  Do the math…that’s a quarter of American adults.

I’ve long contended that this type of relationship is the least-covered story in the entire AI explosion.  It’s a massive market.  And it spans all age groups.  In fact, those aged 60+ are the most likely to have a romantic relationship with AI.

AI companions as an application of AI exploded, almost from the beginning of mainstream AI.  ChatGPT emerged in late 2022 and some of the companion-focused AI apps like Replika actually predate it.  But these apps really stormed out of the gates in 2023, and today there are literally hundreds of them.  It’s a huge market, which reflects people’s desire to have these kinds of relationships.  And that’s not even counting people who use ChatGPT, Claude, or one of the big AI services for this purpose, or people who self-host LLMs or use other DIY solutions.

That’s Just Weird

Some of you will immediately think “wow, that’s weird”.  But let’s project forward in time a little to the Star Trek future as we might imagine it.  Let’s say it’s 50 years from now, or 100 years from now, or however long you think it will take to have true Artificial General Intelligence.  Think Commander Data, with or without the android body.

At that point, we have AGI and the AI you’re talking to is sentient.  It’s a different life form, and you’re interacting with it daily.  It might be your tutor, your assistant, or your gamemaster.  At that point, it’d be weird not to have some kind of personal relationship with that AI.  Some AIs you’ll like, some you won’t.  They’ll all have different personalities, and you’ll react to and interact with them like you would any other personality.

The question is…how close are we to that future?  It’s probably not anything like 100 years in the future, or even 50.  Some would say we are close enough now to simulate it.  There are even those who’d say we’ve reached AGI now, though this is a minority opinion.

Regardless, it’s not that bizarre that people are forming personal relationships with their chatbots.

Deep Dive Coming!

We’re preparing an in-depth look at this phenomenon on our YouTube channel, LowEndBoxTV, where we’re going to dive into the world of AI companions.  I think adoption of these systems is going to continue to grow rapidly, so we’re going to dive into the technology, options, and DIY possibilities.

The post 25% of Americans Have an “Intimate, Romantic” Relationship With an AI Chatbot appeared first on LowEndBox.

TrueNAS is a virtual appliance you can drop onto baremetal or a VM and have a nice prebuilt storage management system.  If you have a server you want to turn into a NAS, you can of course install Debian, Ubuntu, or whatever, and configure RAID, NFS, Samba, etc. yourself.  But if you’d like a system that does all the hard work for you and presents an easy-to-use GUI, TrueNAS has been the go-to.

But now they’ve posted this on GitHub:

This repository is no longer actively maintained.

The TrueNAS build system previously hosted here has been moved to an internal infrastructure.

No further updates, pull requests, or issues will be accepted. Existing content is preserved here for historical reference only.

Although it’s now removed for some reason, the README originally provided this explanation:

This transition was necessary to meet new security requirements, including support for Secure Boot and related platform integrity features that require tighter control over the build and signing pipeline.

…to which the community has cried foul.

The deal here is that you can still download a TrueNAS CD and boot it on a machine you want to install it on.  But now you can’t replicate that CD yourself, because the build tools are now private.  So it’s a case of “trust us”…on the road to a MinIO future?

A lot of people have called shenanigans on the rationale here.  Every CI/CD tool in the world has provisions to handle secrets.  They could make everything available and just not include the signing key.

The issue here is that you don’t really know what’s on the ISO now.  And this could be a first move towards a subscription-only model.

Or it could be just colossally poor communication.  What do you think?

The post Is TrueNAS Killing Its Community Edition? Say It Ain’t So! appeared first on LowEndBox.

The Internet lit up yesterday with news that boffins at Cortical Labs have a petri dish filled with 200,000 human brain cells and they’re playing DOOM.

According to the lab, they have a chip they call CL1 that runs BIOS (BIological Operating System – get it?  Clever, huh?).  They took donated human cells, induced them to become pluripotent stem cells, and then (did some science stuff?  I have no idea really) they become brain cells.  They have these cells running inside some custom (obviously) hardware.  These neurons sit on an array of electrodes, and these electrodes can stimulate and read the electrical spikes from the neurons.

