Yes you will make it easier for kiwifarms to create an ALPR network if you GPL it. Also social change activists, news stations, “news” stations, nosy neighbors, overseas companies interested in obtaining intelligence on US citizens, people who hate racing on public roads, neighborhood watch, people who want to make ALPR bans functionally impossible by making them indistinguishable from dashcams, people who want to make rich people sweat by tracking their movements.

If you don’t GPL it, you’ll demonstrate that a small team can create an ALPR system, so, they might think, why not give it a try?

Are you sure? TOTP secrets can be exported. I think passkey implementations explicitly prevent that. Unless I’m missing an option to export passkey creds, e.g. print them out.

That same disaster recovery feature (which I need) also helps avoid a future where every forum and avenue of dissent requires dis-repudiation via passkeys. It’s a weird nuance, ascribing a social effect to a simple ability to back up your keys without backing up your whole phone.

How does that protect against “only you could have logged in because this passkey is only on your phone”?

Passkeys make plausible deniability more difficult. “This user name isn’t necessarily associated with my real world identity” permits some important good things.

I would say it’s important not to conflate privacy with secrecy. If you have a domain with your name on it (e.g. my mspencer.net) but create email aliases for every situation, sites won’t be automatically correlating your addresses with each other. How do they know which addresses are yours and which aren’t? More importantly, if you self host, emails are encrypted in flight and live on your own hardware at rest, so nobody external to any conversation will be snooping on message contents.

I’m sure legally it has no effect, but I have postfix configured to refuse emails with “updated terms” and “updated our terms” in the body. If I still haven’t been notified that a site’s terms have been updated to allow some new horribleness, they can’t claim they made me aware, huh? I guess they’ll just have to send me paper mail if it’s so important to them.

(You could do that too, if you self host postfix / dovecot / roundcube / opendkim and use greylist and RBLs for anti-spam. It’s been effortless for me, after an admittedly grueling initial setup process taking several days to learn and fail with.)

This makes me sad, that we can’t engage in civil discussion about this. Why did you assume and not ask questions? Be curious, not judgmental.

To me it’s a question of laws. The laws of the U.S. at least somewhat constrain the people of my own country, and can prevent them from working against their own citizens. Like me.

Please be kind when replying.

As a US citizen, I support some things that help rich people in the US win when competing with rich people in China.

I feel like objecting to the “General advice about email is don’t” thing but I don’t know if I understand the objections well enough to refute them. I self host email for mspencer.net (meaning all requests including DNS are served from hardware in my living space) and I have literally zero spam and can’t remember the last time I had to intervene on my mail server.

On one hand: My emails are received without issue by major providers (outlook, gmail, etc) and I get nearly zero spam. (Two spam senders were using legitimate email services, I reported them, and got human-seeming replies from administrators saying they would take care of it.) And I get amusing pflogsumm (summarizes postfix logs) emails daily showing like 5 emails delivered, 45 rejected, with all of the things that were tried but didn’t work.

On the other: most of the spam prevention comes from greylist, making all new senders retry after a few minutes (because generally a legit MTA will retry while a spammer will not) and that delays most emails by a few minutes. And it was a bear to set up. I used a like 18 step walkthrough on linuxbabe dot com I think, but added some difficulty by storing some use and alias databases on OpenLDAP / slapd instead of in flat files.

But hey, unlimited mail aliases, and I’m thinking of configuring things so emails bounce if they seem to contain just a notification that terms and conditions are updated somewhere. I don’t know, cause some chaos I guess.

And I have no idea if my situation is persuasive for anyone because I don’t know what the general advice means. And I worry it’ll have the unfortunate side effect of making self hosting type nerds like me start forgetting how to run their own email, causing control of email to become more centralized. And I strongly dislike that.

Yep, mspencer dot net (what little of it is currently up, I suck at ops stuff) is 2012-vintage hardware, four boxes totaling 704 GB RAM, 8x10TB SAS disks, and a still-unused LTO-3 tape drive. I’ll upgrade further when I finally figure out how to make proper use of what I already have. Until then it’s all a fancy heated cat tree, more or less.

Dear God do I hate how true that is. Not sure if intentional or not, but either way I’m with you. And I think they’re working to a plan.

I had a call center job while finishing college, but I’m currently a professional software developer. The difference in coverage is crazy. Dental crowns went from 25% to 75% coverage. My annual maximum out of pocket for healthcare is so low I keep hitting it by accident and wondering why things are suddenly free.

Why? I think it’s a deliberate plan to make life pretty good for like 51% of us, so we won’t vote against the way they absolutely wreck the other 49% of us.

I hope it stops working soon.

I have an iPhone and a gl.inet gl-e750 portable cell router, and my SIM card stays in the router. I don’t actually restrict my phone the way you’re talking about, but this gives me vpn to my home network without needing the vpn running on each client device. And if I wanted to block connections to big tech company services, I could do that.

Not really, it’s been pretty effortless. Every couple months I have to make sure my renewed LetsEncrypt certs really got imported, but I don’t think I’ve had to intervene manually for anything in a long time.

