Spyke

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Up yours Google

Haven't seen anyone mention it in here yet, but this is exactly why I use Aurora Store to search for and download apps instead of the Play Store. It still installs things so the Play Store can update it automatically if you want, but you don't have to deal with any ads.

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For those who work in companies that subscribe users to emails, when users unsubscribe, what portion of them say they "never signed up for this"?

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If they're using a service to send the emails, like SendGrid or Mailchimp or something, that Unsubscribe survey is actually hosted by the email sending provider, and the more people that mark the email as spam or use the "I never signed up for this" option or similar, the worse it makes the user of the mail sending service look. If they used Sendgrid for example to send a mass email to 10k people, if more than 5% Unsubscribe or mark as spam or use the "I never signed up for this", the company might get their account locked down by Sendgrid until there's an investigation as to why they sent spam.

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How did you mess with school computers?

My school had a web filter to block YouTube and various other sites that they didn't want students to go to. On the block page, there was a "report site blocked incorrectly" button, as well as a password override for admins to do a one time bypass.

One of my classmates registered a domain that all it did was log the IP address of whoever visited it. He then attempted to visit the site from class, it was blocked, and he clicked the report button. Later on one of the IT admins reviewed the report to see if the site should be unblocked or not, by visiting the site. My classmate then had the public IP address of the IT admin.

This IT admin must not have been very good, because he had a password unprotected, open, telnet port pointing to his computer. So we were able to telnet into his PC and poke around. He had an Excel file on his desktop with the web filter override passwords for every school in the district. That Excel file was promptly shared to as many people as who asked for it and we thought wouldn't rat us out.

We gloriously had unrestricted Internet for several months before the teachers caught on. We were told that anyone who used this password would be found out, and that the school was going to have a "volunteer" community service day for 4 hours on Saturday, picking up trash around the school. Anyone who attended would be pardoned for using the password, anyone who didn't attend and who was found out for using the password would have been "punished" (very ambiguously defined). I did not go to the volunteer day, nor was I punished in any way. I do think that it was just a bluff and they didn't have good enough logging to tell who actually used the password.

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Using Fail2ban to protect exposed services

If you're looking to actually do Fail2ban, look into crowdsec first. It's a similar concept but instead of creating your own block lists by people hammering against your system until they're banned, it uses community-populated lists to pre-ban known bad actors.

I know a lot of people shit on it from a decentralization perspective, but I use Cloudflare to expose all my services. Then anyone who hits my sites has to go through Cloudflare's detections first. I have all my services behind a reverse proxy (nginx proxy manager) running locally, and that's the only though exposed to the Internet through my router, also that ONLY allows connections at all from Cloudflare IPs or my local network. My home IP is obfuscated, my services can only be accessed using the ports I define, and things are happy. I also block as much as possible on my router, and have automatic updates on all my server VMs/LXCs.

You could also set up a Cloudflare tunnel to go to the reverse proxy and avoid needing to expose anything to the direct Internet.

Just turn off caching for any media servers domains/subdomains if you go with Cloudflare, or else it will try to cache any media on their servers and it's technically a ToS violation so people get their accounts banned. It's a simple setup to disable cache though.

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So true...

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Just rewatched that episode. She goes into the cellar of a convenience store and finds a trapped zombie and cuts into its skin, then comes out with a box of tampons. Nothing really too crazy happens even though they make you think it will.