So you know what a VPN is, but there are so many options to choose from! Well before we dive into this, let’s get one thing off the bat: Avoid Free VPNs Privacy-respecting VPNs can provide their service because you pay them for it. Free VPNs are worse than your ISP when it comes to respecting your privacy, because selling your data is the only way they can make money, whereas an ISP is primarily paid for by you....
A VPN — or Virtual Private Network — is a tool that secures your internet connection from attackers on your network. But before I explain how that all works, let’s talk about the internet without them. Your Internet Service Provider (ISP) can see everything you do online. Well, nearly everything: When websites use HTTPS (or TLS, or SSL. these terms are often used interchangeably when referring to website encryption), indicated by the padlock in your web browser, your ISP cannot see exactly what you’re doing on the website....
I can honestly say I didn’t see this coming. On August 29th, 2019, Apple announced they would begin not only selling original OEM parts to independent repair businesses, but also provide them with the tools, guides, training, and diagnostics required to complete repairs on out of warranty iPhones. This is great news. It’s a surprising turn of events from a company that has spent years lobbying against Right to Repair bills across the nation....
Outline is a suite of open-source software developed for journalists to safely access their network and the internet while traveling in countries where their activities may be monitored or censored. Despite this, the Outline platform is ideal for a wide range of users, especially less technical users, and users in censored countries like China who may have little to no knowledge about how VPNs or proxies work. Outline consists of two parts, the Outline Manager and Outline Clients....
If you run servers for public services, like I do with privacytools.io, you definitely want to monitor them for any successful logins to user accounts (via SSH, et cetera). The way I plan to accomplish this is to set up an automatic notification to the Pushover app on my phone in the event of any login. I’m going to implement this as part of PAM authentication, and configure it to fail any logins if the notification script fails for whatever reason....
Some people called for me to write a more technically detailed/in-depth guide to setting up Tor with alt-svc after we set it up on privacytools.io, so while I do it all over again on our Mastodon server, I figured I’d write this post! Plus, it’ll make it easier for me if I need to do this again in the future :) When Cloudflare introduced their Onion Service last year, it marked an important milestone in Tor adoption and connectivity....
If you want to install Mojave from scratch, or you need to install it regularly or on multiple Macs, using a USB installer is the way to go for an easy installation. This method requires no third-party software, just a Mac that already has macOS installed and some basic Disk Utility and Terminal usage. Erasing the USB Drive Before we can put macOS on the drive, we’ll need to erase it and format it properly....
Now that you have PowerDNS installed on your servers, you may be wondering how you and your users can create zones on your servers. Well, PowerDNS-Admin is a web-based control panel that makes managing PowerDNS a breeze. It has support for multiple accounts with varying privileges, domain-based user access management, support for a variety of backends for user authentication (LDAP, SAML, etc.), and a whole lot more. We’re going to be setting this up on the master DNS server we created in a previous article, but if you choose to set this tool up remotely or on a preexisting server that should work as well with a few minor tweaks for your config....
It seems object storage is an integral part of any cloud-based web technology these days, but sometimes offloading that aspect of your work to a provider like Amazon S3 or Azure Blob Storage just isn’t feasible or possible. Enter Minio, a self-hosted cloud storage application with a simple interface, compatibility with multiple storage backends, and S3 API compatibility. In this article, I’m going to install Minio on my Synology DS718+ with a shared folder as the storage backend, using Docker....
I recently had to setup DNS servers for a project, so I figured that today’s as good a time as any to start documenting what I do. The goal of this guide is to have PowerDNS configured with a MySQL backend, and then use MySQL replication to sync information between slave servers. Prerequisites At least two servers. I’ve been using DigitalOcean since 2014 and I always recommend them, their $5/month offering works great for DNS....