• 1 Post
  • 48 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: November 17th, 2022
  • pezhore@lemmy.mltoPrivacy@lemmy.ml•Help setting up Wi-Fi router
    1·
    2 months ago

    Ideally, sure use a password generator - but I wouldn’t worry about the security of a password generator like the one I linked.

    1. There’s no linking of the password you generated to whichever account you are creating.
    2. There’s no guarantee from the web operator’s perspective that you are actually using the generated passwords for anything at all.

    Again, use bitwarden’s generator - or equivalent - for passphrases, but in the absence of that correcthorsebatterystaple.com is good enough for a non-shared password.

  • pezhore@lemmy.mltoPrivacy@lemmy.ml•Help setting up Wi-Fi router
    3·
    2 months ago

    The other thing to keep in mind with PiHole - some things are just going to break with it’s default blocking, namely the Google suggested results.

    i know, I know - just don’t use google, but android phones/parents have a hard time not just braindead going to Google for results.

    It’s not the end of the world - I’ve trained myself to just keep scrolling to actual results.

    Another feature for PiHole is local DNS - if you want, you can set up custom dnsmasq entries for self hosted/internal services.

  • pezhore@lemmy.mltoPrivacy@lemmy.ml•Help setting up Wi-Fi router
    141·
    2 months ago

    The brand/type of wifi router is more of a technical requirements discussion than privacy discussion.

    For instance, I live in a two story townhome rental with the modem in the basement - so I picked up an Orbi mesh system to bounce wifi up to the second floor. I also have a fairly complex network with IoT VLAN, DMZ (for remote VPN) and other network segments - again the orbi doing different VLANs per SSID was a deciding factor.

    I’ve also only used the Orbi as an access point, relying on a dedicated firewall/router for that stuff.

    If you’re looking at a flat network (e.g. everything on one segment - the typical home user setup), pretty much any WiFi router from Best Buy or equivalent will do the job. Check your current devices to see if you can take advantage of WiFi 7 technology - otherwise save a few bucks and go WiFi 6.

    For security purposes, change the default SSID (the wireless name) to something unique - and change the password to something from correcthorsebatterystaple.net. You don’t need the default jumble of letters and numbers to be secure.

    Lastly, getting to your privacy concerns, look at the DHCP settings - that’s what hands out IP addresses to your devices so they can reach the internet. Change the DNS servers to something other than your ISP. This looks like a good starting point.

    The big things are to make sure you don’t expose your router management to the Internet (the default shouldn’t do that) and to make sure you periodically check for firmware updates.

    If you want to up your game, you could look at spinning up a self-hosted DNS server like Pi-Hole - but that can be a bit more advanced to get setup and troubleshoot if something goes wrong.

  • pezhore@lemmy.mltoPrivacy@lemmy.ml•Why Your VPN May Not Be As Secure As It Claims
    4·
    6 months ago

    I think that mitigation requires two things for it to work.

    1. You need to use a a Type 2 hypervisor (like Virtualbox, VMware Workstation/Fusion).
    2. That VM needs to be configured in NAT mode.

    The two primary ways you can configure a network for a local virtual machine are NAT and Bridged.

    Bridged mode places your VM effectively on the same network as your host OS, meaning that any DHCP server that exists on your network (rogue or otherwise) will give your virtual machine and IP.

    In NAT mode, the virtualization platform itself includes a DHCP server to dole out IPs, and handle the routing between your virtual machine and your host OS’s network.

    The thought process is that if you trust your laptop, the DHCP address handed out for NAT mode will not have the VPN breaking DHCP option and your VPN inside the VM will not have it’s route table screwed with.