The western hemisphere isn’t just the Americas. It includes half of europe…

There are quite a few people in the western hemisphere that don’t even bat an eye when they walk past a 1000 year old building on their way to work every day.

For me the oldest building is just a random house from the 13 century.

I have set it up in a way where all the packets have to go through their VPN and if they don’t, they get dropped before they leave my PC.

That is the function of a firewall and not of the VPN. As I understand portmaster it does both. But that is not normal VPN behavior.

VPNs are not magic. They are a piece of software that encrypt traffic and send it to a special server. They do that by creating a virtual Internet connection (think like pluging in an additional Ethernet cable or connection to an addition WiFi at the same time). Everything that is sent through the virtual connection is encrypted. Your system now has (at least) two valid Internet connections (one real and one virtual). For every packet it sends it needs to decide which connection it should send it from. This is decided by something called the routing table. When you start the VPN it will put two routes into the table.

• traffic going to the VPN server goes through the real connection (so the encrypted VPN traffic is routed correctly)
• everything else goes through the virtual connection (the VPN tunnel where it gets encrypted)

The attack described is a way how a network router can add a new route into your devices routing table to basically override the second route from the VPN. The route is still there, there just is another one that has a higher priority.

A VPN is not the ultimate authority over your network traffic. It is just another program sending and recieving taffic.

Can’t remember exactly what happened but it involved changing permissions on /bin /sbin and similar. You know for security …

In the end I didn’t have permissions to run chmod, su or sudo

Fortunately there is little that can’t be fixed by booting from a live image.

If you want any system to connect to you, you need to open a port. You don’t need to do that for outgoing connections (the OS and your router will automatically open ports for the return connection). So if everybody connects to one central system, nobody needs to (explicitly) open any ports (except for the central connection point)

Most VPNs use UDP. So set up a wireguard, tailscale or openvpn.

But you still need to “open up the firewall”. UDP still works on ports the same way as TCP. I do agree however, that exposing a VPN port is more secure than exposing a port for a game server, as you don’t know about the security of that server software.

A drive label is just a string that can be set by any privileged process. Seems like this installation of the new distro didn’t do that. Or you skipped a step in the install where you could have chosen the drive label.

If it is a bug in the installer or if you missed it, I can’t tell.

But you can just change it in gparted or something else.

The thing that confused me when first learning about docker was, that everybody compares it to a virtual machine. It’s not. Containers dont virtualize anything. They take a (single) process from the host OS and separate that into its own environment. All system calls, memory access, file writes etc are still handled by the same os (same kernel). However the process is separated both on the file system and process level. It can’t see other processes outside of the container and it also doesn’t see the real filesystem. It sees a filesystem provided by the container. This also means it sees different file and user permissions. When you run a alpine Linux docker container on an Ubuntu system, the container only containes the (few) files for alpine but no Linux kernel no desktop environment. A process inside that container only sees the alpine files and not the Ubuntu files. It also means all containers see a filesystem independent of each other and can use libraries and dependencies of different versions (they are only files after all).

For administration it makes running complex services easy. You define how to setup that service (what base Linux distro to use, what packages to install, what commands to run, and how to start the process). You can then be save to assume the setup of that service did not interfere with the setup of any other service. “Service 1 needs a certain system wide config changed? Service 2 needs that config in the default state? And both need a different version of the same library?” In containers you can have all at the same time because they each see a different version of the same config and library.

And all this is provided by the kernel itself. All docker does is provide an “easy” way to create and manage containers but could could do all of that using chroot, runc and a few other.

As a note, containers usually don’t come with systemd as they don’t need an init system. You would run the service directly inside the container and then use systemd outside the container to make sure the container is started/restarted, or just docker as it can already do that.

I found a great article demystifying containers recently

Chrome doesn’t care about closing html tags. If they are mising the document is invalid but chrome will render it anyway and just add the closing tag where it thinks it should be.

At the other end, Firefox goes beyond the standard and will block certain connections that should be allowed by the fetch standard (the setting to disable that is called enhanced tracking protection).

So chrome allows things things it shouldn’t while Firefox blocks some it shouldn’t

year the brand name was first introduced.

It says so in the legend. Zoom has been a word for a long time but it now also means “participate in a (video) teleconference”, which is a new meaning directly linked to the zoom software released in 2011. When a word became generic is usually very hard to pinpoint exactly (except for zoom that was 2020)

For heroin: I don’t think there was heroin before the introduction of the heroin brand. Bayer literally invented the substance. (Wikipedia says it was invented 23 years earlier in Britain from morphine, but the inventer didn’t do anything with it so it was reinvented later). It was also not a drug you take to get high, it was an over the counter cough suppressant; no needle or spoon or lighter involved. Wild times for sure…

That is a real problem. In a perfect world you would want all of your data to be available to everyone who can use it to improve your live. And only getting advertisement for things you actually want/need (not only think you want/need) is a real improvement of your live.

Sadly “improving lives of consumers” is not the goal of any of the big data collectors and as such any data collected is or will be missused to cause harm to the owner even if it is not directly obvious.