What do you gain by doing this? I trust both proton and mullvad to not fuck up their encryption so attackers can’t read your traffic even through one VPN. The second one doesn’t offer additional security here.

In your setup, proton will only know you use mullvad but not know which sites you visit in the end. Mullvad knows everything just the same as without proton. So the outer VPN doesnt add privacy either.

If you are suspected of a crime, forcing mullvad to disclose your identity/IP is enough and proton doesn’t help.

If you are worried about traffic correlation analysis, then yes 2 VPNs will help. But honestly for normal usage I don’t see the point of 2 VPNs.

And about the DoS fear. Just do it the other way round? Mullvad on the router, proton on the device? From protons perspective you produce the same amount of traffic, it just comes from a mullvad server. The outer VPN is the one where you have increased traffic due to 2 VPNs. But I am pretty sure neither will be a problem and tunneling a VPN through a VPN is not a TOS violation

You DONT want to turn it off. Digital forensics work WAAAAAAY better if you have a memory dump of the system. And all the memory is lost if you turn it off. Even if the virus ran 10h ago and the program has long stoped running, there will most likely still be traces in the RAM. Like a hard drive, simply deleting something in RAM doesn’t mean it is gone. As long as that specific area was not written over later it will still hold the same contenta. You can sometimes find memory that belonged to a virus days or even weeks after the infection if the system was never shut down. There is so much information in ram that is lost when the power is turned off.

You want to 1: quarantine from network (don’t pull the cable at the system, but firewall it at the switch if possible) 2: take a full copy of the RAM 2.5: read out bitlocker keys if the drive is encrypted. 3: turn off and take a bitwise copy of the hard drive or just send the drive + memory dump to the forensics team. 4: get coffee

The western hemisphere isn’t just the Americas. It includes half of europe…

There are quite a few people in the western hemisphere that don’t even bat an eye when they walk past a 1000 year old building on their way to work every day.

For me the oldest building is just a random house from the 13 century.

I have set it up in a way where all the packets have to go through their VPN and if they don’t, they get dropped before they leave my PC.

That is the function of a firewall and not of the VPN. As I understand portmaster it does both. But that is not normal VPN behavior.

VPNs are not magic. They are a piece of software that encrypt traffic and send it to a special server. They do that by creating a virtual Internet connection (think like pluging in an additional Ethernet cable or connection to an addition WiFi at the same time). Everything that is sent through the virtual connection is encrypted. Your system now has (at least) two valid Internet connections (one real and one virtual). For every packet it sends it needs to decide which connection it should send it from. This is decided by something called the routing table. When you start the VPN it will put two routes into the table.

• traffic going to the VPN server goes through the real connection (so the encrypted VPN traffic is routed correctly)
• everything else goes through the virtual connection (the VPN tunnel where it gets encrypted)

The attack described is a way how a network router can add a new route into your devices routing table to basically override the second route from the VPN. The route is still there, there just is another one that has a higher priority.

A VPN is not the ultimate authority over your network traffic. It is just another program sending and recieving taffic.

By design nothing in the chain can be altered. But of course you could have a block indicating “person X is now person Y”. But you can always read that Y was at some point X (and at what point the change happened). That would not be good, as it would be a public ledger of all trans people. It would also make things like witness protection impossible because inserting a block “today in 2024, person W was born in 1974” is very suspicious

> energy equals mass

That doesn’t mean energy has a weight.

It means it is physically possible to transition energy to mass and vice versa. Sunlight hitting the earth does not add any weight.

Edit: turns out that part was wrong

Also, earth radiates heat out to space. At a rate of (aaaaaaaaalmost, because of the greenhouse effect) 100% of the energy we get from the sun. If it didn’t, earth would be a few million degrees hot by now…

If you want any system to connect to you, you need to open a port. You don’t need to do that for outgoing connections (the OS and your router will automatically open ports for the return connection). So if everybody connects to one central system, nobody needs to (explicitly) open any ports (except for the central connection point)

Most VPNs use UDP. So set up a wireguard, tailscale or openvpn.

But you still need to “open up the firewall”. UDP still works on ports the same way as TCP. I do agree however, that exposing a VPN port is more secure than exposing a port for a game server, as you don’t know about the security of that server software.

Can you verify the software running on an instance is the same as the one in the source code repository? You can’t. Can you verify the instance isn’t running code to read passwords from your login requests even if the code is the original open source code? You can’t.

That’s why (and for other reasons) you should never use a password for more than one site/service/instance.

Lemmy admins (admins in the Lemmy application) probably can’t read your password. But everyone with admin rights on the server operating system can.

The thing that confused me when first learning about docker was, that everybody compares it to a virtual machine. It’s not. Containers dont virtualize anything. They take a (single) process from the host OS and separate that into its own environment. All system calls, memory access, file writes etc are still handled by the same os (same kernel). However the process is separated both on the file system and process level. It can’t see other processes outside of the container and it also doesn’t see the real filesystem. It sees a filesystem provided by the container. This also means it sees different file and user permissions. When you run a alpine Linux docker container on an Ubuntu system, the container only containes the (few) files for alpine but no Linux kernel no desktop environment. A process inside that container only sees the alpine files and not the Ubuntu files. It also means all containers see a filesystem independent of each other and can use libraries and dependencies of different versions (they are only files after all).

For administration it makes running complex services easy. You define how to setup that service (what base Linux distro to use, what packages to install, what commands to run, and how to start the process). You can then be save to assume the setup of that service did not interfere with the setup of any other service. “Service 1 needs a certain system wide config changed? Service 2 needs that config in the default state? And both need a different version of the same library?” In containers you can have all at the same time because they each see a different version of the same config and library.

And all this is provided by the kernel itself. All docker does is provide an “easy” way to create and manage containers but could could do all of that using chroot, runc and a few other.

As a note, containers usually don’t come with systemd as they don’t need an init system. You would run the service directly inside the container and then use systemd outside the container to make sure the container is started/restarted, or just docker as it can already do that.

I found a great article demystifying containers recently

I do it quesadilla style. Two wraps, cheese and hot sauce in between. If I feel fancy i add tomato slices on top after microwaving

Yes and killing a few invaders while the planet gets orbital lazered from 2 solar systems away will for sure win a war against an alien force.

Half live 2 got that right. The alien invasion is called the 7 minute war, because after 7 minutes earth had to surrender.

The assumption of course is, that the aliens are as militaristic as we are. If humans are uniquely violent in the universe, we could actually win an invasion. But if war is a normal thing in the universe, there is a 0% chance for any planet bound society to win against an post FTL attacker. Even with many nukes.

Your analogy is lacking. Being technologically behind does not make us the monkey with the nuke, it makes us the human with the rock. Aliens able to travel to earth will have a very easy way to deal with “bad thing flying fast towards us”.

Yes it is unethical and immoral to fool service personal and lead them to believe they receive a tip when they don’t. Everybody hates to receive those fake church bills.

That is a real problem. In a perfect world you would want all of your data to be available to everyone who can use it to improve your live. And only getting advertisement for things you actually want/need (not only think you want/need) is a real improvement of your live.

Sadly “improving lives of consumers” is not the goal of any of the big data collectors and as such any data collected is or will be missused to cause harm to the owner even if it is not directly obvious.