The Core

And now my entire home network is forced through multiple PiHoles, whereas before only certain segments that I personally used had the PiHole love. And I tightened the PiHole down using internal DNS with Unbound. No more DNS calls to Google or Cloudflare. The PiHoles are really essential...my TV seems to be lonely as it appears desperate to call home.

I've read that the newer "smart" TVs know when they're being blocked and will send out gibberish domain calls when they realize they can't phone home. They know they're being blocked.

The thing we have to watch for now is encrypted DNS calls that bypass the PiHole. Some Google devices will do this already. They can bypass network DNS this way to make their precious call home.  Ever wonder why Google and the other big boys are pushing for this secure DNS?

Then there's malware that can run its own encrypted DNS that can use this same functionality to call home through your network protections... It's getting more difficult to keep up.

What's this Streisand stuff about?

A lot of people like to run a VPN with their PiHole, and then have the VPN use the PiHole for DNS queries as well. Probably a fun addition, but not necessary for the PiHole on your network.

Problem here is that in order to be useful you'd have to get everyone to move from the Google/Microsoft/Amazon world and adopt this. I like the idea of controlling your info, but I don't see mass adoption in this project's near future. Would we just be putting our eggs into another seemingly altruistic basket? Why not? They seem to have a "don't be evil" philosophy...wait, I've heard that somewhere before...

Why I’m done with Chrome

A few weeks ago Google shipped an update to Chrome that fundamentally changes the sign-in experience. From now on, every time you log into a Google property (for example, Gmail), Chrome will automatically sign the browser into your Google account for you. It’ll do this without asking, or even explicitly notifying you.

I was trying to use Pis for all sorts of applications, but I've found that although they're cheap and have a small footprint, they're just not powerful enough for a lot of home networking systems if they get any use. Been looking at Intel NUCs to handle some more demanding functions.

Japan is an island nation, and they're relatively homogeneous, so this sort of reaction is fairly common. The idea of Japanese who are not ethnically Japanese is still quite new.  The whole concept of what it is to be Japanese is based on a centuries old mindset, and you really can't get most people to think otherwise. I gave up on that long ago.

Hmm. They were acquired by Cisco, and to get the 'free' version you have to provide them with a ton of private information so that you can run thru the 30 trial of the more advanced feature set...before it will revert to the simpler free version.

Might look into OpenOTP or other open source alternatives before I would go with Duo as there's no syncing feature on any of them that I can see.

No, I haven't tried this one as I've got my InoReader_(paid) and Feedly_(lifetime) readers. Just thought that it was interesting that this one claimed to make anything into a feed. That could help with those pesky no-feed sites.