I do, and I agree about their utility. My users and aliases are in OpenLDAP but it’s pretty easy to add new ones.

Separate accounts are preferable if you’re actually going to be responding to messages. I’ve had some embarrassing encounters where I’ve given an alias to a business that I didn’t realize was going to actually use it for real email conversations with a human. By default roundcube web mail lets you hit reply anyway and the reply goes out with your real address, which can lead to confusion.

I host my own for mspencer dot net, used this 15-ish step walkthrough from linuxbabe dot com. Only maybe three instances of spam in two years, gmail and outlook receive my messages just fine, etc. (Successful spammers were using legitimate services, and those services took action when notified. Greylist delays emails by a few minutes but it’s extremely effective against most spammers because they never come back to retry messages after a few minutes, while legitimate senders will.) I don’t know if I would accept blanket advice against self hosting.

Fundamentally if your mail server can see the addressee, it can see the content. SMTPS encrypts both in the same channel. So at the point where you accept messages and store them in a mailbox, the messages have to be readable.

Encrypting them at rest isn’t something I currently do, but if you’re going to later serve those messages to an email client that expects to receive clear text, your server needs both the keys and the messages. They can be stored in different places.

Most of your needs could be met with full disk encryption on the box hosting Dovecot. If you’re worried about being compelled to decrypt, there’s always the deck of cards trick: The pass phrase for full disk encryption consists of a memorized portion plus the letters and numbers of the top N cards in this deck of cards you keep by the server. If someone were to shuffle that deck of cards, and the server were powered down, the encrypted volume would be impossible to recover.

I’m eager to learn what other Dovecot tricks people can recommend to improve security.

Are you going to be hosting things for public use? Does it feel like you’re trying to figure out how to emulate what a big company does when hosting services? If so, I’ve been struggling with the same thing. I was recently pointed at NIST 800-207 describing a Zero Trust Architecture. It’s around 50 pages and from August 2020.

Stuff like that, your security architecture, helps describe how you set everything up and what practices you make yourself follow.

In a general sense, you are discussing a way to control other people and organizations, and to make them stop talking about you. (Communicating and storing your information) This isn’t always possible or practical.

If you pay a merchant with your payment card, that merchant is allowed to know your payment card number. If you call a toll free number, the recipient of your call is allowed to know your phone number.

If they decide to share what they learn about you, and they do so legally, there’s not a whole lot you can do to stop them. I’m not saying this to antagonize or hurt you. I invite you to think differently about what you can control and what is worth worrying about.

Looking closer at the image, I’m going with “in this house we use single sideband.” (But, as a Plex user, I love yours too.)

Thank you for your reply, but to be clear, I’m not looking for individual details to be spelled out in comments. What you said is absolutely correct, thoughtful, and very helpful. But emotions are running a little high and I’m worried I’ll accidentally lash out at someone for helping. Apologies in advance.

But do you have any links? Beyond just the general subjects of security architecture, secure design, threat modeling, and attack surface identification, I’d love to see this hypothetical “generic VM and web application housing provider in a box” come with a reasonably secure default architecture. Not what you’re running, but how you’re running it.

Like, imagine decades in the future, internet historians uncover documentation and backups from a successful generic hosting company. They don’t necessarily care what their customers are hosting, their job is to make sure a breach in one customer’s stuff doesn’t impact any other customer. The documentation describes what policies and practices they used for networking, storage, compute, etc. They paid some expensive employees to come up with this and maintain it, it was their competitive advantage, so they guarded it jealously.

I’d want to see that, but (a) a public, community project and (b) now, while it’s still useful and relevant to emulate it in one’s own homelab.

If I can get some of that sweet, sweet dopamine from others liking the idea and wishing for my success, maybe I can build my own first version of it, publish my flawed version, and it can get feedback.

I’ve been struggling to wrap my head around a good security architecture for my mspencer.net replacement crap. Could I bug you for links?

I figured out a while ago to keep VM host management on a management VLAN, and I put each service VM on its own VLAN with heavy, service-specific firewalling and a private OS update repo mirror - but after hearing about ESXi jackpotting vulns and Broadcom shenanigans, I’ve gotten really disheartened. I’d love some safe defaults.

I think this needs to exist, but as a community supported system, not as a commercial product.

Pick a set of open technologies - but not the best, lightest weight, just pick something open.

Come up with a security architecture that’s reasonably safe and only adds a moderate amount of extra annoyance, and build out a really generic “self-hosted web hosting and VM company-like thingy” system people can rally around.

Biggest threat to this, I think, is that this isn’t the 90s and early 2000s any longer, and for a big project like this, most of the oxygen has been sucked out already by free commercial offerings like Facebook. The technical family friend offering to self-host email or forums or chat no longer gets gratitude and love, they get “why not Facebook?”

So… small group effort, resistant to bad actors joining the project to kill it, producing a good design with reasonably safe security architecture, that people can install step by step, and have fun using while they build and learn it.