"Buy Me A Coffee"

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  • 17 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • More technically there’s two ways to move data between two separate services. You can either pull or push the data.

    Assume for both scenarios that the client is your phone and the server is some machine in the cloud.

    With pulls the client calls an API and the server returns a response. Generally the www works this way. You ask a server for a wab page and you effectively pull the source down to your browser.

    Pushes work the opposite, in that a server has data for the client and needs to push or otherwise give it to you. Pulls are relatively strait forward because every server has a well known name (the domain name and url). But your phone’s IP address changes constantly. So how does a server know how to contact your device? There’s generally two ways:

    1. Your device can poll (make repeated pulls to a server checking for new data)
    2. Or you can register some identifier and your IP address with some central server every time it changes. And then the server can essentially call a URL on your device directly. This is essentially what Google and Apple are doing as it doesn’t waste CPU resources and your battery.

    You could in theory implement either of these yourself but because of the way the OSes work on both Android and iOS there’s no guarantee that you can keep a process running in the background forever. As the OS can kill your process if the OS needs more free ram, etc … The built in notification APIs are exempt from this because they are part of the OS.


  • If you’re worried about your IoT devices on your LAN the problem isn’t necessarily that they can access WAN but rather that there’s a security vulnerability and that they can be accessed by the WAN. Once a device is compromised and attacker can then use it as a “beachhead” to access other devices on your network.

    So for example, with my setup every IoT device is on a separate VLAN (the guest network acts similarly) which can’t get access to WAN, can’t be accessed from the WAN and can’t initiate any network calls to any other VLAN. Now my primary VLAN can talk to my IoT VLAN, and IoT can talk back, it just can’t start the communication.

    This does pose a problem for TVs though that need to talk to Jellyfin as hinted at in the original post. So what you could do is create a specific firewall rule that allows the TVs to at least initiate communication to Jellyfin but not any other device on your primary VLAN. This will probably require a more sophisticated router though than most of the consumer ones out there. Just be mindful that if n IoT device is compromised they can then try to attack the jellyfin server to jump to your other VLAN and then the rest of your network.


  • Just wanted to add… After reading your initial post I did some more digging on adding tracking headers, etc… especially by T-Mobile.

    While it’s definitely a thing, it only applies to HTTP traffic. Even HTTPS blocks their ability to add those headers. So any traffic that’s using any other protocol (DNS, email, ssh, or just gaming, etc…) would be safe from your ISP from at least trying to add these tracking headers.


  • Yes but while the service is targeted for home use there still is remote work which generally requires a VPN back to the company network. They wouldn’t be able to block this. Now sure they might be more inclined to block Mullvad but they’d impact too many businesses by blocking wireguard as a whole.

    And assuming they did block Mullvad but not wireguard… Just rent a VPS and install a wireguard server and client there to bridge back to Mullvad.


  • I know this doesn’t help much but I use T-Mobile cell towers with an always on VPN with no issue. But I don’t see why they’d block Mullvad. (I’d be more concerned that they’d block them than wireguard in general). But there’s completely legitimate reasons to use both so I don’t see them really bothering to block either.


  • If it was a certificate issue I’d expect youd just get an error from your browser saying the cert is invalid or expired.

    If I had to guess though you’re running into a nat reflection issue: https://nordvpn.com/cybersecurity/glossary/nat-loopback/

    Read up on that. But you may need to provide different DNS entries if you’re inside or outside your LAN or add a NAT hairpin rule to your router. But this is only applicable if you’re exposing the same service to the WWW.

    Some other things to try though:

    • Have you tried just pinging the address? Is the DNS resolution returning the address you expect?
    • Whats in your nginx logs? Do you see anything when you try and connect?
    • Within your nginx container can you ping your service directly? Is something blocking nginx from accessing the site?


  • Yes, but Google at least innovated and tried to increase customer value with Android. They also make better phones (from some people’s perspective) than Apple. I’ve seen nothing from Epic that tells me that their product is better than Steam. Sure they have free games, but that business model isn’t sustainable and for the non free games, why would I buy from them vs Valve? Sure, if I was a developer I might get a better deal with Epic, especially if I can sign an exclusivity agreement), but I’m not a game developer I’m a gamer just looking to play my games on my PC as easily as possible.


  • I can’t speak for anyone else but I can at least share why I didn’t care for it.

    Steam already exists and there isn’t a lot I feel is missing from the Steam store. Not to mention there isn’t anything that Epic does better than Valve for their storefronts. Epic doesn’t provide any new value that Valve doesn’t. In fact I’d argue that Epic causes negative value for several reasons:

    1. They essentially fragmented the PC market as now I can’t access all of my games in a single location. The same reason for example that I hate that Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, HBO Max, etc … exist. It just makes the overall experience less convenient and more expensive.

    2. Several features that Steam already has working are either broken or missing in the Epic Store. Especially around the shopping cart, etc … I haven’t gone to look recently to verify if any of these have been fixed and probably won’t until the other points are addressed, if they even can be resolved.

