March 5, 2024
• 6 min read
This is not an article about which web browser is the best (there is no such thing) but an article about which browser has the most connections after a fresh install. The results shouldn’t be a surprise, really.
Of course, not everything is telemetry per se, some of the connections are from the ‘New Tab’ pages that include Youtube videos but I strongly believe that is the same thing: the software leaks information about you and/or your computer without you actually accepting the data exchange (because you don’t have a way to accept or deny the connection since it’s the first time you’re running the browser).
Read more →February 8, 2024
• 2 min read
Introduction Here is a small tutorial on encrypting a Microsoft Azure virtual machine disk.
Preparing the Azure Virtual Machine Enable the Azure Key Vault provider within your Azure subscription.
$ az provider register -n Microsoft.KeyVault Create a resource group in your favorite location (keep in mind different locations enable different features, some VM sizes are not available in other locations).
$ az group create \ --name testResourceGroup \ --location centralus Create an Azure Key Vault and enable the Key Vault for use with disk encryption.
Read more →January 30, 2024
• 4 min read
I decided to make a log of all network connections a standard install of Windows 11 Pro (for ARM, 22H2, OS build 22621.1344) does.
The methodology is the same, standard setup without changing any of the default settings (Privacy ones, for example). Test device is on a clean user profile, all network connections blocked, application-level network connection whitelisting and only Little Snitch installed. So it’s actually Little Snitch that does all the heavy-lifting.
Read more →January 29, 2024
• 2 min read
NetworkManager is a program for providing detection and configuration for systems to automatically connect to networks. NetworkManager’s functionality can be useful for both wireless and wired networks, for wireless networks, NetworkManager prefers known wireless networks and has the ability to switch to the most reliable network.
If you want to reduce someone’s capabilities to track you, you should avoid broadcasting a persistent and likely unique software identifier; an empty (blank) hostname is also an option, but a static hostname of “localhost” is less likely to cause problems.
Read more →January 15, 2024
• 2 min read
You can set-up a VPN killswitch, which is a simple way to ensure that if your VPN connection is dropped, regardless of the reason, the Internet connections are not allowed (and your real IP will not be exposed). And this can be done easily using ufw on any Debian-based distro.
Start by installing ufw if it’s not already installed on your system:
1 $ sudo apt install ufw Configure ufw to deny all incoming and outgoing connections:
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