lmao God I can feel the frustration rising in me just thinking about it. I know these are digital rather than physical objects… but do these people fail to have object permanence?

Wow, usually people lose their shit and complain that Element is too complex and that me and the devs are being assholes asking them to use it… You know kind of like all the people here on the Fediverse who think we need to make it bigger and bring in everyone from everywhere and that the devs and users who defend them are awful for not focusing on user interface first and making it less confusing to choose a server…

Anyway, thanks for being on team reasonable, because I’m with you on this 100%, but I can’t change how little people want to learn anything sadly so I make compromises with people who cant or wont learn how to do things. It sucks, people really don’t seem to understand that security and convenience are a balance, and every time people argue for shit to be easier they’re actually arguing for everything to be less secure. You sacrifice security for convenience, every time, and the opposite happens because you can sacrifice convenience for increased security measures. Security has to be complex by nature to be effective, and the core of Matrix is being a secure, encrypted protocol, which they have already actually put a ton of work into making easier for fucking normies. Yet, it’s never enough for people. Always screams of “It’s too complex! I hate thinking!”

Oh I was well aware at the time, but I had a lot of friends who still struggled with trying to use Matrix/Element so at the time I was seeking a simpler solution for them.

They don’t understand that things will never return to how they used to be.

They also fail to understand how much worse things are going to get from here before they even marginally get better again.

Our aging infrastructure simply won’t end up having enough resources to be shored up to modern standards, and a lot of the country will start living with rolling blackouts and power for only short stretches in the day as that will end up being the only amount of power the failing grid can support without burning cities down. This will be exacerbated quickly by AI buildout.

The blackouts can also double as a way to censor the internet, adding new controls to the networks while power is down for everyone else, and when things come back online, it’s more and more tightly controlled.

A few years ago I saw a very old logging truck filled with logs stuck in the middle of a small city street for two days while it got repaired so it could be moved. Just wait until half of our roads are clogged with dead vehicles that we no longer have the resources or tools to move because all other big industrial vehicles have broken down as well. How long before every street is littered with dead vehicles we can no longer afford to move and Americans are forced into walking and cycling to get around them since major arterial roads may not be completely blocked.

Food will be scarce and costly, we don’t have a rural landowning population that can grow their own food anymore, especially as a lot of private land has been poisoned and isn’t fit to grow food on. Hell, if you have an old septic tank, you have to be sure you know exactly where it is and plant food well away from it, if you even have the room since those things can take up a lot of space underground.

Further, when septic tanks, sewers, and water systems fail to be maintained, we may have to resort to old style outhouses, which will further poison towns and cities until it becomes a massive public health hazard that nothing will be done about because our country is too broke. Laws that prevent citizens from collecting rainwater will be increasingly seen as draconian since rainfall will be one of the few (relatively) sources of clean water available, and even after collection it needs purifying with boiling and a small amount of bleach.

We are so deeply and absolutely fucked.

This is why corporate promises can never be trusted, because a new CEO can change those promises on a whim.

It’s part of why despite being interested in Beeper, I never signed up for it because I had questions about if those privacy promises they made would be kept if they sold to a bigger company… which they eventually did.

On the plus side Bitwarden already made an official open source self-hosted version, which can be forked and/or return to the community developed Vaultwarden roots.

Meanwhile KeepassXC keeps on chugging along.

Because it is?

People need to be realistic. We’ve been a poorer nation than we’ve pretended to be for a long, long time.

Like look at modern public buildings, not built to last, not like old stone and brick courthouses from the last century and the like. They’re just made with the same cheap materials as everything else.

The decline started with Nixon, got kicked up a gear by Reagan, but the first real crack in the armor was George W. Bush and his middle east boondoggles in Afghanistan and Iraq. After that the world was willing to look at it as somewhat of an erroneous event and expected cooler heads and serious people to prevail.

Now that instead of serious people prevailing, we’ve been spinning down the drain, and that’s literally the plan. The wholesale dismantling of US democracy was crowed from the rooftops as Project 2025.