    3. There’s no level of trust with Epic compared to Steam. I have a massive Steam collection and Valve has shown time and time again that I can trust that my data is relatively safe with them. When was the last time you saw Valve in the media because of a data breach? When was the last time your Steam account got hacked. Epic is just new here so they haven’t had a chance to earn that trust.

    4. Their motives for wanting to create a new store wasn’t to improve the customer experience. Instead it was to improve their bottom line. The court cases against Google and Apple prove this. If they at least tried to have a PR campaign to show how Epic is innovating compared to Steam especially for making the customer experience better, the Epic Store might have sit better with me.

    5. Timed exclusives. Similar to point 1, but they were just trying to use their massive cash reserves from Fortnight to buy their way into the market rather than earn the trust of customers. This again resulted in fragmentation of the PC market.

    Anyway, just my two cents.



  • Can you share the Home Assistant automation / setup that you have for Uptime Kuma notifications? As I’m in the same boat as you. I just got a webhook setup but I’m getting flooded with notifications, especially after services update.

    My hope is I just want to be notified when a particular service is down for say 5 minutes but all I care about is knowing the node name. I don’t necessarily care to get notified if the service comes back up.


  • It’s worse than that. As the other comment said, it’s the consumer who pays the tarrif but let’s assume today:

    • China can produce a battery for $4
    • Twian does the same for $3.90
    • USA can only make one for $5

    Let’s then assume that for all 3 countries 25% of the cost is the raw Nickel that goes into the battery. Let’s also assume that it’s a flat 20% tariffs across the board.

    Now your prices become:

    • China – $4.80
    • Twian – $4.68
    • USA – $5.25

    Increase it to a 60% tariff:

    • China – $6.40
    • Twian – $6.24
    • USA – $5.75

    So no matter what, prices go up even for the US manufacturer as they still have to import raw materials. The tariffs end up making local manufacturing more competitive with overseas at the cost of the consumer. As consumers just saw the price of batteries go from $4.00 to $5.75, a whopping 43% increase. Yay inflation!

    The original idea behind tarrifs are just that… To give local businesses a competitive advantage while they catch up to overseas products. Once the US company is established you can then drop the tariff as they no longer need help while they ramp up manufacturing.

    So maybe the US manufacturer costs might go down, if they’re able to make more at scale, but they still have to beat the automatic 75c increase because of their own imports. And all of that is still assuming that the tariff is large enough to make the US company the cheapest option. Otherwise it may end up backfiring and cause less sales as consumers end up not paying the increased costs. As you can see above with only a 20% tariff.


  • Deflation just doesn’t happen in a bubble though.

    From my understanding the primary lever that can be pulled for this is the Fed interest rate. With a high interest rates you’re trying to decrease the amount of money institutions spend and rather increase the amount that they invest/save. As it becomes easier to make money by buying bonds than by reinvesting into your business. This in effect removes money from the economy.

    The problem here is this means businesses also spend less on salaries, thus triggering layoffs. This then also has a downward pressure on inflation as the working class ends of being layed off as unemployment rises. This puts more and more pressure on businesses to cut costs as more and more people have less disposable income to spend.

    This is the downward spiral that’s being referred to here.

    In effect you can’t create defationary policies without causing high unemployment, at least in a capitalist society.

    Take a look at the history of the Great Depression and the New Deal that helped the U.S. get out of it. Effectively the government had to create jobs to stimulate the economy as businesses couldn’t or wouldn’t shoulder that cost but the government could. As disposable income rose, so did spending and in turn inflation turned positive again as unemployment fell.


  • Yes it would. In my case though I know all of the users that should have remote access snd I’m more concerned about unauthorized access than ease of use.

    If I wanted to host a website for the general public to use though, I’d buy a VPS and host it there. Then use SSH with private key authentication for remote management. This way, again, if someone hacks that server they can’t get access to my home lan.


  • Their setup sounds similar to mine. But no, only a single service is exposed to the internet: wireguard.

    The idea is that you can have any number of servers running on your lan, etc… but in order to access them remotely you first need to VPN into your home network. This way the only thing you need to worry about security wise is wireguard. If there’s a security hole / vulnerability in one of the services you’re running on your network or in nginx, etc… attackers would still need to get past wireguard first before they could access your network.

    But here is exactly what I’ve done:

    1. Bought a domain so that I don’t have to remember my IP address.
    2. Setup DDNS so that the A record for my domain always points to my home ip.
    3. Run a wireguard server on my lan.
    4. Port forwarded the wireguard port to the wireguard server.
    5. Created client configs for all remote devices that should have access to my lan.

    Now I can just turn on my phone’s VPN whenever I need to access any one of the services that would normally only be accessible from home.

    P.s. there’s additional steps I did to ensure that the masquerade of the VPN was disabled, that all VPN clients use my pihole, and that I can still get decent internet speeds while on the VPN. But that’s slightly beyond the original ask here.