All of the “snooping” is self contained. You run the network controller either locally on a PC, or on one of their dedicated pieces of hardware (dream machine/cloud key).

All of the devices connect directly to your network controller, no cloud connections. You can have devices outside of your network connected to your network controller (layer 3 adoption), but that requires port forwarding so again it is a direct connection to you.

You can enable cloud access to your network controller’s admin interface which appears to be some sort of reverse tunnel (no port forwarding needed), but it is not required. It does come in handy though.

As far as what “snooping” there is, there is basic client tracking (what IP/mac/hostnames) to show what is connected to your network. The firewall can track basics like bandwidth/throughout, and you can enable deep packet inspection which classifies internet destinations (streaming/Amazon/Netflix sort of categories). I don’t think that classification reaches out to the internet but that probably needs to be confirmed.

All of their devices have an SSH service which you can login to and you have pretty wide access to look around the system. Who knows what the binaries are doing though.

I know some of their WISP (AirMAX) hardware for long distance links has automatic crash reporting built in which is opt out. There is a pop up to let you know when you first login. No mention of that on the normal Unifi hardware, but they might have it running in the background.

I really like their APs and having your entire network in the network controller is really nice for visibility but my preference is to build my own firewall that I have more control over and then Unifi APs for wireless. If I were concerned about the APs giving out data, I know I could cut that off at the firewall easily.

A lot of the Unifi APs can have OpenWRT flashed on them, but the latest Wifi7 APs might be too locked down.

If you are just looking to repurpose an old device for around the house use and it won’t ever be leaving your home network, then the simplest method is to set a static IP address on the device and leave the default gateway empty. That will prevent it from reaching anything other than the local subnet.

If you have multiple subnets that the device needs to access you will need a proper firewall. Make sure that the device has a DHCP reservation or a static IP and then block outgoing traffic to the WAN from that IP while still allowing traffic to your local subnets.

If it is a phone who knows what that modem might be doing if there isn’t a hardware switch for it. You can’t expect much privacy when that modem is active. But like the other poster mentiond a private DNS server that only has records from your local services would at least prevent apps from reaching out as long as they aren’t smart enough to fall back to an IP address if DNS fails.

A VPN for your phone with firewall rules on your router that prevent your VPN clients from reaching the WAN would hopefully prevent any sort of fallback like that.

Add a -f to your umount and you can clear up those blocked processes. Sometimes you need to do it multiple times (seems like it maybe only unblocks one stuck process at a time).

When you mount your NFS share you can add the “soft” option which will let those stuck calls timeout on their own.

It might be the least effective especially for those not in swing states, but it certainly isn’t the least important.

And as far as “not a democracy” the NPVIC isn’t that many states away from effectively rendering the problems with the electoral college moot. Certainly a steep uphill battle though.

If voters actually turned out for primaries/elections there would be much better candidates. So your argument becomes “nobody else does it, and because of that the system is broken, and so I won’t do it either”.

It seems like people get caught up in the media hype on the presidential election and forget that some of the most important change needs to start from the bottom up, and a couple of. votes can make a huge difference in State levels, and congressional/senate elections. A president is worthless without a Congress/senate passing laws that actually matter.

Just look at what Minnesota has been able to with voter reform in the last year with their very narrow trifecta. I.e law went into effect this year that allows residents to sign up to automatically receive absentee ballots for every election/primary in their area. A minor improvement, but an important one. Guaranteed that there will be folks that wouldn’t bother to vote on non-presidential elections that will be now.

They also added a “right to be absent from work to vote” which gives Minnesotans the ability to vote without using any sort of vacation/leave time without losing pay. Full list of other rather import changes here

Things like that can snowball into a larger shift at the state level.

The state has no need for you to legitimize them. Even if the system is weighted against you every vote still has power, and the only thing that not voting accomplishes is sending a message that you are okay with the system as it is. There are plenty of politicians out there that want change to happen, and they can’t do it without enough votes behind them.

