Snot Flickerman
Our News Team @ 11 with host Snot Flickerman
Yes, I can hear you, Clem Fandango!
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The reality is that security/privacy will always be a balancing act with convenience.
If you increase your security and privacy, you will lose convenience.
If you increase your convenience, you will lose security and privacy.
It’s always a tradeoff.
It’s up to you what things you’re willing to trade off, in the end. Everyone can give valuable input, but it will always be up to you to make the final decision on what level of tradeoff you’re willing to accept and what level fits your threat model.
For total security and privacy you would basically have to not use electronics at all and live in a cabin in the woods and have a good grasp of chemistry, scavenging and farming to take care of yourself. I think a guy named Ted did that once and it didn’t work out so great for him, but of course, he also didn’t actually just keep to himself in those woods.
And to be fair, these days even that’s not a guarantee of total privacy with satellite imagery, drones, etc.
Hello everyone, what is your go-to password manager?
KeePassXC for something hosted locally on your home network. Best aspect of KeePassXC is the support for OTP codes built-in, in my opinion. For mobile OTP codes, I personally use Aegis.
What would you suggest for friends and family that aren’t very tech savvy?
Bitwarden for non-tech-savvy family and friends.
it can end up receiving packets not meant for it because switches will flood all the ports for packets they don’t know how to route
This is only applicable to IPv4 networking and is very much “the old way” of doing things. If you have properly designed and set up your own home network, you shouldn’t be having broadcast traffic happen at all, because all your switches should have a MAC table that includes all the devices you have physically connected. Especially if you have bothered to take the time to hand out static addresses tied to the MAC address. A broadcast should generally only be happening if there is an unknown destination on the LAN, and an unknown destination only happens when there is a new device added at an unknown location. Once a broadcast packet has been sent and replied to, the switch fills it’s MAC table with the information on the new device, now knowing it’s location.
Wi-Fi’s packets can be intercepted by anyone, it’s technically sending all packets on blast as radio waves at all times. Sure, modern Wi-Fi can be encrypted, but that encryption can also often be broken.
Finally, IPv6 doesn’t use broadcast packets at all, instead using multicasting, which is similar to a broadcast but doesn’t flood every port in the wired network and is a bit more tightly directed.
Everything old is new again.
Reminds me of the documentary called Spin from 1995. It was built from behind-the-scenes footage captured from live satellite feeds from the 1992 Presidential election and the 1992 Rodney King LA riots.
Except that fascists will invent excuses whenever there isn’t violence at all.
True, but why make their jobs easier? The more propaganda they have to produce over reality means more truth slips through.
I believe it is worth combatting their surveillance. Our liberty is not a given but needs to be taken. What is stupid is holding too much defeatism.
Gonna just have to agree to disagree on that. I feel capable of privacy measures intended to stop basic corporate adware surveillance, but the idea that we as individuals can battle the tools and capabilities of well funded nation state with agencies like the NSA and CIA involved seems to smack of hubris to me.
Mutual aid, as you said, is good; but it should not be the only resort.
I agree, but I don’t think you’re going to be able to organize and mobilize the citizens against an authoritarian takeover without parallel systems being set up first. Otherwise fascist disaster capitalists will just use their control of such systems against us.
Some of us think the best way to do that is to build parallel systems of mutual aid (which isn’t illegal) to support each other when things become difficult instead of violence. Especially considering the fascists are trying to foment violence as an excuse to clamp down with martial law and cancel elections. Parallel systems would instead allow us to house, clothe, and feed each other during something like a general strike, which is much more likely to cause a deep impact than fruitlessly trying to violently attack one of the best outfitted and funded militaries on the planet which commands surveillance systems that make our meager attempts at privacy seem foolish at best and downright fucking stupid at worst.
That’s why in the old days it was “always know your dealer” as interpersonal trust systems were built on people who weren’t screwing with the quality of what you were getting and you could easily, by word of mouth, tell others to not deal with people who had done you wrong. Same idea, different technology and time period.
Good point, where I live weed is legal as are mushrooms, I often forget that people might still be looking for drugs beyond those.
I guess I always lived by the old adage “always know your dealer” when I was still doing drugs, which is a long time ago now. The idea of getting them online from strangers just seems risky in general.
I don’t know what country you’re from but at least here in the USA the things that therapists are required to report to police are pretty slim, mostly just things that could cause direct physical harm to yourself and others.
Beyond threats to hurt another person, threats to sexually assault another person, neglect of a child, or threats of harm to oneself… almost everything else is covered by HIPAA patient privacy rules.
If you live elsewhere perhaps you could look into your local laws in terms of what is required mandatory reporting for therapists?
I do a lot of risky and dangerous shit on the internet.
Maybe stop doing things that would get the police at your door?? There’s only a handful of things I can think of that would actually get police at your door for your online behavior and most of them are things that kind of make me ill to think about.
The main difference I see between the two is that Mullvad no longer offers port forwarding services and ProtonVPn does offer port forwarding services.
This can make a big difference based on your use-case scenarios. If you are gaming and need port forwarding or are torrenting and need port forwarding Protonvpn is the better choice.
The catch is you have to install the Epic app or whatever it is called.
Also they hate Linux and shitcanned the already-existing native Linux port of Rocket League when they bought it. It’s fair to say you won’t dump resources into making new Linux ports but shitcanning a quality one that already existed? They can eat shit.
I never played Rocket League again after that.
Build your own NAS. It doesn’t need to be quite as beefy as a gaming computer or personal computer, but a lot of companies that make NAS devices are making them more and more proprietary.
So PC with TrueNAS or Unraid or something similar. Don’t get sucked into an ecosystem that won’t let you use your own drives.
I agree that the backend for snaps being proprietary sucks, but I actually think snaps themselves are pretty useful in server configurations because of the sandboxing and limiting access to system resources. I get the whole argument that it’s doing what flatpak already did yadda yadda, but like… competing standards happens. It’s part of life and always will be.
I work for Meta (Facebook).
For example, the word “protest” will now get your account and activity monitored.
Maybe? The Orbic is fully Linux whereas Android is a locked down heavily modified version Linux with a lot of differences in the codebase.
Androids only work as a WiFi hotspot. I could be wrong but I am not aware of any with cellular hotspot capability. You would need it running as a cellular hotspot for it to detect the stingrays.
https://www.justanswer.com/computer-networking/h3j0m-orbic-mifi-trying-active.html
This thread seems to imply that it could work in Europe for US Verizon customers, but I can’t find much else about whether or not it directly supports European cellular radio bands.
From the Github (emphasis mine):
Rayhunter has been built and tested for the Orbic RC400L mobile hotspot. It may work on other orbics and other linux/qualcom devices, but this is the only one we have tested on.
Still very cool, but very, very limited options for using it.
On the plus side, it at least seems like a relatively inexpensive option, only $19 on Amazon.
To be clear, I’m only linking to it on Amazon because it is sold out from the manufacturer itself. Due to being sold out, I assume, Orbic doesn’t even list a price for it.
Another important note from the Github (emphasis not mine):
THIS CODE IS A PROOF OF CONCEPT AND SHOULD NOT BE RELIED UPON IN HIGH RISK SITUATIONS!
I think a Degoogled stock Pixel will be far more inconvenient than you want it to be because of the work you would have to put in for simple things like Push Notifications to work without Google services.