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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • I’ve never encountered what you’re describing. There’s always other ways to authenticate than through a mobile app, at least from my experience, and I think I’ve used about a dozen different banks/credit unions over the past 15 or so years. Last credit union I cut ties with had ZERO MFA for their web portal, except on account creation. Like, no SMS, no email, nothing - just user+pass, and making sure you have the right background picture of the login screen you picked on account generation (like, a duck or a football or whatever). Completely ridiculous in 2025 (when I cancelled my account).

    Regarding the OP, I think any new competition in this space right now is good, even if it ends up just being a triopoly vs a duopoly (fat chance with this thing but we can hope).

    Ideally though we need an open protocol/standard that can be implemented through any manner of device software.



  • Ok?

    In the post I replied to you said you can’t find used cars for less than 10k.

    Now you’re saying people are too time/money poor to buy a $1k car, which is true for some, but that’s way different than your last point.

    At some point you’re too poor to buy a car, and that sucks. Not sure how cheap people expect a 2000lb hunk of engineered metal, glass, and a combustion engine that can propel you 300 miles should be, but I think $1k is cheap for that and it sucks if you can’t buy it. Either way.

    But sitting here and complaining that the cheapest car you can find is $10k in your area is dumb, because what that tells me is all you’re doing is going to look at nice stuff at carvana or CarMax.




  • Non native English speakers really struggle with at, on, and in. Don’t feel bad for being confused it’s super, super common, and most non native speakers will struggle with this no matter how fluent they become.

    For general example, if somebody is sitting inside an airplane, you can say they’re on the plane, or they’re in the plane. You could also say they’re at the plane, but that’s really only used in certain contexts.

    In the context you’re asking about, “at the port” at and in are synonymous, essentially. The article isn’t specific enough so it’s reasonable to assume that somewhere within the port’s boundary area, fence line perhaps, there was a temporary facility that was bombed.

    Since they used the term “at” though, it COULD mean that it was directly outside the port boundaries. Like right outside the fence, perhaps.

    Sorry. Not sure if any of this helps.


  • Until ads are responsible and don’t carry risks of injecting malware and trackers, I will block them without prejudice.

    Even back in the day they would try to hijack your browser, redirect you to some random page, destroy ability of your back button to take you out, and throw up a ton of popups.

    I don’t think blocking them is an asshole move until ads are served responsibly, without threatening my security or privacy. When, and if, that day ever arrives I will stop blocking them because I understand that most sites subsist solely off ad revenue, at least in this current Internet model we live with.


  • You don’t NEED tap to pay. I literally never use it, ever, unless I have a card with a bad chip (happened once).

    Forgetting your wallet like a dummy doesn’t mean you NEED tap to pay, it means you need to remember to bring your wallet.

    Also, there is nothing you NEED the Costco app for, an org like that can’t lock things behind an app to function because their customer base is too broad, they will inevitably have old people with T9 Nokia bricks still. It might have been the most convenient way to achieve it, but it’s not a requirement - even if that particular sales associate didn’t know how and would have to phone a friend.

    All that to say I’m not trying to convince you to use gOS; I fully recognize that security is on one end of the spectrum from convenience, and we all choose where we want to be on that spectrum. But I felt the need to counter your claims… Nobody NEEDS tap to pay smh. If you care about privacy at all you wouldn’t be linking cards to apple or Google, adding yet another layer of giant data collection to some of your most intimate data.


  • Yeah when you’re playing an instrument in a symphony you have a very, very narrow ability to hear and understand everything that’s going on. Your own instrument is (usually) in your face, you might be in a section with a bunch of the same or similar instruments that is drowning stuff out, everyone is facing away from you and the acoustic echo is weird, etc.

    Conductor stands right in the middle of it all and can actually hear everything. A conductor can guide entire sections, or even easily pick out a specific player and get them to be louder, quieter, slow down, etc.

    Each player in the symphony is paying attention to that person and they all take cues from them. It’s pretty wild.





  • Wireless cameras offer an easier vector for people to get into your camera feeds. Biggest risk to this is a poorly secured network in the first place, but the risk is still there.

    Also, wireless is going to be inherently a worse quality video stream, and constant video traffic being sent over your Wi-Fi bogs down your entire network.

    All that being said Wi-Fi cameras are just fine and as long as you have strong Wi-Fi security you’re really not at a real risk unless someone very savvy is specifically targeting you, in which case you’ve got bigger problems.

