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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 14th, 2023

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  • Not an opinion, I have an actual situation with my eyes where they twitch uncontrollably when presented with bright lights for a long period of time. I have tried minimum screen brightness, lowered contrast/colors, auto brightness based on the environment, various software solutions to removing blue light 24/7 from the screen - none of it worked. Went permanently dark theme on everything, magically eyes haven’t twitched in years.

    Light theme vs dark theme is not just a preference, it’s an actual accessibility need for some of us.



  • Glad I looked at this thread. The fact they’re cheap and have what sound like reliable PoE hats… Tempted to replace a few old Pis lol. Maybe. But can at least say no future devices will be Pis at this point.

    Note: only using them for simple things. Wireguard VPN (no I don’t have a fast internet so I don’t need more than the 1gb connection speed), pi hole, and a touch panel I installed that connects to home assistant on the wall.



  • Friends and I are in the upper 30s and 40s range so not young not old I guess lol. For the family side, I tend to look for all my closer relatives which range in all ages. While there were many many lines that matched our last names, the entries that were a match didn’t have the right phone numbers or addresses (so couldn’t really validate if they were us or others with the same name). Or it could always be that they were addresses so old that I don’t have a record of them to compare to… Considering a large chunk of the data is apparently old, it’s possible that could be a reason I didn’t see everyone, too? I’ll probably go back and dig a little deeper on the family side since I haven’t deleted the data yet.


  • Fair enough, I should have left with the mention of mileage may vary. I checked for some more friends per request since my posting, and out of the 20-30 families I’ve now checked, only 1 was compromised… But they were also in a couple of previous ones too. But of course, this doesn’t mean it’s the same case for everyone else.



  • The news is kind blowing this up bigger than it really is. But I find this as a good thing because I’ve noticed a few people FINALLY taking the advice I’ve been giving for years now, and that’s to freeze your credit at the big bureaus and some, if not all, of the smaller ones.

    That being said, I checked this data dump for my own data as well as a bunch of friends and family. Not a single person I checked was in it… Which is why I’m not finding this breach to be that frightening personally. The ATT breach was way worse. Also Krebs posted on this today… A good read for anyone interested. Main thing I took from it was a large number of these entries belong to people who have passed away already.




  • The security part is the reason I use NoScript to do this. We’ve all typo squatted sites we visit, I’m sure. But if I typo squat a site I frequently visit and see the JavaScript disabled, it forces me to recheck I’m on the right site. Granted it’s only happened once where I didn’t realize I typo’d until seeing it was disabled, but it only takes 1 time to lose everything…

    Not sure the fingerprint concerns are too major for me either. Hopefully most scenarios, I’m flagged as a bot or crawler and out of some data that would otherwise have been collected. Who knows. I imagine that JavaScript makes up for way more fingerprinting though.




  • I’ve been doing this for a while now with opnsense being what masks the whole network behind the mullvad VPN.

    Pros:

    • Even fresh new devices that have all that crap junkware installed get routed through the VPN, meaning no tracking to you immediately (unless they sniff the rest of the network and relay your network AP I guess)
    • one device instead of many, leaving extra devices available to use for a single mullvad account (limited to 5 devices, at least for wireguard)
    • if using wireguard, you honestly won’t be hit with network performance issues. Just don’t choose a server across the world from you. I chose one in the same country as myself and get an average 95-97% of my internet speed, and that’s because I also have IDS/IPS enabled

    Cons:

    • as others mentioned, increase captcha annoyances
    • some banks may lock your account if you try to log in with the VPN
    • if the VPN server goes down, the whole network will. This may be a good thing since your don’t want traffic to leak, but just pointing out you now have another single point of failure outside your ISP
    • when someone’s hoarding the entire VPN server you’re connected to, you’ll probably witness a slowdown

    That all being said, if you’re not very technically savvy on the networking side or haven’t ever setup a custom router/firewall, this will be a pain. But it you want to learn something new and are up for the challenge, eventually it gets down to almost never having to worry about it. I’ve been doing it for a long time now, so for me personally, I’ve gotten to the point of only needing to login to the firewall for a VPN setting update or server change maybe once a month


  • I personally use mullvad for all outgoing traffic and then airvpn for any let forwarding I require. Basically airvpn is exclusive to incoming traffic, like my self hosted services or game servers, and then anything I do on the internet routes through mullvad. All setup through opnsense since they both support wireguard.

    I always had issues with proton’s port forwarding being reliable in the past. That being said, if you need things like video streaming services, mullvad seems to be having a hard time with these recently where as proton worked well for me back when I used it (unsure if that’s still true).


  • I’ll have to check out TrackerControl, that’s a new one to me!

    I have seen app manager but currently use AppOps. I didn’t recommend AppOps above because I’m not sure it’s still supported or not, and it’s also not really Foss. It’s treated me well over the years, but I’m definitely interested in finding a better alternative. The last time I checked app manager, it wasn’t as good… But maybe that’s changed as it’s been several years now so I think I might be due for looking at it again!

    My wireguard connection on my phone connects to my home network to an pi hosting my internal VPN… But the network is completely covered by a mullvad VPN through opnsense. I’ve got pihole setup using the mullvad anti-trackkng private DNS. With this setup, the only real need I have for root on my phone is because I do some pretty low level automation on it through crond and some backups of core app data that I’d really hate to lose… And the complex firewall rules lol.



    1. AFWall+ firewall to allow list apps to internet using your preferred method (e.g. VPN, wifi, data, etc)
    2. PcapDroid to help monitor and analyze packets, or to just confirm things aren’t communicating unexpectedly
    3. AdAway if you’re not using your own dedicated dns over a permanent VPN connection

    If not all 3 of these, AFWall is probably the best to go with. Having a way to not only block Apps, but also define your own custom firewall rules is very powerful. For example, I redirect all DNS requests to my own DNS with a custom rule (for apps, like Termux, using hardcoded DNS lookups instead of what the phone is set to)