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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • I second that. This practice comes from a time where domain names were expensive, in many ways: SNI didn’t exist/wasn’t wide-spread, so each domain name on HTTPS needed a dedicated IP, Certificates weren’t democratized yet via letsencrypt/acme and most hosts were big enough to run multiple services, because virtualization wasn’t as widely available yet. So putting apps on sub-paths made sense.

    Now all of those things are basically dealt with and putting each app on its own sub-domain just makes way more sense.


  • First: love that that’s a thing, but I find the blog post hilarious:

    We believe this choice must include the one to migrate your data to another cloud provider or on-premises. That’s why, starting today, we’re waiving data transfer out to the internet (DTO) charges when you want to move outside of AWS.

    and later

    We believe in customer choice, including the choice to move your data out of AWS. The waiver on data transfer out to the internet charges also follows the direction set by the European Data Act and is available to all AWS customers around the world and from any AWS Region.

    But sure: it’s out of their love for customer choice that they offer this now. The fact that it also fulfills the requirements by the EDA is purely coincidental, they would have done it for sure.

    Remember folks: regulation works. Sometimes corporations need the state(s) to force their hand to do the right thing.



  • without trusting anyone.

    Well, except of course the entity that gave you the hardware. And the entity that preinstalled and/or gave you the OS image. And that that entity wasn’t fooled into including malicious code in some roundabout way.

    like it or not, there’s currently no real way to use any significant amount of computing power without trusting someone. And usually several hundreds/thousands of someones.

    The best you can hope for is to focus the trust into a small number of entities that have it in their own self interest to prove worthy of that trust.


  • Like many other security mechanisms VLANs aren’t really about enabling anything that can’t be done without them.

    Instead it’s almost exclusively about FORBIDDING some kinds of interactions that are otherwise allowed by default.

    So if your question is “do I need VLAN to enable any features”, then the answer is no, you don’t (almost certainly, I’m sure there are some weird corner cases and exceptions).

    What VLANs can help you do is stop your PoE camera from talking to your KNX and your Chromecast from talking to your Switch. But why would you want that? They don’t normally talk to each other anyway. Right. That “normally” is exactly the case: one major benefit of having VLANs is not just stopping “normal” phone-homes but to contain any security incidents to as small a scope as possible. Imagine if someone figured out a way to hack your switch (maybe even remotely while you’re out!). That would be bad. What would be worse is if that attacker then suddenly has access to your pihole (which is password protected and the password never flies around your home network unencrypted, right?!) or your PC or your phone …

    So having separate VLANs where each one contains only devices that need to talk to each other can severely restrict the actual impact of a security issue with any of your devices.


  • Since most of those are run commercially and don’t make their data easily accessible, that’ll be a much different process, I assume. You’ll basically have to scrape them like any other web site, except you’ll specifically be targeting the edit/source view pages. Then find a wiki implementation that has as close a syntax as possible to the one they use (that could be tricky …) and upload there. So unless you happen to find some code from someone who wanted to do the exact same thing, I’m afraid this would involve quite some programming/scripting.





  • Increase the attack surface compared to what? If you don’t allow/enable any access to services inside your network from outside, then by definition you have fewer attack surfaces than if you add a VPN to that empty list.

    So trivially the answer is “yes, it adds an attack surface”.

    But what are the alternatives? If you directly expose each individual service on a dedicated port, for example, then you’d add many more (and usually less well hardened) attack surfaces instead.

    So if the comparison is “expose 5 web-based services directly” vs. “expose one VPN like wireguard”, then the second option is almost always the clear winner when it comes to security (and frequently also when it comes to ease of setup as well as comfort).










  • Now you make me feel old. In “the olden days” before streaming of media over the internet was as commonplace as it was now, that was the standard way that tech-savy people consumed media: Either on their PC or with some set-top box with built-in storage. I fondly remember my PopcornHour, which was basically a line of desktop-boxes that ranged from “basically a hard disk, video decoder and HDMI out” all the way to “can automatically rip your BlueRays”.