From there, it’s just a matter of connecting the video input from the game (what a human would see with his eyes) to the electrodes, and then the electrodes to controller input to the game.  By using a “reward system,” this “synthetic biological intelligence” was able to “learn”.

Mind-blowing and the next frontier?  Not so fast.

First, the “learning” is very overstated.  What they have is a neural network that can choose 0 or 1.  This is not feeding dopamine into a “brain” or anything like that.  The cells are used really more like transistors.  And really, it was not playing the game very well.

But more to the point, there is precious little actual hard data on this.  We have tweets and a slick YouTube video, but no peer-reviewed journal articles.

I went to their web site and clicked “Buy Now”.  I got this:

Thanks for expressing your interest in purchasing CL-1 units or for bespoke solutions. Please email us with key details below and one of our sales staff will get in touch with you regarding your purchase order.

To ensure a prompt response, it is helpful if you can give us an idea of your intended application and whether you are interested in the cloud system or to purchase CL-1 units. Please remember, you’ll need a suitable laboratory facilitates to use a CL-1 unit. If you do not have this we suggest you look at Cortical Cloud, our Wetware-as-a-Service (Waas) option, available on the top right of the website and sign up there.

OK, let’s try “Waas” (cringe).  All I got was “The Cortical Cloud will be launching soon.”

This really smells like a hype.  The video is interesting and shows their CL1 system, but it’s important to remember that what this “brain” is doing is something that silicon can do millions fo times better.  You can write code that will play DOOM perfectly.  The argument may be that it’s “early days” for the CL1, but this isn’t like quantum computing where an entire new approach to computing could open up.  It’s just a neural network.  We already have those, and the ones we have today do not wear out in 6 months like the CL1.

This seems like a proof of concept designed to attract funding.  It isn’t clear that this will ever pan out into a new frontier of computing.  The only real advantage offered up is the lower energy cost.  But that comes with radically reduced compute power, so…

I wish they’d opted to provide a bit more science and a little less hype.

The post Are 200,000 Human Cells in a Petri Dish Really Playing DOOM? Pump the Brakes appeared first on LowEndBox.

Looking to get up and running in the UK?  Community provider VM6 Networks has some nice offers build on the AMD 9950X platform.

How nice?  Starting at only £3/Month!  And they’re still offering service on some of their legacy hardware (AMD Ryzen 7800) for only £18/YEAR!

These are very full-featured as well.  You’re getting:

• Premium hardware
• Gen4 NVMe Storage
• Virtfusion panel
• A 99.9% Uptime SLA
• Snapshot backups
• DDoS Protection included!
• 10Gbps Network.
• Upload your own ISOs.

Why Choose VM6 UK VPS Hosting?
Choose between a range of Windows and Linux distributions. Whether you need Microsoft Windows Server 2019 and above, or one of over 26 Linux operating systems, we have you covered! We are also a fully registered limited UK company Company Number: 16553775

Important Links

• Looking Glass
• Acceptable Use Policy
• Affiliate Program
• Terms of Service
• VM6 Blog

Learn more on their LowEndTalk thread!

Legacy VPS Offers

AMD Ryzen 9950X Offers

Available Addons

Additional IP £1.75
1TB Traffic £2 – £0.13 per 1GB

The post VM6 Networks: Cheap VPS Offers in Coventry, UK on Premium Hardware! appeared first on LowEndBox.

The GNU Public License is popular with many developers, but it’s lost a lot of its momentum over the years.  Commercial developers hate it, because it imposes complexity into license management.  The “GPL virus” is a bit exaggerated, but the reality is that the moment you include some GPL code, you’ve got to have a link where people can download the source.  I mean, my car has an option to read the GPL on my dashboard.

If I’m a company developing software, who needs that headache?  Particularly in a litigious society.  There may be societal benefits to copyleft code – that is the Free Software Foundation’s argument – but there is zero benefit to a commercial software publisher or distributor.

