https://www.shotcut.org/ and https://www.openshot.org/ are other options, besides the already mentioned KDEnlive.

Conversations/Cheogram are excellent XMPP apps for Android that are freely available on F-Droid.

If someone is offering a public wifi, there is a reasonable expectation that other people sitting in the same cafe for example can’t listen in on what you are doing on your device. As older wifi encyption standards are easily compromised, this requires enforcing a semi-recent wifi-standard. You can of course make your own judgement in your own home, but in a public space it is different.

As for SSL certificates… this isn’t only a captive portal issue. If your device has such outdated root certificates that you run into issues already at the captive portal, you will have also issues with each and every website that uses https. Root certificates are only cycled out of use for good reasons, such as them becoming compromised, so by using an super old root certificate on your device you are wide open to MITM attacks on supposedly secure connections.

Don’t look online, ask friends and family if someone has an old laptop you can get for free. Very likely someone does, especially if you are ok with a bad battery and/or a broken screen.

A RPi3 can work, but it being ARM based will cause various headaches when learning compared to something x86.

Badly implemented captive portals are an issue, yes. But enforcing certain security standards on public wifi so that random people can not see everything you are doing online is good.

And I would advise against going online with a device so old and unmaintained that it has issues with its SSL root certificate.

Typically a video-chat server does no transcoding so this isn’t a major issue. But for hosting a Peertube or Owncast server it would.

The old A/V chats in Matrix were just Jitsi-meet in disguise, but this has been largely deprechiated now with Element Calls.

https://movim.eu/ can do that AFAIK, but for now the A/V calls don’t go through an SFU distribution server (coming soonish), so it will not scale to many participants. But if you want to only stream to a few people (like max. 5 or so, depends a bit on your and their internet speed) it should work.

It’s nice that they ported it, but it would be much nicer if there were any server boards with open firmware that not super old, but right now being cycled out of professional use and thus cheap to pick up from resellers.

Lol, wat? I have not seen Anubis even once in front of a static page. You are either making shit up or don’t understand what a static site is 🤦

Well… you found your problem then. It is neither my problem, nor a problem of apartments in general 🤷

Eh, we are talking about DHH, a really shitty company CEO, multi-millionaire, and open white supremist. He is very much part of “the man” and worth fighting.

Yeah, that is a pretty realistic assessment, and the author should definitely try out Snikket (XMPP). There are also somewhat decent bridges for xmpp via https://slidge.im/

You could enable Suricata on OPNsense, which will allow you to subscribe to some known attacker lists and so one. But the problem these days are mostly AI scrapers that usually don’t show up on these lists as they are not attackers per se, but just cause a lot of database load by repeatably probing every part of your web-applications.

DSub2000 is also fairly nice for Android.

Many apartments are owned by the inhabitants or are cooperatively managed.

That is a silly assumption, like why would you assume the worst possible setup? And it would be much easier to talk to the person managing the apartment internet than having to deal with some AI chatbot that pretends to be the support at some shitty ISP.

Obviously I don’t think you need Anubis for a static site. And if that is what your admin experience is limited too, than you have a strong case of dunning krueger.

No one is disputing that in theory (!) Anubis offers very little protection against an adversary that specifically tries to circumvent it, but we are dealing with an elephant in the porcelain shop kind of situation. The AI companies simply don’t care if they kill off small independently hosted web-applications with their scraping and Anubis is the mouse that is currently sufficient to make them back off.

And no, forced site reloads are extremely disruptive for web-applications and often force a lot of extra load for re-authentication etc. It is not as easy as you make it sound.

You clearly don’t know what you are talking about.