My employer uses Googles business suite for everything, so we use Chrome to access email, calendar, word docs etc.

I still use Firefox & ublock origin for all my other web browsing.

I have a few decades programming experience, as a professional software engineer, an open source developer, and a DevOps engineer. There is no way in hell I would do a code review where 15k lines were added and a similar amount of lines removed without having a long discussion with the person who made those changes. I’d want to ask a lot of detailed questions about the changes, questions that an LLM isn’t likely to answer, and most definitely not questions I’d be inclined to try to type into an LLM to try to get an answer.

Over the years I’ve dealt with all manner of bugs, from overflows & underflows, to bad assumptions about logic flow, and much much more. The whole purpose of pointed questioning of the author is to be comfortable with decisions made in the code and to minimize the chances of all sorts of potential bugs.

I use an older version of Calibre that has a fairly robust plug-in to remove DRM. I use it to remove DRM from all my ebook purchases. That plug-in isn’t supported in newer versions of Calibre so I don’t upgrade.

Just wait until buggy malware worms its way into these things and the screen just shows kernel panics in an infinite loop.

Edit: or worse, somebody hacks it to play random hardcore porn videos.

Not to mention that it’s trivial to change your IP on most cloud providers. So if a VPN provider is using a cloud service for some of its gateways then it can quickly remember them if necessary.

Companies like Akamai already do this to an extent. My employer is an Akamai customer, and they’ve offered this service to us in the past when we saw a lot of malicious traffic originating from commercial VPN providers.

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How do you decide which open source projects are worthy of taxpayer money, and how much does a given project get?

I have a couple projects I’ve put up in GitHub as open source. Would they qualify? Or are you just talking about well known open source projects like Linux?

I’ve hardly scratched the surface with them, but I did create on/off sensors for my ancient washer & dryer with them. I’m sure I’ll come up with more ideas soon enough.

The issue with cloud providers like AWS is that they charge for virtually everything, and that makes it easy to rack up charges if you forget about something you spun up as a test last week and forgot to terminate it. For larger companies it can be a significant issue. So there are other companies out there that you can use to scan your entire AWS account, summarize what you’re using, and highlight things you may not need any more. They’ll also recommend cost savings measures like paying for a year of server time up front instead of paying as you go. If you know you’ll need a server for a year then paying annually is a lot less expensive.

On the plus side, you don’t need to deal with things like hardware failures. We have a large AWS environment where I work, and we’ll occasionally get an email informing us that an instance is “running on degraded hardware”. A simple reboot (power cycle) will move the instance to new hardware. And if you decide you need more RAM, more CPUs etc. then it’s also as simple as rebooting.

You mention it’s listening on port 53, but have you actually tried DNS queries to see how it responds? Will it resolve www.google.com or <reverse_ip>.in-address.arpa?

So glad to hear this. Had Insteon in my old house and moved when they shut down, so I’m mostly using eave now in the new house. I loved Insteon, and kept my hub & plug in modules when we moved. I’ll definitely consider using them again going forward.

I would ditch my Roku in an instant if it wasn’t for my pihole. The volume of ads, logs, etc. that it blocks on Roku is insane…

Reminds me of the estimated 3,000 pairs of shoes that Imelda Marcos reportedly had.

Yuck. Makes me glad ours are in our relatively dry basement. But with them down there we used to forget about loads we started until I set up the notifications.

Same. Ours also uses a timer to re-check in 15 minutes if nobody is home. That way one of us gets alerted when we’re actually home and can do something about it.

It also doesn’t alert us between 11pm and 8am so we don’t get woken up if we start a late night load.

CDN/security providers like Akamai & Cloudflare maintain lists of known Tor exit nodes and keep it regularly updated. That makes it trivial for customers to block that traffic.

Source: My employer is an Akamai customer and we use this list in some our WAF policies.

They’ll drag out any legal challenge in hopes you won’t want to pay for months of legal fees fighting it, on top of whatever legal fees are incurred that caused you to challenge it in the first place…

Next up, you’re going to have to register your drill press, lathe, etc.

Spoofing is a whole hell of a lot easier said than done. Content delivery networks like Akamai, Cloudflare, etc. all know exactly how different versions of different browsers present themselves, and will catch the tiniest mistake.

When a browser requests a web page it sends a series of headers, which identify both itself and the request it’s making. But virtually every browser sends a slightly different set of headers, and in different orders. So Akamai, for example can tell that you are using Chrome solely by what headers are in the request and the order they are in, even if you spoof your User-Agent string to look like Firefox.

So to successfully spoof a connection you need to decide how you want to present yourself (do I really want them to think I’m using Opera when I’m using Firefox, or do I just want to randomize things to keep them guessing). In the first case you need to be very careful to ensure your browser sends requests that exactly matches how Opera sends them. One header, or even one character out of place can be enough for these companies to recognize you’re spoofing your connection.