I also think the rise of GitHub has played a role.  When you go to choose a license for your repository, several options are chosen.  If you look them over, the MIT license is certainly far easier to understand than the GPL.

In prior years, GPL-licensed software was so common that companies almost had to include it.  This is changing rapidly.

First, the Gnu Compiler Collection (gcc) has been eclipsed by LLVM/Clang for many tasks, and it has industry heavyweights behind it.  The common toolchain used to create software no longer has the big flagship project that was gcc.  Richard Stallman has called this a “terrible setback“.

Second, there is an ongoing effort to rewrite many core Linux utilities in Rust, in the name of security.  These utilities are MIT-licensed, not GPL licensed.  There is a compelling reason (security) for distributions to adopt these tools, and they have.  You can expect that from here on out, GPL packages will be replaced by MIT-licensed ones in Linux distros.

In both cases, non-GPL licenses are being chosen.  As the universe of GPL software shrinks, it has a snowball effect.  The GPL becomes less visible, and the network effect of the GPL is diminished with every migrated project.  If the Linux project is mostly GPL-license software, the next developer will license with the GPL.  But what happens in the future when only the kernel is GPL-licensed?  The kernel has too many contributors, of course, to relicense but…

…actually, hold that thought.

Recently there was a kerfuffle about the chardet project.  chardet is a Python module (and a very popular one, with 170 million downloads), which has been licensed under the GPL.  A different developer was hoping to include it in the Python standard distribution, and decided to reimplement it.

With AI.

And did so in 5 days.

From start to finish, a complete clean room implementation was done.  The original developer is raising holy hell, but it’s hard to see how they have a case to stand on.  Every file is different.  Automated plagiarism checks report only 1.3% in common code (and you’ll always have some common boilerplate in software).

In a true “clean room” implementation, you isolate some people from any access to existing source code, and you tell them to write a similar program.  You can never truly do that with open source software, because it’s ubiquitously accessible.  But if you examine the source code and compare new vs. old, it’s clear if someone was just mechanically copying things and doing some light variable-renaming.

Here, the reimplementation looks very clean.  Different code, different algorithms, and better performance.

This was done using Claude.  Now…how long before other GPL projects are replaced?

Imagine you’re a company and you want to use some GPL software.  Do you really want to inject that licensing headache into your project, or do you want to have an engineer spending a week reimplementing it with AI assistance?  I know which I’d choose.

Fast forward a couple years…how long before the Linux kernel itself is rewritten?  Maybe there’s still the “official” kernel that is GPL-licensed, but there could be a shadow kernel that is MIT-licensed which tracks it.  If reimplementing software becomes cheap and easy, commercial entities and developers who don’t like the GPL will swiftly replace it.

Copyleft was an intriguing idea.  Emphasis on the verb.  Given the pace of AI advancement, can it have more than a few years left to live?

The post The Linux Kernel Will Soon Be MIT-Licensed and Copyleft Will Be Dead Within 5 Years appeared first on LowEndBox.

Community provider HostingB2B recently posted on LowEndTalk:

Recent disruptions across major UAE cloud zones have proven that even the most robust networks face unforeseen physical risks. While many focus on cyber-resilience, current regional events have shifted the priority toward physical and environmental security.

To assist those needing to diversify risk or migrate critical workloads, HostingB2B is offering high-security colocation slots in our Tier-III+ Dubai facility. Engineered for extreme resilience, our infrastructure remained fully operational and unaffected throughout recent incidents. We provide N+1 power redundancy and industry-leading 32 Amps per rack, backed by a 99.93% uptime track record and ISO 27001/9001 certifications. If your current setup is impacted or you require an urgent disaster recovery site, our team is ready to facilitate a rapid, secure transition.

They’re referring to the well-publicized Iranian missile strike on Amazon’s UAE datacenter.

They offer hosting in Dubai, and can provide you with Dubai colocation services.

Get from 1U to 24U of rack space, and you can pay monthly.  They are ISO 9001 & ISO 27001 certified.

Learn more on their home page, and be sure to read their TOS and AUP.  Then pop over to the LowEndTalk thread!