The serious people in other countries aren’t going to be fooled again.

To quote George W. Bush “Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice, sh–, uhhh, you can’t fool me again.”

I just thought it was interesting that someone could not know what a tracker was and also be, you know, using one.

99% of my stuff from 1337x
what trackers even are

Meanwhile, me: Pirating since before Napster, has automated nothing at all, likes browsing private torrent trackers websites because it sort of makes me feel like I’m in Blockbuster video in the 90s walking the aisles and checking what’s available.

I think the argument is that since some of the extensions that are probed can be political in nature, which can reveal political identity, which is potentially unlawful in the EU. However, it really needs to be up to a judge to make a decision on that.

In general what they’re doing is legal, and the BrowserGate people are using niggling little details, a handful of extensions out of the 6000 probed, to justify this argument. I couldn’t say, especially as someone from outside the EU, whether this is actually illegal or not, but it’s definitely in a nebulous area at the moment.

Though I agree it’s sensationalized in terms of claiming it’s “searching your computer” and doing “corporate espionage.”

Literally? They’re searching installed browser extensions, that’s not “my computer.” Sure, it’s identification data, and it may brush up against EU laws, but “illegally searching your computer” is definitely a bit of hyperbole.

They are not “literally” searching my computer, as much as I am not literally fucking your mom.

“Yes, LinkedIn was probing for a lot of extensions, but there was no scanning of your computer and no malicious code, just a simple JavaScript technique to determine if the extension was there.”

Reguly decided to test the resource probing and results obtained on a sample 10% of the 6,000+ extensions. “One extension refused to have its tab closed and reopened itself every time I closed it. Others changed my home screen, the about:blank page, and added bookmarks.” Another Rickrolled him, playing the ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ video every time he opened his browser. “To say that a lot of these are the worst of the worst extensions out there is not an understatement.”

What’s more, statistically from his sample testing, he believes only around 2,000 could be detected by LinkedIn, when even 6,000 is just a small sub-set of the total number of extensions that exist. If LinkedIn was intent on fingerprinting or profiling its users, there are better methods than this.

“I don’t see anything that indicates malicious intent here,” he told SecurityWeek “It is discovering some information, yes, but I don’t think it crosses the threshold to malicious – I think that’s a very sensationalized view of what’s going on.”

Asked why LinkedIn is doing this, he replies, “I don’t know. But for me, a common trend across these extensions is that they have data scraping functionality and are not well known. And they were problematic at times. Many of them gave me that used-car-salesman vibe that you see in the movies,” he continued.

“I can’t help but wonder if LinkedIn wanted to know if these extensions were there to try and defend against them. I certainly wouldn’t want one of my LinkedIn contacts to be running these extensions and visit my page with these scrapers installed. I feel that a user with these extensions installed visiting my LinkedIn page is more of an affront to my privacy than LinkedIn checking to see if I have these extensions.”

Of course, depending on interpretation, this still may not be appropriate or legal in the EU. However, it does seem that BrowserGate’s claims are a bit on the exaggerated side.

OP’s link with Google’s AMP nonsense removed: https://www.securityweek.com/browsergate-claims-of-linkedin-spying-clash-with-security-research-findings/

Yes, consumer routers are much lower powered because they’re built to be a router so they can simplify it to the basics needed just for routing. The trade-off is that most off-the-shelf consumer routers don’t support V-LANs. The person you were responding to notes they have a Mikrotic device, which is one of the most popular series of devices for people to put OpenWRT on. (EDIT: Memory was foggy it’s actually devices with MediaTech CPUs is what I am thinking of) The major downside here when it comes to exposing devices to the internet is you lose the strong firewall. Part of why the OPNsense firewall is stronger than what a consumer firewall even with OpenWRT on it is because it isn’t just built to be a router, and being much beefier allows it to handle much more complex firewall rules and things like packet inspection or intrusion detection. OpenWRTdevice has a basic firewall which will do the job, for sure, but I am definitely on the side of using something a little bit more powerful for more firewall features and options. You’d probably still be relatively safe with OpenWRT/, but the low power of the devices may make them less robust depending on how many users you plan on having, in which OPNsense’s beefy nature makes it more robust for more data passing through.

