Sure, but that’s not the setup you described in the original post. I think that’s probably where your confusion is coming from - people are responding about a setup that’s just a PiHole, not a PiHole plus router features to ensure that it’s used.

Ultimately any setup that allows the device internet access is going to introduce some opportunities for tracking/telemetry/ads. If the vendor really wants to they could just channel all that data through a single HTTPS connection, along with the useful data you want to let the device access. You won’t have any way to inspect that traffic and selectively block it, so you end up having to chose between blocking everything or blocking nothing.

Your setup sounds like it’s reaching the privacy/functionality trade off that you want.

With a Pihole, you aren’t preventing the device from reaching the internet, you’re just refusing to provide it answers to its DNS requests. That means that it can’t translate a domain name (example.com) to an IP address (1.2.3.4) using your DNS server. But there’s nothing stopping it from using a different DNS server whose IP it has hardcoded, and nothing stopping it from then talking to anything on the internet once it has the correct IP to use.

In contrast, the other poster sounds to be using a firewall to apply ACLs. That means that the only way to reach the WAN is by passing over the firewall, and the firewall can apply rules about what traffic it allows. That prevents the device talking to a hardcoded DNS server, or talking to something on the internet if it alreadt knows its IP.

The other poster also talks about adding specific exemptions to these ACLs for specific services. So, e.g. letting the TV reach Jellyfin, but only Jellyfin & not all the other devices on the network. That reduces the risk of an attacker using the IoT device as a way to attack the rest of the network, since there’s less stuff to attack. You’re right that this is a fairly marginal gain for an IoT device which doesn’t have WAN access anyway.

The downside of this approach is that the device enforcing the ACLs has to handle all the network traffic. That means it needs more processing power to take packets, apply the ACL rules and then decide whether or not to send it onward. The upside of a Pihole is that DNS is a relatively tiny amount of traffic, so it takes much less processing power to handle just DNS.

I don’t think anyone but you ever said he was irrelevant, or bragged about not knowing who he was. You’re extracting a ton of meaning to a short comment which I just don’t think is actually there

https://socialblade.com/youtube/handle/asmontv says there’s over thousand youtube channels with more subscribers than him. He might well be large & influential in his niche, but it’s unlikely that people outaide his niche will know who he is. Do you think you’ve heard of 1,000 biggest youtubers whose channels aren’t about things you’re interested in?

Pewdiepie, by comparison, is the 12th most subscribed channel on youtube. I think you’re underestimating how much more famous that makes him with the general public.

https://source.android.com/docs/setup/contribute/licenses says most of the Android userspace is Apache 2 licensed. While they can’t close source the Android branch of the kernel, they could close-source new userspace code and it would probably diverge from the last open source release quite quickly.

Realistically, that would probably be sufficent to make Android functionally closed-source, even if the GPL bits were still available.

Yeah, its not unreasonable that you’d have a remote way to access the device to gather debug data with the customers consent. An SSH key in the firmware is a flexible way to do that, so long as there are good controls in place to ensure that it isn’t misused.

I think multiple people already have access to the databases that store the data the device sends. I don’t really care whether they get the data from the device itself or from the database.

Similarly, I think multiple people have the ability to make changes to the firmware build and the systems that distribute it. So those people already have the potential ability to gain access to the device.

One person or multiple people having unauthorised access are both unacceptable. I’m saying that the users have to trust the companies ability to prevent that occurring, and that therefore this particular technical detail is mostly irrelevant

I’m 90% sure it is not a single user. I just don’t see how that really affects the security of the product, given that the company that sells it can already do the things the author is saying can be done if you have this key.

To be clear, I wouldn’t buy this. I just don’t think the SSH key makes it any worse than it already was

A shared account doesn’t mean everyone who works there has access to it, or that those who do have access aren’t subject to some type of access control.

The article basically goes on to say that the existence of this key makes a huge difference to the security/privacy of the product. It argues that using it, someone could access data from the device, or use it to upload arbitrary code to the device for it to run. However, those are both things the user is already trusting the company with. They have to trust that the company has access controls/policies to prevent individual rogue employees doing the things described. It seems unreasonable to say that an SSH key being on the device demonstrates that those controls aren’t in place.

The email address attached to the public key, eng@eightsleep.com, to me suggests the private key is likely accessible to the entire engineering team.

This assumption is doing a lot of heavy lifting in the authors argument that this is a big deal.

Here’s an Olympic sprinter powering a toaster. He generates 0.021kWh going flat out: https://youtu.be/S4O5voOCqAQ

It’s not that you change the passwords for each website often, it’s that you use a different password for each site. That way if one site gets hacked and your password is leaked, it can’t be used to access your accounts on other sites.

Plenty of costs don’t depend on how much usage there is. If a tree falls and takes out a power line it cosrs the same whether that line was being used at 1% capacity or 100%

It’s a quite entitled view to take that they should make an effort to pass the project on. It would be very hard to build sufficient trust in a new developer quickly, and passing it on without that trust would be undermining the trust that users of the projects have placed in this dev. If I were him, I wouldn’t be staking my reputation on finding someone to take over from me if there wasn’t already an obvious candidate.

The successful fundraiser you mention looks to have had a target of $12k USD (from: https://discuss.techlore.tech/t/divestos-is-unsustainable-needs-community-support-we-sent-250-and-you-can-help-too/6660, the original page has been taken down), and was as a alternative to them taking a full time job. I’d say its a reasonable bet that money was spent on living expenses, and IMO $12k a year is much less than this level of skilled work is worth. It’s certainly not enough money to make it unreasonable to shut down the project a year later, and I doubt anyone who donated feels shortchanged by it.

Why would it need 5GHz? At most it needs to do two audio streams, which aren’t going to need lots of bandwidth

If you’re just commuting & riding flat, even-ish trails, you maybe don’t need a MTB at all. You’ll get much bigger changes in handling/comfort/speed from changing the style of bike than the marginal gains from upgrading individual parts.

What are you hoping to gain from a drivetrain upgrade? It might make more sense to look at changing the type of bike you have, rather than trying to transform a MTB to act like a hybrid/gravel/road bike

How exactly is it hashed? There aren’t that many possible phone numbers, so it might be viable to just try every valid number until you find one that matches

Blaming Spotify for this is like blaming the company that made your TV for showing you ads that are part of the broadcast. Unless Spotify makes the specific podcast you’re listening to, they’re just playing you the content someone else made, including the ads they included in that content.

It’s marked solved, but since OP didn’t post the solution:

-e uses basic regular expressions, where you need to escape the meta-characters ((|)) with a backslash. Alternatively, use extended regex with -E

$ echo a | grep -E "(a|b)"
a
$ echo a | grep -e "\(a\|b\)"
a
$ echo a | grep -e "(a|b)"
$ echo a | grep -E "\(a\|b\)"

The x390/x280 are the same era as these but smaller, so might be a better fit here. The X390 has soldered RAM though, so I’d look for the 16GB version if you can find it (there’s not much of a price difference used)