• 0 Posts
  • 11 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 30th, 2023

help-circle
  • There is anonymity and pseudonymity.

    Do you need your opsec to be resistant to state-level actors (oppressive regime, censorship, illegal activities)? Well then you need to make sure you don’t introduce anything that will deanonomize you.

    Are you trying to be resistant to mass data collection efforts used for profit? Being on the pseudonymity spectrum is a good step.

    Dealing with the latter is like dealing with a bully. Make it not worth their time. They just want to put you in bucket X so they can estimate the most likely way to influence you for reason Y. Pseudonymity is about having multiple aliases that get put into different buckets so their privacy invasive efforts are less effective.





  • OS: NixOS (high learning curve but its been worth it). Nix (the config language) is a functional programming language, so it can be difficult to grok. Documentation is shit as its evolved while maintaining backwards compatibility. If you use the new stuff (Nix Flakes) you have to figure what’s old and likely not applicable (channels or w/e).

    BYOD: Just using LVM. All volumes are mirrored across several drives of different sizes. Some HDD volumes have an SSD cache layer on top (e.g., monero node). Some are just on an SSD (e.g., main system). No drive failures yet so can’t speak to how complex restoring is. All managed through NixOS with https://github.com/nix-community/disko.

    I run stuff on a mix of OCI containers (podman or docker, default is podman which is what I use) and native NixOS containers which use systemd-nspawn.

    The OS itself I don’t back up outside of mirroring. I run an immutable OS (every reboot is like a fresh install). I can redeploy from git so no need to backup. I have some persistent BTRFS volumes mounted where logs, caches, and state go. Don’t backup, but I swap the volume every boot and keep the last 30 days of volumes or a min of at least 10 for debugging.

    I just use rclone for backups with some bash scripts. Devices back up to home lab which backs up to cloud (encrypted with my keys) all using rclone (RoundSync for phone).

    Runs Arrs, Jellyfin, Monero node, Tor entry node, wireguard VPN (to get into network from remote), I2C, Mullvad VPN (default), Proton VPN (torrents with port forwarding use this), DNS (forced over VPN using DoT), PiHole in front of that, three of my WiFi vlans route through either Mulvad, I2C, or Tor. I’ll use TailsOS for anything sensitive. WiFi is just to get to I2C or Onion sites where I’m not worried about my device possibly leaking identity.

    Its pretty low level. Everything is configured in NixOS. No GUIs. If its not configured in nix its wiped next reboot since the OS is immutable. All tracked in git including secrets using SOPS. Every device has its own master key setup on first install. I have a personal master key should I need to reinstall which is tracked outside of git in a password manager.

    Took a solid month to get the initial setup done while learning NixOS. I had a very specific setup of LVM > LUKS encryption /w Secure Boot and Hardware Key > BTRFS. Overkill on security but I geek out on that stuff. Been stable but still tinkering with it a year later.


  • I’ve been screaming its just wage theft. My city provides tax breaks for occupancy (employees prop up the local economy buying lunch). They are making me pay for gas, time, and car maintenance (and lunch but fuck them, I’ll just not eat) for this tax break which goes to C-level bonuses/shareholders. Its just another way of skimming off the top of employee wages.

    We worked fully remote for nearly 2 years and the hybrid policy just keeps getting worse and worse. Coupled with quarterly riffs, I also suspect this is to avoid severance pay/unemployment while accelerating the down sizing. Yet our CEO bonus keeps going up and up despite our stock plummeting since the end of COVID lock downs.




  • One of the pirate bay founders created https://njal.la/#home but with the caveat:

    For instance, when you register a domain name in our system, we can register with our own data. We will be the actual registrant of the domain – it’s not an ownership by proxy as found with all other providers. However, you will still have the full control over the domain name. You can either use our information (and our nameservers) or you can go with your custom data. And you can move at any time. Simple, flexible.

    I believe it is required (ICANN?) to have a real entity attached to every domain, even with a proxy for the public whois. They simply offer to be that identity to avoid giving any identifying information, but they will have all claim on it if it came to a legal dispute.