That reminds me … another annoying thing Google did was list my private jellyfin instance as a “deceptive site”, after it had uninvitedly crawled it.

A common issue it seems.

cgnat

Ew

What I used to do was: I put jellyfin behind an nginx reverse proxy, on a separate vhost (so on a unique domain). Then I added basic authentication (a htpasswd file) with an unguessable password on the whole domain. Then I added geoip firewall rules so that port 443 was only reachable from the country I was in. I live in small country, so this significantly limits exposure.

Downside of this approach: basic auth is annoying. The jellyfin client doesn’t like it … so I had to use a browser to stream.

Nowadays, I put all my services behind a wireguard VPN and I expose nothing else. Only issue I’ve had is when I was on vacation in a bnb and they used the same IP range as my home network :-|

This is how I found out Google harvests the URLs I visit through Chrome.

Got google bots trying to crawl deep links into a domain that I hadn’t published anywhere.

all you need is to get a static IP for your home network

Don’t even need a static IP. Dyndns is enough.

Seeing the Brussels Times, I thought it was going to be about this guy: https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcel_Vervloesem (sorry no english link).

PC gamer no longer means tech savvy. My zoomer stepson is a hardcore gamer but can’t figure out shit when something’s wrong with his computer, and does not understand basic concepts regarding hardware, operating systems, networking, … and he doesn’t seem to care about any of it either.

Never mind developers who, in 2025, still think their project is special enough for a $HOME dotfile/dotdir

Well, Firefox is pretty special 🤡

You’re thinking of Netscape Navigator Gold 3.0

Yes, we had social media back then, just not with Nazis, bots, and ads.

We did have plenty of usenet trolls and usenet wars.

I haven’t had to compile a kernel in 20 years.

You’ll be lucky if there are actual VMs.

Mods should ban any account that has external links meant to sell something

There is r/nofans

I think cars peaked ca. 2010. Anything added after that are annoyances or things being taken away.

If I could get a brand new facelift E90, that would probably be my next car.

Do not allow username/password login for ssh

This is disabled by default for the root user.

$ man sshd_config

...
       PermitRootLogin
               Specifies whether root  can  log  in  using  ssh(1).   The  argument  must  be  yes,  prohibit-password,
               forced-commands-only, or no.  The default is prohibit-password.
...

If it is your single purpose to create a blocklist of suspect IP addresses, I guess this could be a honeypot strategy.

If it’s to secure your own servers, you’re only playing whack-a-mole using this method. For every IP you block, ten more will pop up.

Instead of blacklisting, it’s better to whitelist the IP addresses or ranges that have a legitimate reason to connect to your server, or alternatively use someting like geoip firewall rules to limit the scope of your exposure.

Yeah I don’t do security via obscurity

Another one who misunderstands that phrase… Yes, obscurity shouldn’t be your only line of defense, but limiting discoverability of your systems should be an integral part of your security strategy.

A VPN like Wireguard can run over UDP on a random port which is nearly impossible to discover for an attacker. Unlike sshd, it won’t even show up in a portscan.

This was a specific design goal of Wireguard by the way (see “5.1 Silence is a virtue” here https://www.wireguard.com/papers/wireguard.pdf)

It also acts as a catch-all for all your services, so instead of worrying about the security of all the different sshds or other services you may have exposed, you just have to keep your vpn up to date.

Barracudas are SMR garbage nowadays, they’re coasting on their reputation of many years ago when they were actually decent hard drives for the price.

Those look like real life windows media player skins from the early 2000s.