thegeekbin

I’m using restic and b2 to backup anything important I care about. All system junk I don’t bother to backup. All in all, I’m paying around $8/month to backup my important documents, photos etc. Restic lets me encrypt them as well, so bonus points definitely.

I prefer easydns and porkbun. Both are great, easydns has great NS’s as well, easy to manage. Overall I’m satisfied!

Clearly I need to step it up. I was (unsurprisingly) surprised at what I've observed they've managed to correlate. I run standard pi-hole, resist fingerprinting, and normally go through a VPN (mainly because I'm on public wifi half the time when travelling). I haven't logged into facebook in about four years, just did it for the first time today to see what's been correlated.

Aside the mountain of irrelevant notifications, here's what I've observed in this report that's concerning.

1. Albeit some data has been correlated properly (banking applications which is scary on it's own part it's sending data to facebook, imgur, Xbox, my telco provider, and a few misc blogs I've visited a handful of times per year), it's correlated a significant amount of data that may not belong to me (good thing, I suppose?)

2. Why the heck are banking applications sending data to Facebook as "CUSTOM", with no context? For example, RBC bank in Canada sends "CUSTOM" data (haven't been with them for over two years, but all interacts labelled CUSTOM) and Facebook will not give any more context on the exact data it received. Little scummy, Facebook.

Well, time to sweep this up and resist tracking more. Let's see how it works this time round.

While I'm not going to disagree Switzerland is an OK option, you have to understand first why ProtonMail choose Switzerland.

One point being "In the US and EU, gag orders can be issued to prevent an individual from knowing they are being investigated or under surveillance. While these type of orders also exist in Switzerland, the prosecutors have an obligation to notify the target of surveillance, and the target has an opportunity to appeal in court. There are no such things as National Security Letters, and all surveillance requests must go through the courts. Furthermore, while Switzerland is party to international assistance treaties, such requests for information must hold up under Swiss law, which has much stricter privacy provisions."

I read this as, it isn't to say a government can't monitor what's going over the pipe for sigint, but if they specifically target a user for surveillance it must be disclosed to them and they have a right to appeal.

Nonetheless, if you're an American connecting to Switzerland for ProtonMail, the US govt will have some sigint, even if it's just your origin -> protonmail destination.

I'd go as far as to argue, as long as all communications are fully encrypted with the best possible encryption available (and no backdoors) it's fairly safe in any country for most general content. If you're extra concerned about privacy and surveillance (like I am), you should host in a country which has strong privacy laws but read up on the privacy laws, most of the time a country has good privacy laws for individuals, companies within the country, not foreigners.

Just my two cents away.

I’ve done some basic filtering against some slowloris etc type attacks, I’ve got lots of open proxy and relays blocked from the web. I’ve also got rate limiting in place now, and I’m offloading assets to a proper CDN. In the end my server should only serve a few hundred KB at absolute max, the rest handled by a CDN. My thought is with that it probably would hold up to the attacks. Thoughts?

I changed my hardware around recently, I used to have 5u colo that I’ve now downsized for financial reasons, I migrated all into one box called Poof, on poof I’m running:

    - matrix home server
    - xmpp server
    - websites for wife and I (Cloudlinux, Plesk, Imunify360)
    - nextcloud
    - jellyfin + jackett + sonarr + radarr
    - rutorrent
    - CDN origin server (bunnycdn pulls files from this)
    - znc bouncer
    - freeipa server
    - Portainer with pihole, Prometheus, grafana and some microservices on them
    - Gitea server
    - spare web server I use as staging environment

All of this is behind a firewall, I’ve been fortunate enough I’ve got /27 assigned to me, so more than enough IP addresses available to me, I’m using all but about 5 or 6 of them, but plan to change that soon. I’m going to be assigning dedicated IPs to every site I host (3 total), put my XMPP server on its own vm instead of sharing it with Matrix and giving it its own IP.

I blog about this stuff if anyone’s interested: https://thegeekbin.com/

Location: Ottawa, ON, Canada

Remote: Preferred

Willing to relocate: Prefer to be remote, open to relocation for the right opportunity

Technologies: Backend development in various languages (PHP, C++, Python, Node), frontend development (HTML/CSS/Javascript),cyber security analysis/pentesting

Resume/CV: Please contact

Email: curtis [[ at ]] thegeekbin [[ dot ]] com

Current Timezone: EST

2) yes, if you're going to build this let me make a recommendation: Register it in China, and in the States - China's policy is first to register -- NOT first to create unlike the States and Canada (prime example: https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/bs6n3l/apple_remov...)