1-28: Data Privacy Day? Request Your Data, Start Making Changes | Level One Techs

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This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://level1techs.com/video/1-28-data-privacy-day-request-your-data-start-making-changes
3 Likes

Quick thing: Emby was briefly mentioned as open source. Emby isn’t open source anymore. Jellyfin is the FOSS fork.


For clarification, Emby used to be open source and a lot of Emby still is open source, but there are some closed binaries in there since version 3.6.

4 Likes

Dammit Wendell.

Your earlier video finally got me off of ass. Finished last week.

Things I already had:

Crimper/cheap cable cat 6 tester/punch down tool/cable stripper. Synology with a few TB left on it.

Bought: 500 ft of cat6, patch cables (yeah too lazy to make them myself - sue me), Cisco SG350 -10, 3 dome cameras and one bullet. 4 license pack for camera.

Borrowed: a fish pole set - more on this later.

First - The switch. What a bit of a pain in the butt to change the default ip on the machine. Had to fish out my usb to serial cable and do it in the bios. Why change it? Well this switch is going to be dedicated for camera so I am putting it on a 192.168.2.* while my home network is 192.168.1.*. Why not VLANs - because lazy that why and I really did want a separate switch for this function like I do in my hospital closets (Director of IT for multi-location IDN). Once that was done - set up the DHCP services on that switch to serve addresses (.1 - .99) and put it on da floor.

Second: the cameras. Hard coded the IP address on them starting at .100. Then change switches. Made sure they showed up in Synology (after adding the license pack). It is highly satisfying not specifying a gateway on the cameras.

So, THAT was the easy part. I’ve always lived in the data layer. Usually physical layer stuff is a rounding error on one of my budget spreadsheet (worrying about firewall penetration, blah, blah, is WELL worth having a professional do it). My house? I was like hell - had a pro do it the first time to drop Ethernet into my rooms so why can I use that?

Well, when you drilling holes in 2x4’s in your attic b/c you don’t have enough room going down to your wiring … cabinet you realize how much of a pain it is. Then realize they ran it through a box with no room and when you chiseling the box frame out of the wall while not trying to knick the existing cables is so much fun. They did leave a guide line so that helped quite a bit.

If anyone needs to know - 1 inch. I went with a 1 inch hole drill bit in the exterior roof. tried the 3/4 and just not enough. One inch was a bit of a pain to get the cable through from an angle, but doable. It’s my suggestion based on what I just did.

Had to run one more hop from my “data cabinet” back into my office for the synology. It should probably live by it, but meh. Ok ok - I ACTUALLY ran 3 more back to my office. I’m bonding the ports. If anyone cares - Synology supports it and so does the cisco switch. It’s one of the reasons I “overbought” for it - but it’s a workhorse and use another one just like it to power operations in my office.

The run back to my office used the fish pole line to run them back down. Then we punched down or made ends for all the network stuff and pushed the cables through the holes - attached network tester and all of them came up clean. On the first try. Nothing short of a modern day miracle. And we took so long doing it got dark and couldn’t finish till the next day. My wife thought leaving holes with cables hanging out will let all of the bugs in the known world come into the house. I got 100+ text messages asking me if I would be done that day. Why do I add that? Just to know “people are watching”.

Anyway, plug up the patch cables and go to turn on the first camera. The DSCam application is great on my android - I was positioning in real time. Note - not necessary but have someone help you - getting that first screw in while doing it yourself on a ladder will probably get a video shot that will end up on Ridiculousness. I hung all 4 myself and it was a more of a PITA than running the cable and if I had another pair of hands - it would have been really quick.

Then went to each of the cameras interfaces - changed the overlays based on location and now have a working system.

Random thoughts:

  1. Think through how you are going to get back into your network. I was going to just vpn into my synology like I always do and then open the app. Oh not so fast my friend! My wife wanted it as well and she’s on an iphone. I would have written a script for android, but right now I’m allowing connectivity to it. Have to think about it some more .

  2. Think through your alerting needs. Again, talk with other folks in teh house. I set it up and then was asked “when do I get alerts” - from? - you guessed i t right - my wife. Had to set up some notification groups and such - clean up false positives - all the damn detail work that I would have lived with but would have NEVER turned over to a client. Yeah - in this context I need to treat my wife as a client.

  3. If you have a separate network - you will have to plug into the other switch - or put another wireless router on it to get to the cameras. I just put a cable for plugging in, but have thought seriously about putting a WAP on it so I can lay on the couch without a cable.

