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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • Like many other security mechanisms VLANs aren’t really about enabling anything that can’t be done without them.

    Instead it’s almost exclusively about FORBIDDING some kinds of interactions that are otherwise allowed by default.

    So if your question is “do I need VLAN to enable any features”, then the answer is no, you don’t (almost certainly, I’m sure there are some weird corner cases and exceptions).

    What VLANs can help you do is stop your PoE camera from talking to your KNX and your Chromecast from talking to your Switch. But why would you want that? They don’t normally talk to each other anyway. Right. That “normally” is exactly the case: one major benefit of having VLANs is not just stopping “normal” phone-homes but to contain any security incidents to as small a scope as possible. Imagine if someone figured out a way to hack your switch (maybe even remotely while you’re out!). That would be bad. What would be worse is if that attacker then suddenly has access to your pihole (which is password protected and the password never flies around your home network unencrypted, right?!) or your PC or your phone …

    So having separate VLANs where each one contains only devices that need to talk to each other can severely restrict the actual impact of a security issue with any of your devices.


  • Since most of those are run commercially and don’t make their data easily accessible, that’ll be a much different process, I assume. You’ll basically have to scrape them like any other web site, except you’ll specifically be targeting the edit/source view pages. Then find a wiki implementation that has as close a syntax as possible to the one they use (that could be tricky …) and upload there. So unless you happen to find some code from someone who wanted to do the exact same thing, I’m afraid this would involve quite some programming/scripting.





  • Increase the attack surface compared to what? If you don’t allow/enable any access to services inside your network from outside, then by definition you have fewer attack surfaces than if you add a VPN to that empty list.

    So trivially the answer is “yes, it adds an attack surface”.

    But what are the alternatives? If you directly expose each individual service on a dedicated port, for example, then you’d add many more (and usually less well hardened) attack surfaces instead.

    So if the comparison is “expose 5 web-based services directly” vs. “expose one VPN like wireguard”, then the second option is almost always the clear winner when it comes to security (and frequently also when it comes to ease of setup as well as comfort).






  • The problem with your attitude is …

    No. That’s your problem with my attitude.

    “Free speech” absolutists don’t convince me with their hypotheticals.

    Believe it or not: absolute free speech is not the end goal and not as valuable as you all believe.

    Forbidding some kind of speech can be okay.

    Because not forbidding it creates an awful lot of very real and very current pain. Somehow the theoretical pain that a similar law could create is more important for your argument, than the real and avoidable pain thatthis law is attempting to prevent.

    but e.g. American free speech would be nonexistent

    And I say that the specific American flavor of free speech is not very valuable at all.










  • Now you make me feel old. In “the olden days” before streaming of media over the internet was as commonplace as it was now, that was the standard way that tech-savy people consumed media: Either on their PC or with some set-top box with built-in storage. I fondly remember my PopcornHour, which was basically a line of desktop-boxes that ranged from “basically a hard disk, video decoder and HDMI out” all the way to “can automatically rip your BlueRays”.