But those aren’t mutually exclusive things. Voting for the Dems doesn’t prevent you from doing those other things in the meantime.

If you only have two real choices that will affect the outcome and one of them is better than the other, voting for neither of them just makes things harder for those that would have made it slightly better. More compromises have to be made and that means the situation can’t improve.

I see constant posts about how Trump splitting their base is going to mean the end of the Republican party but that seems very short sighted. It is a simple matter of natural selection, and in a two party system only two parties will ever exist. It also inherently gravitates to very close races between those parties. Any split of the Republican party might cause a term or two of chaos, but it is just a matter of time before something fills the vacuum and balance is restored.

Each party would prefer to move further towards their end of the spectrum, but they are forced to move their values (or choose more centrist candidates) until they have enough of a majority to win.

Gerrymandering, the electoral college, what’s left of the judicial branch, apathetic voters, parasitic third parties, and wedge issues have allowed the Republicans to shift further right while maintaining their power. The only possible response to that from the Dems is to also shift right as well. If they didn’t the Republicans would just end up with trifectas or super majorities.

Trump was also able to shift racist/authoritarian/nationalist policies much further right by shifting his fiscal policies further left than what Republicans normally would do. His whole campaign was based on deficit spending (tax cuts without any real cost cutting, stimulus COVID spending, etc), public works (multi billion dollar worthless walls), and his focus on blue collar workers (not directly supporting unions but he pushed anti China + US manufacturing boosts).

Every vote for a third party is one less vote that the Republicans need to gain, which is a little more right that they can slide and maintain power, and since natural selection links the two parties it is also a little further right that the Democrats have to slide to maintain their power as well.

If you want to shift things left voting third-party won’t do it. Third parties have no power to make changes and never will in our current system.

Voting for the only party that has a chance of winning and is willing to make voting reforms to improve that system is the only hope of shifting the parties to the left where the actual political center of the country lies.

Voting for anyone else is illogical and won’t prevent this genocide. Protests, and organizations can maybe help in the short term to push the Democrats to change course but it also disenfranchises more voters to not show up, and pushes more to vote for third parties… And so the snowball tumbles down the hill to the right gaining momentum leaving us with frankly no good choice.

This was a separate outage unrelated to CrowdStrike a few hours earlier that took down a couple of airlines as well.

A majority of the VMs in the Azure CentralUS datacenter went down due to some sort of backend storage issue.

Edit: I guess I should have read the article they do say CrowdStrike. They seem to be implying that they were one event when the cloud services outage was earlier and unrelated. I had heard about grounded flights during the first outage as well. So they likely are combining the two events here.

I would think most wifi jamming is just deauth attacks. It is much easier to just channel hop, enumerate clients, and send them deauthentication packets.

This way you don’t need a particularly powerful radio/antenna, any laptop/hacking tool with Wi-Fi is all you need. There are scripts out there that automate the whole thing, so almost no deep knowledge of wifi protocols are required.

WPA3 has protected management frames to protect against this but most IoT cameras probably don’t support WPA3 yet.

Updates for CrowdStike are pushed out automatically outside of any OS patching.

You can setup n-1/n-2 version policies to keep your production agent versions behind pre-prod, but other posts have mentioned that it got pushed out to all versions at once. Like a signature update vs an agent update that follows the policies.

One nice thing about KDE compared to most of the other DEs is that the window manager (kwin) is separate from the underlying components, and it can be replaced!

There are many walkthroughs like this one out there: https://github.com/heckelson/i3-and-kde-plasma

You get i3 for tiling window management but you still get to use KDE’s system settings to do configuration like display settings, themes keyboard shortcuts, etc, just like you did before. You can also pick and choose which parts of the KDE desktop you want to keep (menu, krunner, etc)

Since i3 is just a window manager and is lacking all of that system level stuff it really rounds out i3 to feel like a full DE instead of having to piece together other tools to do those things.