  4. I wish I had bought and installed a bullet and a dome camera and installed them first. One of the locations would have done better with a bullet vs the dome I had planned for that area. Now that I have a read on hardware, when I go do that at my dads, I know what to buy.

Think that’s done - if you have any questions - just ask. It’s pretty straightforward.

1 Like

Oh damn my post shown in the video … :slight_smile:

I find the article incomplete if i’m to be honest…
After doing all of that, one should drill holes in all of their walls and insert some tinfoil balls.
Extremely important to make certain that distances between said holes vary! Don’t let them get ya! Just drill like crazy, without pattern.
For those with a bit of extra cash, a Faraday cage surrounding your entire house is also a must! Don’t be stingy now.

…

Or maybe, you stop using all the crap you’re (statistically speaking) using, even as you’re reading this.
Because once there? All you need is some privacy tweaks in your OS and some average care in regard to how/when/where from you read your email, shop, and surf in general (always to be seen as 3 distinct, separate categories).
That’s it.

I know the man is out to get ya and i know a lot of people here geek so they can geek, but… reason first.
You don’t need cloud, at all, you don’t need social media, you don’t need streaming, you don’t need anything that links the real you to the web.

Don’t cry wolf when you’ve left the sheep loose please…

So in your opinion let’s go live in a cave … However, I will stay where I am and I will try to at least marginally control my life. :wink:

if you want to start with initial research on it before they answer. The under workings of discourse and cloudflare and some of the plugins they use. This can be found if you use an inspector, console and debugger but 26 MB seems awfully large. My cookie for the session is not nearly as large. When is the last time you cleared that data?

discourse learns your emojis. I found that funny

There’s a few plugins out there for Firefox if you really want to dig into what a site is looking at and requesting from your computer. The forum is very benign. I won’t say that there’s anything nefarious going on at all other than the standard things needed to protect any page. If that’s what you are concerned about.

If you really wanted to get a little funny, you could have CURL store the cookies and browse via that for a bit or automated script to do so and then open the actual files and see what it’s storing. Local storage. That’s another way to do it.

The nice thing about Wendell’s terms of service even though they’re kind of evolving at times is that he does protect people’s data under California data rules, which basically gives you in the US a GDPR like protection. While I personally already have this protection, being a dual citizen in a lot of ways. It’s nice to see that you know you could actually make that kind of data request and you could get your data zapped away if you really needed to. Since California is one of those states that actually does do data protection rights. Although I will say I wish that the discourse form function to delete people’s posts was more granular as in hey, I’d like to have all of my posts in this topic category redacted but I want to leave my productive posts and then I want you to erase all ties to me. That would be a great feature but I don’t know if that’s ever going to be a thing that’s easily implemented. I’ve seen the back end though and I know it can be done. I spawn up a VM myself and started to take a look at what’s behind discourse so I was well informed. I know what can be done and what can’t be done at this point for the most part minus the newer additions that I haven’t seen

Have you ever downloaded your data from the forum? It’s interesting I did. I wasn’t very satisfied with the results but that’s not the fault of wendell at all

Its my personal belief that when someone wants to download posts all things posted should be joint property and thereby downloadable as a single HTML file

Thats what the download from a discourse forum looks like. Again not wendells fault

But say you actually want to download a page. You can use CURL to kind of do it but because of the way discourse elements work you can see from this file its not everything

Infrastructure Series_ BIND9 Authoritative DNS Guide Please See Me Edition - Wikis & How-to Guides - Level1Techs Forums (9_12_2022 3_16_44 PM).html.txt|attachment (8.3 MB)

You can rename that to inspect it. Its just benign HTML

1 Like

I just requested my Apple Data, and its shocking how little data is there

wasnt implying there was games afoot :slight_smile:
just saw how big it was and like i said made me wonder why so big… :blush:

as for the last time i cleared my cookie for the site…
it was a while ago.
but not that long, less than 6 weeks i think.

thanks for the links. :slight_smile:

1 Like

I only see two cookies, one 999bytes and the other 878bytes. Unless we are talking about cache, it can accumulate up to 200MB, but it’s just a cache… so I don’t see a problem. :wink:

im talking about it all.
the cookies the service workers, addons a such.
like i said, i just wanted to know what’s being put on my pc.

i clear my browsing data cache regularly, although i do not clean my cookies as often.
so its unlikely to be cached just thumbnails, icons and such.

turns out there’s not much to it.
looking at phases txt file there’s a lot of images saves as svg format, some base 64 and some java script.

:confused: