Reminds me a bit of how it was in Germany at the beginning of the Iraq war (2). Plenty of Americans saying we should be bombed back to the stone age for not going to Iraq, while our soldiers were dying in Afghanistan. I remember in all the bulletin boards people would kind of cheer for American losses, hoping secretly or sometimes openly that Iraq would win, and the schoolyard bully would get another bloody nose.
That’s the moment large parts of my generation became anti-american.
Americans like to think of themselves as heroes, fighting for what’s right, upholding the constitution etc. But if you look at history Americans again and again chose to simply do nothing. You reached late Roman decadence.
Here a candidate voted with the far right and a week later, one million people were on the streets. Population adjusted that would be 5 million Americans. That was a small protest for us. And that’s nothing compared to the French. I looked at the biggest American demonstrations and this one demo, a regular Sunday for us, would have been the third biggest in the US, population adjusted, or the seventh biggest, not adjusted.
All these talks of civil war… You cannot even move your ass to go to a demo. You think regular Americans are actually going to look at a Bradley, who can kill all the inhabitants of a house with one shot, and go like “yep, time to strap on the suicide vest!”
Even those militia types… Look at them. How far do you think they can run on average? How far with a backpack? They are just LARPing. 80% will stay home, 4% will go back home after the beer runs out, 15% will rat the others out to the Gestapo.
I would get a backup tool that offers encryption, which is most of them. Popular choices are: tarsnap, restic and Borg.
Nextcloud has collabora integrated.
I would put this stuff behind VPN.
Get a refurbished Lenovo thinkpad t470 or so from ebay, make sure it has full HD and comes from a commercial shop. All the Thinkpads work great with Ubuntu. They are good quality business notebooks, easy to repair with good parts availability. You can probably get one around 150 or so.
I repaired laptops for a living for a while and Thinkpads were always my favorite.
Seems weird to me, the router would need to do deep packet inspection of DNS and selectively block specific ones. It feels more like you’ve set up your DNS to do forwarding instead of resolution. Can you post a network diagram and the DNS config?
Do tcpdump host $server instead. Otherwise you will only see the request (the response goes to a different port).
Just to be sure you do dig A @server $domain (with the “A”) and can confirm the following
SERVER is your server
;; ANSWER SECTION is empty (or doesn’t exist)
;; AUTHORITY SECTION mentions your local DNS server
Also check
dig NS @server $domain
Is your server in the answer section?
Mine doesn’t seem to exist anymore sorry.
Here is how I would diagnose (I’m assuming you have Linux / WSL on a client)
dig $domain check which server answereddig a $domain should give a recorddig a $domain @server to make sure you’re querying the right serverIf none work, probably network issue (DNS boind to wrong IP, firewall, etc)
If 3 and 5 work but 4 doesn’t, your DNS isn’t authorative.
If only 5 works DNS settings on the client is wrong.
Luckily no government in Europe would ever try to force users to install spyware in their messengers europe wide.
If you assume everything is compromised, there is no safety. You have to trust something at some point.
Usually, speaking from a professional IT perspective, people trust encryption. Once you do that, it does not matter how safe or unsafe the place where you store your data is.
AES, the encryption standard used by pretty much everything, is safe. It has not been weakened in any meaningful way since its inception and is also quantum - safe.
You could use for example openssl or Veracrypt or even just 7zip to encrypt it. If you don’t trust these tools, encrypt it twice with two different ones, just put a txt file next to it with the exact steps to decrypt, because you will forget in which order you have done things.
Personally I have a homeserver that is encrypted at rest and then it uses restic to store encrypted backups in the cloud.
Ultrasonic cleaner! Really awesome for glasses, jewelry, all kinds of small stuff. I fill it with isopropanol solution and clean my phone case in it.
Its very unlikely for these reasons:
Anyway, that’s what research is for.
We should put research into stratospheric aerosol injection. We need an insurance to limit climate change if emissions don’t go down fast enough.
We know it works, and it’s at least not catastrophically unsafe as we have already done it with container ships, and seen it happen at bigger scale with volcanic eruptions.
This is a good start:
https://european-alternatives.eu/
Mostly moving to hetzner. It’s a bit rough around the edges but works.
One big thing missing is there is no good and affordable WAF. Myra is good but costs at least 10k/month.
I am almost done migrating away from all US businesses as a result of this. I am even drinking freeway cola 😅
I work in IT as a freelance DevOps/Cloud engineer and am advising all my clients to migrate away from AWS etc.
Even sold most of S&P 500 and reinvested into an all-world ex-US ETF.
That’s a lot of work, I appreciate it.