packet_nerd

Not surprised at all. This is the way enterprise systems are.

It's a little depressing to go to work and try to deal with the atrocious stuff I have to deal with, and then think how much of my life is online at companies probably just as bad as my own.

The Pi Hole is blocking at the DNS level, which comes with pros and cons compared to a browser based ad blocker. You should absolutely run both. The Pi Hole can catch ads in apps and other places your browser based ad blocker wouldn't, and the browser blocker will catch any ads that don't have their own DNS lookup. Also the Pi Hole acts as a local DNS cache, which will speed things up slightly in some cases.

I always try to use a real looking answer. This site makes it easy to pick:

https://www.randomlists.com/

Wouldn't a Google Auth type TOTP be ideal for over the phone? Is there anyone doing this?

It could be the same one I use for 2FA to the website. Or, an entirely offline flow would work too where they sent a dead-tree mail with the shared secret in QR code format.

> You can block DNS traffic sent to servers configured in custom hosts files

You're thinking of configuring a custom DNS server, which is not related to the hosts file. The hosts file replaces DNS so there would be no network traffic to block.

Theoretically a kid who really wants his porn could manually add the name-to-IP entries for his favorite sites to his local hosts file, completely bypassing any DNS based filtering you might have on the network.

Yes. So they are trying to tell me how to be more sustainable, and make a profit on the side? Which objective is more important to them?

Edit: I believe that analyzing the biases and incentives underlying the choices and abstractions presented to us is an important part of what it means to be an intelligent human being. Ads are not reliable sources of information, as the company is incentivized not to inform you, but to sell to you. There are many better sources of good ideas than ads.

> "Do you need a hat shaped exactly like a golf ball? At Dave's Golf Ball Hats we sell six sizes!"

The implicit message here is buy buy buy. "There's cool hats shaped like golf balls. Everyone's getting one! I need one too!"

Do I really need a hat shaped like a gold ball? Do I need any of the crap our materialistic society says I need?

Ads like this are trying to shape my expectations about myself, the meaning and purpose of my life, and what I need to feel fulfilled; and all for someone else's benefit, not my own. I have made it a personal goal to reject consumerism, and instead live a simple, sustainable, and efficient life. Rejecting ads (electronically blocking where possible, mentally blocking everywhere) is part of how I'm trying to achieve that goal.

Any company trying to sell me something that I didn't seek out myself is my enemy.

I care and would pay. Same with websites. especially if the experience was easy, scalable, and protected my privacy and anonymity.

The Android (and iPhone) apps have always been more trouble than their worth, IMO.

I always manage my passwords on my computers, and type in on phones as needed. Simpler and just works.

To easy the pain of typing passwords, I always follow a consistent format that's easier. Example:

7,#/T8z%FS%zht6S

ctaq.zwjd.qnbu.ut1A

The first one is terrible to type on a little Android keyboard whereas the second is a breeze, and still perfectly respectable as far as password strength goes.

> more polished user experience

I'm forced to use LastPass at work, and personally find KeePass to be a much better user experience.

KeePass is more secure than LastPass, not less. I've tried a couple different password managers, but always come back to KeePassXC with a simple auto-type workflow. My reasons:

A. The auto-fill extensions don't work on enough sites to make it annoying (maybe ~20%). Auto-type is a more consistent workflow for me.

B. Lastpass (and friends) browser extension doesn't do anything for desktop apps, SSH sessions, or anything outside the browser. You have to copy and paste one at a time.

C. I like all my passwords to be a particular format because it frequently happens that I have to type them in manually (Phone, vCenter console, BIOS, etc.) and I just like that to be easy. (I use 5 groups of 4 lower case separated by periods, with one number and one upper case letter in the last group. Still very strong but also manageable to type into an iPhone).

D. I like to record more than just passwords (the email I used, answers to security questions (always random, but legit looking), bank and credit card details, stuff like that). The KeePass UI for keeping those kinds of notes is just so much cleaner, simpler, and better than anything else.

E. KeePassXC has first class support for Yubikeys.

To add to this, here's a few example complex text layout languages in no particular order: Thai, Khmer, Arabic, Hindi, Hebrew, Burmese, Tibetan, Punjabi, Sanskrit, and many many others.

Many millions (billions?) of people won't be able to use your terminal in their language.