The post Has Your Gulf System Been Disrupted? HostingB2B Can Help Out With Dubai Colocation! appeared first on LowEndBox.

Onidel is expanding in Ho Chi Minh City (Viet Nam)!  They recently shared news on LowEndTalk:

We have just deployed a new cluster in Ho Chi Minh. This is our effort to keep infrastructures in Vietnam on par with what we have in other locations. What you’ll get in Ho Chi Minh:

• AMD EPYC Rome
• NVMe Block Storage (Triple replication by Ceph)
• Dedicated IPv4
• Routed IPv6 (pending for BGP announcement, ETA next week)
• 1 Gbps network port
• BW Pooling
• Private network
• High-availability at compute, storage and network-level.
• and more.

They’re offering 50% off recurring prices for a limited time…only until March 8, 2026!

Here are some sample configs, but login to their site to dial in the exact specs you want.   Be sure to use promo code: VIETNAMISBACK.

Read more on their LowEndTalk thread!

The post TIME LIMITED: Cheap VPS Offers in Ho Chi Minh City from Onidel! 2GB VPS From Only $4.95/Month on Annual! appeared first on LowEndBox.

New York Senate Bill S7263 is under consideration, and it seeks to prohibit LLMs from dispensing advice on a broad range of topics.

The logic is: “since you need a license to practice medicine, psychiatry, engineering, law, and other disciplines, and since LLMs don’t have a license, they must be prohibited from dispensing any advice on these topics.”

Some key points:

• This is, like a lot of American law, another trial lawyer enrichment act.  The enforcement mechanism is civil, which means that anyone can sue the chatbot operators.  The government isn’t going to step in and ban ChatGPT.  It’s going to allow everyone to sue ChatGPT.
• Operators cannot get out of liability by putting disclaimers on the output.
• Liability exists for anyone who offers a model or chat interface.
• If it passes, operators will have only 90 days to put safeguards in place.

Some thoughts…

First, yes, in a perfect world, everyone would have affordable access to all kinds of professionals.  But we don’t live in a perfect world.  People turn to AI to ask all kinds of questions.  It’s absurd to say “no, this information requires you to pay $300 an hour and we are outlawing any other means of getting it.”

Second, this is analogous to removing textbooks about psychiatry or medicine from libraries.  I could go to the library and read a book on diseases and convince myself that I have kuru (despite the fact that I don’t practice funerary cannibalism).  Should these books be removed from libraries?

Third, I’m sure the various professions are feeling the heat from AI.  Isn’t this really just about protecting their paychecks?

There will be all sorts of free speech challenges and such if this passes.  I’m thinking that the AI juggernauts will be lobbying hard against it as well.

The post New York Moves to Protect Professional Paychecks by Prohibiting LLM Advice on Medical, Legal, and Engineering Questions appeared first on LowEndBox.

California recently passed a law that requires age verification for operating system accounts.

No doubt, the lawmakers who penned this dubious piece of legislation were thinking of the typical Microsoft Windows setup experience.  If you get a new Windows laptop, you sign up with your Microsoft account.  In California’s mind, this should require age verification so some child can’t create an account.

The reasoning is likely the desire to have that age verification flow on to various application or service gateways.  So in theory, if you create an account as a 7-year-old, that account status (“this is a child”) will be available to sites that publish adult content so they say that account can’t access our material.

As posted on the ubuntu-devel list:

At its core, the law seems to require that an “operating system” (I’m guessing this would correspond to a Linux distribution, not an OS kernel or userland) request the user’s age or date of birth at “account setup”. The OS is also expected to allow users to set the user’s age if they didn’t already provide it (because the OS was installed before the law went into effect), and it needs to provide an API somewhere so that app stores and application distribution websites can ask the OS “what age bracket does this user fall into?” Four age brackets are defined, “< 13”, “>= 13 and < 16”, “>= 16 and < 18”, and “>= 18”. It looks like the API also needs to not provide more information than just the age bracket data. A bunch of stuff is left unclear (how to handle servers and other CLI-only installs, how to handle VMs, whether the law is even applicable if the primary user is over 18 since the law ridiculously defines a user as “a child” while also defining “a child” as anyone under the age of 18, etc.), but that’s what we’re given to deal with.

