Comment by gerdesj | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gerdesj | Hacker News Reader

Passionate write up, very well put and beautifully presented.

However, I think that worrying about your IP address and encouraging the same as a major "Security Thing" is missing way more important aspects of IT security. For many people who follow your line of thinking via your blog and say the ads for VPNs and the like, they might feel they have achieved "security" by obfuscating or hiding one small aspect of their on-line life.

Online profiling is generally way more detailed than an IP and will include browser finger printing (agent string) and fonts loading, and much much more with some pretty impressive Javascript tricks.

I live at 1 Eldonthingie Road, BendInARiverTown, Summersetshire - I have obfuscated that lot quite a bit but not too much that a determined person could work it out and see where I live. Back in the day it would be published in the phone book for all to see.

There are way more important security enhancements that you can deploy before you worry about VPNs and that. I only use a VPN when off site and need to get back to the office or home.

Today, I was working on a customer site and they have a TLS man in the middle box which buggered up my VPN (OpenVPN on 443/tcp) That costed them an additional four hours of my time at my rate!

You turn on VPN meanwhile your OS, Adobe CC, Office, etc is busy phoning home with all kinds of fingerprintable if not personally identifiable data. Even Firefox phones home with tons of data at launch and exit with telemetry off.

Getting real anonymity online is way more complicated than I think most people realize. Then again maybe that’s fine, it depends on your threat model.

I just have been using alternative firewall softwares such as simplewall (Windows) and Little Snitch (Mac). You can configure them such that you are alerted every time any process makes any form of network request, and either temporarily or permanently blacklist/whitelist as well as even have fine-grained control over specific hosts/domains/etc.

Really a must have, for me.

Do those firewalls block all network activity? Would a DNS lookup trigger an alert?

I had an application that was phoning home and after some digging I found that it was doing so through DNS. It would lookup something like $KEY.some.domain.com and the response would decode to the value.

As far as I can tell it’s any and every network lookup or request. Frankly, ever since I started using them (several years ago) I’ve only been feeling more and more that it may be the only way forward.

My data isn’t up for grabs for profiteering/aggregating/snooping on, sorry.

EDIT: Your comment made me curious so I will do more due diligence and return with an update.

EDIT2: So after not that much investigation--mostly just rereading what's shown on their project page (https://github.com/henrypp/simplewall) -- it confirms my belief that this adequately shields me from any and all networks without my knowledge or consent. In my opinion, it's kind of dystopian that The Industry basically operates on the assumption that most people will in fact just not care, but maybe more would care if it was presented as more of a choice than a concession.

Like, I don't mind sharing for the purpose of analytics. I read through privacy policies (is this being an adult?) kind of frequently these days, and as much as I hate to say it, Apple is still probably what I consider the poster child for big tech data privacy, they are doing the absolute bare minimum by clearly and plainly disclosing what data is used for what and how, and it allows my mind some rest.

EDIT3: Proof shown here https://github.com/henrypp/simplewall/issues/980

Very cool. Thanks for digging in to this.

Little Snitch catches a lot but gives a blank check to large parts of macOS as not to cause weird behavior of the OS. Some of macOS's phone home calls don't use DNS and instead directly use random IP ranges belonging to Apple so that the only way to block them is to blackhole their ranges at the router. Unless you do that per interface, that means now iOS iMessage won't work and bunch of other things break when your phone is on wifi. Really fixing this problem is a complete PITA.

I can't really speak to this because I no longer own or can afford a Mac, I just know it did the trick for me in the past.

The reality of our tangled mess that is data privacy issues is really almost grotesque at this point.

You can disable these "blank check" rules; I do.

You can't use iMessage if you want privacy from Apple; trying to block phone-home to Apple while still using their hardware-serial-number-linked-services is silly. You have to give up iMessage, FaceTime, Handoff, iCloud, App Store, Apple Music, all of it if you want privacy from Apple (obviously).

Lulu is a great alternative also.

https://objective-see.org/products/lulu.html

> Even Firefox phones home with tons of data at launch and exit with telemetry off.

Firefox drove me nuts with this. This article helped:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-stop-firefox-making...

That won't stop the OS or a bunch of other apps from making a bunch of connections, but at least you can beat firefox into submission

Cracked Office works great if you deny 100% of all network connectivity via Little Snitch. Same for cracked Adobe CC. If you don't want to fly the black flag, buy a dongle for Davinci Resolve Studio and download LibreOffice; both also work fine with 100% of all network connectivity denied.

You can disable all of the built-in LS rules for macOS services and never make/use an Apple ID (so, no App Store, no iCloud, no FaceTime, no iMessage, no Apple Music, etc) and your mac will still work to launch local apps just like it did in 1999. This is how I use mine.

Note well that you must install LS on a fresh boot offline, before you connect the mac to the network, otherwise APNS will phone home from your IP with client certs that are linked to your hardware serial number.

I give friends cash to order the new/fast BTO macs to their addresses on their payment cards, then go pick them up from them; you can't usually get the max-spec apple stuff for cash at the store.

You can actually at some stores get almost maxed out models, they have specific 'ultimate' configurations. Use the inventorywatch app to figure out whatever a store has in stock.

Like the 16" M1 Max with 64GB & 4TB SSD is the 'ultimate' retail config for that model for example.

https://worthbak.github.io/inventory-checker-app/

You are right.

But the OP doesn't state anything to the contrary.

You are what-abouting a completely sound, thoughtful, and helpful article about one small piece of the privacy puzzle.

I disagree. Your IP can group you with at most a few million other people. The bits of entropy needed to identify you is very small if you know the IP.

Any script kiddie can DOS a residential connection for however long they like. It's a common "attack" people do in games that leak IP's.

The culture of internet celebrities is growing significantly with twitch/YouTube streaming. People are dangerous, and will harass and stalk.

Swatting is also still very real, it's a common occurrence for major content creators.

Yes you should do more, a good VPN is essential if you interact with other people online.

> Back in the day it would be published in the phone book for all to see.

What do you mean with "back in the day"? Is this not common practice anymore? In my country all this data is public information, including your social security number and tax records. The only way to obfuscate it is to get a "protected identity" court order but even then I think it will only hide a small fraction of your PII.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com