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.

I had a few AC Pros in a 110+ year old house where other AP’s had issues with all the plaster & lathe walls. They worked great. I also have a couple of them installed at a non-profit org I volunteer with and everybody is very happy with how they work there as well.

After moving from that first house to a new one with a bigger footprint I upgraded to a pair of their U6 mesh AP’s, one at each end of the house. Never had any issues with them.

Wary why? I work remotely in IT and manage a ton of Linux systems with it. Because my company has a large number of remote employees they limit us to Windows or Macs only, and have pretty robust MDM, security, etc. installed on them. Since MacOS is built on top of a unix kernel it’s much more intuitive to manage other unix & linux systems with it.

Personally I haven’t used Windows really since before Windows 10 came out, and as the family tech support department I managed to switch my wife, parents, brother, and mother in-law all to Mac’s years ago as well.

I doubt it would help. My employer uses Akamai as a CDN & security provider for our websites. Their bot analysis tools regularly flag distributed bot activity that can come from a handful or a few thousand IPs. They do a range of browser fingerprinting, TLS fingerprinting, etc. to uniquely identify traffic across ranges of IP’s. I’m sure Google/Youtube has the ability to do this as well.

Any given client would need to regularly randomize the order of headers in requests, randomly include/exclude optional headers, and also randomize TLS negotiation to try to circumvent all the fingerprinting these big corporations perform.

Used GPS on boats as early as the late 1980’s, back when selective availability was still a thing. For those unfamiliar with it, GPS was initially military-only, and when they allowed civilian use they were concerned that US adversaries could use it for precision attacks. So SA was included in the civilian version, which introduced a random error of up to something like 1000 yards.

The truly ironic thing is that the US Coast Guard (a branch of the very military that created SA) saw the usefulness of GPS for marine navigation, but only if SA was removed. 1000 yards could easily mean the difference between a boat running aground (or worse) or not.

So the USCG built ground stations that would receive GPS signals, calculate the SA error, and broadcast a fixed signal. That was called Differential GPS, or DGPS. Boaters could buy special DGPS receivers for years, which were as accurate as GPS without the SA error.

Eventually the military was convinced to do away with SA entirely so DGPS was retired. It was only after that happened that GPS became globally useful for car, hiking, etc. navigation.

IANAL, but I believe these laws cover audio recording only. OP shouldn’t have an issue if they use something that records video only.

Think about it a second. I live in a two party consent state, but I see security & surveillance cameras everywhere. If two party consent was required for video then they wouldn’t be there.

Professional hitmen don’t actually exist.

Sammy “The Bull” Gravano would probably disagree with you. He’d likely consider himself a professional since he admitted to involvement in 19 murders. Granted they were all mob related, and not “for hire” by anybody with a pile of cash and a grudge…

DigiCert recently was forced to invalidate something like 50,000 of their DNS-challenge based certs because of a bug in their system, and they gave companies like mine only 24 hours to renew them before invalidating the old ones…

My employer had an EV cert for years on our primary domain. The C-suites, etc. thought it was important. Then one of our engineers who focuses on SEO demonstrated how the EV cert slowed down page loads enough that search engines like Google might take notice. Apparently EV certs trigger an additional lookup by the browser to confirm the extended validity.

Once the powers-that-be understood that the EV cert wasn’t offering any additional usefulness, and might be impacting our SEO performance (however small) they had us get rid of it and use a good old OV cert instead.