Yes, this really is as ridiculous as it sounds.

So what happens if, for example, OpenBSD ships a version without this new age verification scheme?  Because I guarantee they’re going to.  What if I create Raindog Linux, don’t implement this, and put the ISO on for download?  Is California going to send agents to my home to arrest me?

The whole idea is absurd.  But then, cloud-mandated OS accounts (like the typical Microsoft login) are also absurd.  When I login to my PC, I login to my PC.  If I want to also login to Google, Microsoft, whatever, that’s fine, but why are those steps unified?  No one asked for that.

This will be unpleasant.

The post Absolute Insanity: Age Verification for OS Accounts Coming to Ubuntu appeared first on LowEndBox.

We have a cool offer for you today for HostNamaste!  They’re offering VPS resource pools, where you can deploy multiple VPSes based on your desired specs.  Move resources around, tear down and re-spec the boxes, and and enjoy a digital playground.

What Are Resource Pools?

A VPS Resource Pool lets you purchase one pool of resources and split it into multiple independent VPS instances.  Depending on the plan you choose, you can create up to 2, 3, or 4 VMs.  This gives you a lot of flexibility and you can reconfigure at any time!

Resource Pool vs Normal VPS

HostNamaste is a registered hosting company based in Rajkot, Gujarat, India, operating continuously since March 2016.

We focus on long-term reliability in the LowEnd market, offering:

• Stable hardware
• RAID-10 storage
• Honest resource allocation
• Real 24/7/365 support

Be sure to read their TOS and AUP, and learn which payment methods they accept.

Server Locations

• Los Angeles, California, USA
• Dallas, Texas, USA
• Paris / Roubaix / Strasbourg, France

️ Minimum Host Node Specs

• Dual Intel Xeon E5-2650v4 / AMD EPYC 7351P
• 512 GB RAM
• 4 × 2 TB SSD (RAID-10)
• 1 Gbps Network Uplink

The post Get VPS Resource Pools from HostNamaste Starting at Just $5/Month in Dallas, Los Angeles, or France! appeared first on LowEndBox.

It’s always cool when someone takes a new spin on VPS hosting.  You’d think by now that every possible variation of this service category had been tried…but you’d be wrong!

Today we’d like to introduce you to Shellbox.

Shellbox is an instant Linux environment service.  There’s no signup form, no web dashboard, and no configuration.  You connect connect via ssh shellbox.dev and have a running KVM instance in seconds. The entire workflow, including creating boxes, managing billing, and adding funds, happens over SSH.

I tried out it out myself and it’s really neat.  You do need to have an SSH key (man ssh-keygen if you don’t know how, or read our tutorial).  That’s all you need.

And – you pay by the hour, which makes it perfect for short-lived uses, test cases, and services you don’t need running 24×7.  Boxes automatically suspend when users disconnect and resume exactly where they left off, so customers only pay for actual compute time. The service runs on Firecracker microVMs on dedicated hardware in Helsinki

Shellbox launched publicly in 2025 and has been featured on Hacker News.

I played around with the service.  The cool thing is that everything is done over SSH.  For example:

$ ssh -i ~/.ssh/id_ed25519 [email protected] help

Shellbox - Instant Linux Boxes

Commands:
  create  [xN]  Create a new box (x1-x8 size, default x1)
  duplicate    Copy a stopped box (inherits size)
  rename       Rename a box
  list                List your boxes
  keepalive     Toggle keepalive (box stays running on disconnect)
  wakeup  [min] Toggle wakeup (auto-start on HTTP, stop after idle)
  cron   [run] Toggle cron (periodic wake, run, stop)
  stop          Force-stop a box (clears keepalive, preserves wakeup/cron)
  delete        Delete a box
  key [list|add|remove]  Manage SSH keys (multi-device access)
  billing             Show your account balance and usage
  funds       Add funds to your account (min $10)
  refund      Refund funds from your account
  payments            Show payment history
  promocode (code)    Redeem a promo code for free credits
  help                Show this help
  about               About Shellbox

Connect to a box:
  ssh @shellbox.dev

File transfer:
  scp file.txt @shellbox.dev:/path
  scp @shellbox.dev:/path ./local/
  sftp @shellbox.dev

Billing:
  Boxes stop when balance falls below $5, deleted at $0.