EDIT: Those Mikrotik devices OP is referring to are different than what I was thinking of, but they also have a good price point and are dedicated routing appliances thus lower power draw (many of them support Power over Ethernet). Their OS isn’t as open as any of the others though, however it offers a full featured enterprise grade router OS. A good choice for someone who isn’t as savvy off the bat, although you lose the powerful firewall.

https://mikrotik.com/products/group/ethernet-routers

They also have a demo of their RouterOS which seems like it’s very full-featured: https://demo.mt.lv/

Yeah, get your new OPNsense device fully set up through the guide, and it will act as a router and firewall. Once it’s ready to go, plug it in with ethernet to the Verizon router (with the ethernet connected to your OPNsense going into the WAN port) and make sure it’s picking up internet from the Verizon router. Once you’re sure it is, then go into your Verizon router’s settings and turn on bridge mode. The internet should auto-reconfigure for your new router to grab the IP from the modem by passing through the Verizon router.

If for whatever reason this doesn’t work, you can regain access to the Verizon router by doing a factory reset (as you won’t be able to view it’s settings as it no longer has an IP on the network in bridge mode). So don’t be afraid of it, worst that can happen is a factory reset. Just back up your settings beforehand (either manually writing them down or exporting a config file) so you can restore them easily.

I am pretty sure both switches will need to be managed because you will need a trunk between the firewall and the first switch and a trunk between the first switch and the second switch. A trunk needs to be defined on both ends, and with an unmanaged switch in between the firewall and managed switch I am fairly sure that’s not possible.

There are two types of ways VLANs communicate, and that’s through trunk ports and access ports. Trunking ports basically bundle all the VLANs together and send them to the next destination, such as another switch. Access ports are for giving access to end devices for a specific VLAN.

So I am fairly sure you’ll need a trunk between Firewall and Living Room Switch and a trunk between Living Room and Office Switch. It’s been a minute since I did work with VLANs myself though, so others feel free to correct me.

Related, I am also fairly sure the router itself will need VLAN support so while it’s understandable to not want to replace it, it may be a requirement and most consumer routers don’t come with VLAN support. Options are finding a router that supports alternative firmware like OpenWRT or DD-WRT which adds VLAN support or go whole hog and set up OPNsense or PFSense and essentially build your own router/firewall.

EDIT: I just looked at the Home Network Guy’s guide you linked to. His guide is helping you build a combination router and firewall with OPNsense. If you really need to keep the Verizon router, check if the Verizon router has an option called “Bridge mode” where you can bridge the connection to your own router/firewall and basically turn the Verizon router into a dummy passthrough device that the network just sort of passes through and otherwise ignores.

Where do all the lovely self-hosters here turn when they want to chat networking or server hardware?

I know this might seem like a strange answer, but… IRC channels on private torrent trackers. Many of the people on these sites actively have large and complex setups running. There often is a lot of talk about hardware for servers and networking in those IRC channels. Or at least there is on the trackers I am on.

I know that’s not necessarily a helpful answer to anyone not already in the private torrent tracker community, since its often quite a task to get involved if you aren’t already. However, it’s one that I have had great success with, personally. To anyone who already is on a private torrent tracker, if you haven’t checked out the IRC, give it a shot and see.

Oh and don’t forget you can self-host The Lounge for a self-hosted web-based IRC client.

You’re welcome and no problem, I went looking for it because I wanted those tips too ha.

https://programming.dev/post/47150919

The original thread with advice given to OP, in case anyone else is also looking for similar suggestions.

The slaves for sure, but it also creates a situation where the powerful may not be giving enough food to their security forces, and their security forces turn on them, joining the slaves in outright rebellion.

Not that this will bring more food in, but it could result in some of those “powerful” people suddenly not being so powerful.

Security through obscurity isn’t security.

There goes my excuse for not giving up and just paying for Unraid.