Mikelius

This thread has provided genius ideas I somehow never thought of, and I’m totally stealing them for my sites lol.

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.

deleted by creator

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.

Hey this is pretty nice and simple, I like it. Had to hold down on the app to select the settings to change my server, would be nicer if that settings button was within the app itself… But got it pointing to my self-hosted instance and tested it out. Works perfectly! Thanks for sharing

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.

My solution to this question a year or so ago was to take my gaming desktop, which was collecting dust after I moved to my gaming laptop, and gut it down to a 4U server rack case. Best decision I’ve ever made. 12 core Ryzen and 128gb memory. Got a 10g adapter in the pci express, 8xHDD for data and then 2 mirrored nvme for the OS itself. Only thing I kept out was the video card since I had no use for it (yet)

An equivalent “server” on the market would probably cost a fortune and cost you a ridiculous amount of electricity.

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).

Lots of comments already mentioning the differences. I have tried these, including the mentioned ipfire, and decided on the end to use opnsense plus openwrt on two different devices.

I chose opnsense at the time many years ago because it supported wireguard out of the box, where as pfsense required some weird install process I didn’t want to deal with. Plus I liked the UI to opnsense more.

My moden has been literally replaced by my firewall so I have the ONT connected to it and then use it to do all the heavy lifting for… Well, firewall stuff. It connects to a VPN so my entire network routes through the VPN. Then my openwrt device is connected to that. It also handles firewall stuff, but more at an internal level (keeping network devices only permitted to communicate with devices I say are okay, blocking internet access, etc) and also hosts my nginx setup to route to various servers.

While I could do everything on one machine with opnsense, I’ve got a particular setup that allows me to have multiple devices at the firewall level, truly isolated from the rest of my internal network (for a couple of internet open port services). And it gives me peace of mind that if someone found a zero day in opnsense, I’m not totally screwed unless they also got one in openwrt.

To answer “which is better to begin with”, I personally find opnsense way more flexible and robust than the other 2 options. Has a lot more capabilities and upgrading is super easy without requiring jumping through weird hoops and such like openwrt does.

Remember, you can always opt out of sending any technical or usage data to Firefox.

How about you show you respect user privacy by making it an opt-in…?

Feels like no matter where I turn, even the “privacy friendly” options turn away from privacy eventually.

Not much for myself, like many others. But my backups are manual. I have an external drive I backup to and unplug as I intentionally want to keep it completely isolated from the network in case of a breach. Because of that, maybe 10 minutes a week? Running gentoo with tons of scripts and docker containers that I have automatically updating. The only time I need to intervene the updates is when my script sends me a push notification of an eselect news item (like a major upcoming update) or kernel update.

I also use a custom monitoring software I wrote that ties into a MySQL db that’s connected to with grafana for general software, network alerts (new devices connecting to network, suspicious DNS requests, suspicious ports, suspicious countries being reached out to like china, etc) or hardware failures (like a raid drive failing)… So yeah, automate if you know how to script or program, and you’ll be pretty much worry free most of the time.

Plus 1 to openvas. UI is indeed horrendous though.

Be careful running high load tests against sensitive devices. I once ran it against a PoE switch I used for my cameras and it did something so crazy that it required me not to only power cycle the switch, but to disconnect all the cameras first and then power cycle. Was super confusing and felt like it found a way to short the device lol. Scared the hell out of me.

That being said, I’ve found many many things to improve on my devices thanks to openvas.

It’s not free, they ask you to buy credits. I didn’t buy any so don’t know how much they cost, but just mentioning to make this clear.

I assume anyone who’s set their profile to private without sharing apps, external links, etc, and only go to private servers wouldn’t have much to worry about against this scenario?

I’d do my part in buying games from them more if they didn’t block my home network from their website lol. Yes it’s behind a VPN, and no I’m not turning it off to give up my privacy just to buy something I can get from stores that won’t block me.

I honestly used to buy games from them a lot, but once their website became inaccessible, I sorta forgot about them. Surely I’m not the only one right…?

Oooo I don’t know how I missed that one. Nice, I’ll have to check that out, thanks!!

If you self host nextcloud, another option is to put the rss feeds for your favorite podcasts into the news app. I listen to all of my podcasts through that.

However… I’d totally be interested in a better self hosted podcast app that allows me to see a record of everything I’ve listened to, while also allowing me to download the episodes to my phone, lol. That’s the only reason I’m stuck on the news app still.

If you have a pi or Linux box, try setting it up as a syslog server. Then tell opnsense to use that for forwarding logs to. Doesn’t guarantee you’ll see what went wrong, but maybe it’ll help.

I’m not sure opnsense has journalctl or something similar, but that would be a good place to look for some history, too.

Sorta kinda wondering (conspiracy thought, totally no evidence, just a random thing that came to my mind) if this is either an attack on AI or attempt to compromise those who use AI to write their code. Or both.