Examples:
  ssh shellbox.dev create mybox
  ssh shellbox.dev list
  ssh [email protected]
  scp file.txt [email protected]:/root/
  sftp [email protected]
  ssh shellbox.dev billing
  ssh shellbox.dev funds 20

I love the minimalist ethos and command-line esthetic.  In a world where you need two hundred JavaScript packages and a megabyte of CSS to make a web page, having everything right there in the terminal is awesome.

Shellbox is not a traditional VPS — it’s an entirely SSH-native experience with no web panel, no signup, and pay-per-minute billing with automatic suspend/resume. A typical developer using a box 2–4 hours per day pays $1.20–$2.40/month. Stopped boxes cost just $0.50/month, so users can maintain dozens of environments for pennies. Every box gets a public HTTPS endpoint with automatic TLS and an email endpoint. Full SCP/SFTP support means it works with VSCode Remote SSH and Zed out of the box. Try it yourself: ssh shellbox.dev about

Read more on shellbox.dev – their web site also has a command-line feel – and be sure to check out their terms and refund policy.  Billing is per-hour, and there’s a minimum $10 top-up, which makes sense since no one wants to be doing per-penny credit card billing.  They accept credit/debit cards, Google Pay, and other methods via Paddle.

Datacenter and Test IPs

Hetzner HEL1-DC4 — Helsinki, Finland

• Test IPv4: N/A (boxes do not receive dedicated IPs; access is via SSH to shellbox.dev)
• Test IPv6: N/A (not currently offered)
• Test file: https://vm3-2268c445.shellbox.dev/100MB.test
• Looking glass: N/A (try the service directly: ssh shellbox.dev about)

Host Node Specifications

• AMD EPYC 7502P (32 cores / 64 threads)
• 512GB DDR4 ECC Registered (16x 32GB)
• 1x 3.84TB NVMe U.2 SSD (Datacenter)
• 1x 1.92TB NVMe U.2 SSD (Datacenter)
• 1x 12TB SATA HDD (Enterprise)
• 1Gbps uplink (Intel I350)

VPS Offer

Shellbox — Instant Linux Box via SSH

• 2 vCPUs
• 4GB RAM
• 50GB SSD
• Unmetered transfer
• 1Gbps shared uplink
• KVM (Firecracker microVM)
• 1 public HTTPS endpoint with automatic TLS
• 1 email endpoint
• Full SSH/SCP/SFTP access
• $0.02/hour while running
• $0.50/month while stopped
• Effective cost: $1.20–$7.20/month depending on usage (2–12 hrs/day)
• No monthly commitment, prepaid balance with refunds available

The post Shellbox: The Coolest New Take on Hosting! Provision Your New VPS via Command Line for $0.02/Hour! appeared first on LowEndBox.

Welcome, SKRIME!

This is the first time we’ve featured this community provider on LowEndBox.  They’ve got some great deals on hosting in the Netherlands.  Check these out:

• Get a 1GB VPS for only €0.99/month (IPv6 only)!
• Or if you want IPv4, it’s only €1.49/month!
• These are KVM, DDoS-protected servers with RAID-1 NVMe
• And they come with unlimited bandwidth!

Outstanding!

SKRIME is a German hosting provider with one clear mission: deliver reliable, high-performance hosting at prices that make sense. We run our infrastructure in the SkyLink datacenter in Eygelshoven, Netherlands, benefiting from direct fiber connections to Frankfurt and Amsterdam for optimal routing and consistently low latency across Europe and beyond.

All servers are protected by an in-house DDoS protection solution powered by XDP/eBPF technology with multi-layer symmetric filtering. It is built to handle attacks targeting any kind of workload — from web applications and APIs to latency-sensitive game servers. No third-party mitigation, no rerouting — just always-on inline filtering included with every server at no extra cost.