The Haas cached second load is slower than the first. You can't blame that one on execs already having the assets...

My parents are Christians. There are a few Christian denominations/groups/cults with strict food rules, but definitely fringe.

For the particular extreme religious community (almost cult) I grew up in, meat eating was a sin (more or less). Financial support for a company wasn't really a big deal, it was more about keeping their bodies "pure" for God. I even knew a rancher who raised cattle to sell, but wouldn't eat any kind of animal products himself.

> huge support and network burden

I don't think anyone on Linux setting up and tweaking WireGuard to integrate with CloudFlare's free network expects to be able to call up support and be like "hey, I need help debugging my custom client." :-) As far as network burden, you're just concerned that we'll be using too much traffic?

Having Cloudflare's weight behind Wireguard seems like a great thing for an open decentralized Internet.

I've tried to use RSS before, but the big hangup for me is most sites don't put the full article in the feed, just a title and summary. To me having to go back and forth just kills the whole thing.

My experience with these kinds of people is they react badly when anything new seeps into their worlds.

I'd always heard that mixed race children are a bit taller (and smarter?) on average than their parents. I wonder if it's true?

My family lived in Thailand when I was teenager, and this is how it worked there until just before we left (around 2013) there was a new law or something, and you actually had to physically go to a place, fill out a form, and show your passport just to get the stupid sim unlocked. At least in the US you can do it online or through the phone.

> huge pain

The current system is a huge pain too...

I have 700+ accounts recorded in my password manager. Organizing, managing, occasionally changing passwords on important ones, etc. etc. takes a non-trivial amount of time and dedication!

And it's way way harder for many people who never got a system down, something I'm reminded of every time I visit my grandparents.. :-) Their main email account used to be an old ISP one that they'd payed for for years, and for whatever reason (I couldn't figure out why) it stopped working with some sites. Without that email account they lost access to a bank account, several credit card accounts, and some other stuff, and I ended up walking them through setting up a gmail account and calling in to change the email associated with all those accounts. Well, I used their landline phone to help set up the gmail account, and this year they moved, no longer have that phone number, and lost access to that account. I tried to help recover it, but wasn't successful. Guess what... they had to repeat the process for the bank and all those credit cards.

> reasonably anonymous

The signup process has always been quite invasive for me. Is it possible get a phone in the states without handing over your SS, name, and DoB? I've never tried; what happens if you give bogus info?

Here's an idea that I thought of..

Suppose WebAuthn was the standard authentication scheme everywhere. People used a series of tokens (Yubikeys, phone apps, etc.) with private keys which they use to authenticate to services. The government runs a department where you present them proof of your identity and the public keys from your Yubikeys/whatever, and they would publish a cryptographically signed electronic message which read the equivalent of "the owner of the private keys associated with public keys a, b, and c is a real person"). Then, when you signed up for an account at Twitter, or wherever, they could quickly check that published list and know that you where a real person.

Advantages, you own your own private keys and completely manage your online identity. The government doesn't have any control over where you log in, or who you sign up for accounts with. Also, you can remain anonymous to the site you sign up to. They can check that you're a real person and only signed up once, without actually knowing your real name or other details.

Haven't so far, but I know a real number is required to sign up, so who knows how long it will work..

There has got to be a better way to do online identity as a society! The most promising ideas I've heard about are WebAuthn and Estonia's digital identity system. How long is it going to take to get out of the dark ages and get this right?

One thing I'm sure of, uploading a scan of my passport to every website is not an appealing thought. Besides the inconvenience, do I really want my passport spread around on dozens/hundreds of different high-value servers run by who-knows-who?

I don't remember honestly, but I was looking for a site to do my taxes when I saw the last one. I didn't finish signing up. It mentioned not supporting "voice over IP" numbers, or something to that effect. I wish I'd taken a screenshot.

My wife and I cancelled our phone services a while back to save money since we rarely if ever have to call anyone and just use messaging to keep in touch with each other and friends.

What are people like us supposed to do?

I do have a Google voice number, but I noticed one or two places recently that won't accept that anymore.

Isn't there a 900MHz band with similar restrictions to 2.4GHz? That would be a bit longer range.

HF digital modes are very common on the shortwave bands. Look up PSK31, etc.. You can convert any SSB (voice) HF radio to digital by connecting it to a computer's audio card.