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7 things all travelers with smartphones and computers should do to be secure while traveling.

Longtime readers know that I’m not a fan of most cloudy services. Not just about the privacy sucking aspects, but also about the inability to control your own data.

This week, we’ve seen two huge cloud providers do dumb things.
Dropbox disabled public folders. Seems they didn’t like people transferring files? I dunno. The other was a change in ToS for Evernote. They wanted to clarify that their people could read your notes. Gee – put stuff on someone else’s server and wonder if they can read it? Duh.

Remember Google Reader? They weren’t able to make money off it, so after years of happy users, they shut it down.

I’m not including links for these things because I’ve learned those will disappear quickly.

If you have a broadband connection, you can run your own cloudy services. A $35 raspberry Pi can do it. There are some projects that will setup a raspberry pi to provide file sharing, family photos, read-it-later, centralized contacts and other handy tools like a family calendar for your family. You should run a VPN to access these things securely too. These things can all run on the same $35 computer.

If you are really nerdy, check out the sovereign project. It provides about 20 cloudy services including a VPN.

Say no to cloud services. Just say no!

Saw this quote on /.

The cloud is someone else’s hard drive attached to someone else’s server in someone else’s data center at the end of an Internet pipe controlled by someone else. If that works for you – and it might! – great. But do be aware of what you are doing.

Got a new toy recently, an HDHR4-US (also known as an HDHR-Connect) from SiliconDust. These are the guy who have been making the HD-Homerun network TV tuners for years.

Got Plex Server and Raspberry Pi? You need rasplex. This is a plex playback distro designed to be installed into a Raspberry Pi v2 or later. While it can work on v1 Pis, playback is known to stutter on the older hardware. You need to connect to a Plex Server (the server runs on a different machine).

In the normal Raspberry Pi method, we just shove an image onto an SDHC card 4G+ and that is it. Put the card into your Pi, answer a few questions about your network and Plex Server.

It isn’t perfect. I find the remote inputs slow or ignored. Don’t like all the feedback screen overlays that block subtitles (pressing push brings up this screen so the subtitles cannot be read) and the lack of Folder View for all media. They spend too much screen room on being pretty, but not functional. For home movies that begin with the same long name, but just change the last part for the different parts, the filenames are useless. They cannot be seen.

There are many shows I don’t retain – just want to dump into a single directory and watch. Don’t get me started about the lack of m3u playlist support for video files either. Also, the pixel ratio seems off a little, but that could have been a few odd-sized videos.

Also miss all the addons that Kodi provides. Plex channels are poor in comparison. For example, the SyFy channel only shows clips through plex, whereas the Kodi addon will stream complete shows from syfy.com. This isn’t accessing illegal content, just shows available on the website.

Still, if you have lots of media stored inside your Plex server, this is the easiest way to access it from a silent Raspberry Pi. Playback is good and easy.

I would never have looked for this if PlexBMC was working well. Sometime in the last few months, it stopped working well. It usually works enough to start playing 1 video, but the addon crashes before the video ends. Playback is still handled by Kodi, so it finishes fine. And for playing lots of videos (not official media from studios), Kodi is still the best player I know.

Ok, so when MSFT switched data providers over 2 years ago, both my Win7 media center systems (7mc going forward) stopped getting guide data. I worked and worked and worked with every available solution. On the main 7mc system started working about a month later … after manually having to setup and schedule recordings for 2 weeks. Most of the recommended solutions had people changing their ZIP code … well, since 1 of the machines has been working with my correct ZIP, I knew that wasn’t the issue. Followed all the so-called solutions , most of which said to flush 7MC and reload using a different, nearby, ZIP. Did this multiple times for the first 6 months or so. Never worked.

We all need to be careful which websites we visit. Why?

Lots of websites aren’t coded correctly. This is a specific javascript problem list. Appears to be updated daily.

The solution? The developers of these sites (and the site-owners) need to fix it. OWASP has a Top 10 List for many languages as a guide for how to avoid the most common issues.

• 3rd Party Javascript Top 10
• AJAX Top 10

These are probably well-intentioned sites, just with developers in over their heads. I know I would be over my head.
Security is hard. It takes years to learn and the learning never ends because the hackers are always trying different methods too.

Linux server security is a huge topic. After all, there isn’t a security checkbox. Why is that?

Every server is a little different, but the ideas to security each of them is the same, the OS doesn’t matter.
Depending on your level of expertise, the answers for each of these items will be different.

Another example of why you shouldn’t trust consumer routers. d-link

It isn’t just this specific d-link router. We’ve seen the same issues over and over and over with pretty much every non-enterprise vendor.

Plus we don’t want our devices used by crackers to DDoS Brian Krebs anymore, right?

We are Linux people. We CAN do this ourselves.

Always wanted a way to get the full content from websites without all the extra stuff and have a way to take it with me on a portable device without a data plan. Wallabag to the rescue.

Plus, I don’t want too many central orgs like google/fb/twitter/NSA/GCHQ/KGB/Mom knowing what I was reading.

Wallabag is like read-it-later. Once setup (and the setup is much like Nextcloud), then almost any webpage I’m viewing inside a browser can be grabbed for later using “cntl-alt-s” – That tells a browser plugin to tell Wallabag to save that URL for reading later. Great for longer Ars or Krebs on Security articles. Also a great way to grab instructions for setting up something non-trivial as a record. Wallabag supports annotations, so if those instructions don’t work, we can add comments/corrections. We can also share this content with others.

Poor quality of Seagate disks is a well-know issue for people using spinning disk storage at home. I hear their enterprise HDDs aren’t bad, but that isn’t what we purchase.

My sample size is very small. From 1990 – 2005 I went out of my way to purchase Seagate HDDs. They lasted for the sizes I bought. Used some 320G Seagate disks in an array for 7+ yrs and NONE of those failed. They made quality HDDs.