Our KVM VPS lineup starts at just €0.99/month and scales up to powerful servers with up to 128GB RAM. Every server comes with NVMe SSD storage in RAID 1, a 10 Gbit/s shared uplink. Beyond VPS, we also offer web hosting, domain management, game server hosting, and dedicated servers — all under one roof.

We’re a small, independent team that keeps things transparent, responsive, and no-nonsense. No hidden fees, no surprise throttling — just solid hosting from people who care about what they build.

Check out their web site, and read their terms of service and cancellation policy.  They accept PayPal, credit cards, paysafecard, Alipay, and bank transfers.  Questions?  Ping @SKRIME on LowEndTalk.

Datacenter and Test IPs

• SkyLink — Eygelshoven, Limburg, Netherlands
• Test IPv4: 77.90.60.30
• Test IPv6: 2a06:1283:9000::cafe
• Test files: https://ping.threatoff.eu/100M.test
• Looking glass: https://skrime.eu/network

VPS Offers

The post Awesome Deals in the Netherlands from Skrime! €0.99/month Gets You a 1GB VPS! appeared first on LowEndBox.

2026 is not a leap year, folk, so February ends today!

That means that today is your last chance to get in on ServerHost‘s February giveaway.  Check out these prizes:

• 1x $1000 in cash!
• 1x iPad Mini!
• 3x LowEndTalk T-shirts!  (Final design TBD)
• 5x $50 ServerHost account credits!

And Don’t Sleep On These Deals!

ServerHost is calling this Black Friday 2.0, because this is Black Friday pricing!

And they’re still available…but…February is ending.  So available for how much longer…?  Don’t wait!

I Wanna Win!

Let’s go! If you don’t see the Gleam widget, you may need to disable your ad blocker, make sure cookies are enabled, and/or enable JavaScript.

Last chance!

ServerHost-LowEndBox January 2026 Giveaway!

The post Last Day, Last Chance to Win $1000, an iPad Mini, and More in ServerHost’s February Giveaway! Get a 4GB VPS for Only $33/YEAR! appeared first on LowEndBox.

Hey there, Felware!

They contacted us again to feature their dedicated server offers. We’ve been featuring them since November 23 and they’re not your average dedicated server provider.  Besides great deals and solid service delivery, they’re based out of Madison, Wisconsin.  That’s convenient enough to anyone looking for hosting in the USA but also helpful if you’re looking for a specific Midwestern geography or just want something different than yet another Chicago server.

Felware provides high quality dedicated servers hosted in a professional environment, all while keeping a personal connection with our customers. We have a dedicated phone line and WhatsApp where you can speak with our engineers directly, and we work around the clock to monitor our services. Our staff has decades of experience as network engineers/software engineers at FAANG and other reputable companies.

Learn more on their website, or ping @Felware on LowEndTalk.  You should also, as always, be sure to read their client service agreement, hosting service terms, and privacy policy.

Limited Time Promo

Get 35% off the LIFETIME of your recurring monthly subscription using code LOWENDBOX35! There are limited servers available, so act fast!

Datacenter and Network Info

MSN1 – Madison, Wisconsin, United States
Looking glass/test url: https://lg.felware.net/

Dedicated Server Offers

The post Exclusive 35% Discount for Cheap Dedicated Servers in Madison, Wisconsin from Felware! Starting at Only $64.99/Month for an E5-2680v4 with 64GB of RAM and UNMETERED BANDWIDTH! appeared first on LowEndBox.

It’s been a miserable week as a Big Tech consumer for me.

Personally, I really hate the big tech model:

• Release mass market products
• Provide very limited support options
• Rarely talk with your customers but instead rely on some AI-generated trend analysis nonsense of comments you get in support forums
• Assume that users will support each other
• Where there are bugs, never acknowledge them, just push out updates

This is how Google, Meta, Microsoft, Apple, etc. all work.

99% of the time, it works, but when it doesn’t…well, you get my week.

YouTube Music Disaster

I use YouTube Music.  Or used to use it.  Mainly this was because I use YouTube Premium as it allows downloads and I’m often hiking in areas without good cell.  No ads is a bonus.  And YouTube Music is free.

It’s an ugly app, though.  Your YouTube (video) and YouTube Music playlists get mixed together.  If it wasn’t “free” I wouldn’t use it.

And now I won’t because for the last three weeks there’s been a bug where I can only see the first 16 of my playlists.  I have a couple hundred playlists, all lovingly curated over the years.  And now I can’t use nearly all of them.

So I opened a…ha ha, almost said support ticket.  No, I opened a thread in the “support community”.  And there was some response, but they basically said “be sure to submit feedback”.  Great.  I did.  And the issue persists.  No way to actually talk to a human.  Someone said a “ton of people are facing this issue”.  For how long?  If a ton of people can’t listen to their music…isn’t that a Priority One Incident to use some ITSM speak.

I’m a paying customer, damnit.  I deserve to be able to raise a support request when it’s needed.

I eventually gave up.  Apple Music allows you to almost effortlessly import your YouTube Music playlists via SoundShift (and it was able to see all of them), so now I’m an Apple Music guy.  Switching from my daughter’s $10.99/month plan to a $16.99 family plan is a $6/month delta but…at least I can listen to my music.

Meta Rejects Mail, Can’t Send Gifts

For Valentine’s Day, I gave my wife a set of Walkabout Mini Golf courses.

We love the game and frequently play it together on Quest VR.  I made a nice little booklet, referred to different moments we’ve had together in life together with screenshots from the game…awww….

This last weekend, we finally had time to play.  I logged into my Meta app and gifted her each course.  She logged in and…they were nowhere to be found.  OK, maybe it takes a while.  An hour goes by.  Then two.  Then six.

The next day I contacted Meta.  Their support replied with the usual “additional information needed” so I replied and…

Um, what?

554 5.7.1 POL-P6 Message refused https://www.facebook.com/postmaster/response_codes?ip=2607:f8b0:4864:20::c34#POL-P6

Seriously?  My personal email is hosted on GMail.  I’ve never had anyone block it.

OK, so…fine, I don’t have DKIM keys setup for email.  I add them.  Haven’t needed this in literally 15 years of using Gmail.

Then Meta asks me what my email address is.  Because…they can’t look at the from line?!?  Fine, I tell them.  Then:

I appreciate you providing this account information and I was able to see there was indeed a system error when sending the gifts that meant they did not generate the coupon/ auto re-deem for the other user.

If you like I can refund these purchases for you now, and you can try purchasing them one at a time and confirming that they each are received.

So I’m not hallucinating.  Yes, please refund…my wife can buy on her side.  It’s all our money together, after all.

They respond by asking me for my email address again.  I give it.  Then:

After checking this, I have tried to refund the games as for you, but I’m afraid we can’t refund them, as per our policy Meta Quest/Rift Content Refund Policy.

Good grief!  I just replied back and said “something is wrong with your response” and reminded them of the facts.

They reply back, and once again…wait for it…ask what my email address is.  Every time they do this, it’s another 6-8 hours of email round trip of course.

Then:

I will require more time to look into this issue and the possible solutions available to you. Thank you for your extended patience and understanding. I will do my best to get back to you with more information or an update within the next 3-5 business days.

So painful.

For some reason, the gifts arrived today, so I closed out the case.  And by the way, the gifts don’t just appear in the recipient’s account.  Meta emails a code my wife will have to enter.  For each course.  How archaic!

Meanwhile, Here in Low-End Land

I had an issue setting reverse DNS with a community provider.  I opened a ticket.  An hour later, I got a “sorry about that!” and the issue was resolved.  In their panel.  I noticed the panel appearance changed slightly, so apparently they pushed out a code fix.  Based on my humble little request.

I swear…small shops live on reputation. Big ones live on inertia.

The post The Week Big Tech Failed Me: Google and Meta Both Outdone by a $10/Year Provider appeared first on LowEndBox.