    I have probably a dozen cheap wireless cameras in my house (to keep an eye on pets) and I have them spaced over two access points and honestly I don’t notice a difference on my Wi-Fi at all, but I’m sure it’s worse than if I didn’t have them. All my exterior cameras are wired, but that’s more because I want better quality streams and I’m running a wire anyways so might as well be PoE. Only exterior wireless camera I have is my doorbell but that’s because I didn’t want to run a new wire to it.

    Overall wired cameras are much better quality, but they’re not as convenient. Make the decision for yourself based off of your priorities. Real tough to get a wireless camera with the fidelity needed to capture license plates clearly, but if you don’t need that then why worry about whether your gear can achieve it or not?


  • There’s no reason to try and salvage a ring camera. Their business model is subscriptions and data collection; I’m not aware of any projects to flash them with custom firmware, and my guess is they’re locked down hard to prevent it because that’s their entire revenue model, you’re free to keep looking but I’d bet it’s a dead end or at the very least much more than an afternoon project.

    Get a Wi-Fi reolink and connect it to an ONVIF capable NVR. You can use a paid solution like blue iris on a Windows machine or there’s plenty of free options for any OS of your choice. You can probably directly access the feed by navigating to the camera IP but I’m not sure, I don’t use mine that way. Without some kind of NVR software you won’t get a lot of the features people like such as notifications and two way talk, object/person recognition, etc.



  • Don’t take it personally. You think your neighbor wants to record you and your dog specifically? I mean, it’s possible, but it’s likely they just want to be able to see who comes to their door, or have a general idea of what’s going on around their house. I have my locally hosted reolink doorbell set to trigger on zones if things enter my driveway or approach my door, because that’s what I care about. I get a bunch of crap with kids playing in the street running onto my property, people’s dogs straying off the sidewalk, and the occasional vehicle turning around. But I also figured out what kids were doing dong dashing, and have record of what deliveries were suplexed WWE style onto my doormat so I can more easily handle stuff damaged in shipping.

    If you hear some crazy shit outside you probably get up and look out the window, don’t you? Well, a camera means you can go back and see what happened all the time. It’s a no brainer why people want them now that they’re cheap and accessible.

    Most people don’t have any idea how bad cloud cameras are for overall society, and they’ll probably roll their eyes and think you’re crazy if you try to dive into that conversation with them out the gate.

    They’re legally within their rights to do what they’re doing, so you can dislike it all you want but there’s not much you can do about it without some pretty diplomatic conversations. And a passive aggressive note left about them watching you and your dog isn’t going to help your case, at ALL. First you’ll have to become friends with them so they trust you, then find a way to educate them and change their minds.


  • Honestly? It can’t, really. There’s some very accessible things people can do on the user side such as good password management practices, but even something as “simple” as firewall rules quickly devolves into technical stuff that most people have no idea how to deal with.

    The reality is that the Internet, computers, applications are all incredibly complicated. How they interconnect is incredibly complicated, and the vast majority of people don’t even understand what an IP address is, what the function of DNS is, what a MAC address is and how it’s different than an IP address, etc. So, you can maybe point them to a guide that they can follow to set up wireguard to access their music folder when they’re out, maybe, but since every network is different, how do you make sure they’re setting it up securely without copying and pasting routes that make them less secure? You have to understand what you’re doing to be able to see if in a specific use case you’re not causing an issue.

    I dunno. This is a really tough nut to crack. There’s no “guide to learning cyber security.” If you know nothing and want to learn more, you just have to learn about networking, Linux, firewalls, active directory, everything.

    If you’re looking for something incremental all you’ll find is incremental learning of specific things. Like, look up the LPI Linux Essentials study guide if you want to just learn some Linux stuff. Then spin up a bunch of VMs of different distros to play with, and look at some other Linux stuff. And more Linux stuff, until you feel like you understand Linux pretty well. But, that doesn’t make you good at cyber security… Because there’s so much more than just knowing Linux. So no, there’s no incremental guide for what you’re looking for - you just have to learn many things, and you can come from whatever direction you want to start from.

    If you want to learn safely then just don’t expose anything to the Internet. Keep it all local, and yeah you might introduce some insecure setups or applications, but you’re not really under any more threat of network intrusion than if you never started. That sucks though because we want to access our shit from outside the house, right? But that’s the choice, if you want to stay more secure until you’re more educated. And yeah, honestly it’s kind of undergraduate qualification level to start understanding things well enough. Sorry, that’s just the reality I think.


  • Best option is to recommend people self host their camera feeds. People aren’t going to give cameras up, myself included, but keeping it all out of the ring/nest/netvue or any other cloud system is the way to go.

    People can record in public, and that includes the area around their houses. Having 100s of thousands or millions of cameras sharing feeds with law enforcement for warrantless surveillance or corporate data hounds for more people tracking is the issue.