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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 18th, 2023

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  • Do not bring your normal personal devices to China. They are notorious for injecting spyware on foreign devices at every opportunity. Use a freshly formatted device and create all new accounts to use with it.

    Regarding services: do not use self-hosted services unless you you spin up fresh, isolated instances of your services for use while abroad and spin them down afterwards, including formatting any OS they were hosted on.

    Regarding VPN: because we are assuming that any device used in China is compromised, do not connect to your VPN unless you have set up a segregated VLAN and are connecting through a VPN server instance created specifically for use while in China.

    Basically, assume anything you use in China is compromised. And assume your connections are being monitored. And assume that any device you are connecting to from China is at risk of being compromised. So everything needs to be segregated from the rest of your network and set up specifically to be deleted after you’re back home.


  • It is important to note that while a FICO score is roughly equivalent to “trustworthiness”, the three credit agency scores (Equifax, TransUnion, and Experian) are NOT meant to reflect your trustworthiness directly. Rather, they are specifically designed to inform lenders of your profitability for them.

    It’s an important distinction because having a an outstanding payment history alone won’t improve these scores, if you aren’t utilizing available credit and maintaining some running balance with lenders.

    Basically, if you’re just going to borrow money and never pay any interest on the loans, you aren’t actually a source of profit and therefore aren’t a desirable customer for lenders and creditors




  • Just a heads up, people should be wary of playtron to a degree: the CEO is a guy named Kirt McMaster. Anyone from the Android enthusiast community may know him as the guy who convinced the creator of CyanogenMod to incorporate (becoming Cyngn) and then drove the company into the ground chasing skinning and theming revenue, and wouldn’t even allow the community to keep the cyanogen brand (they had to rebrand it to LineageOS)

    Kirt sucks. He’s a terrible leader and a terrible businessperson. I’m sure there are plenty of great people involved in playtron but with him at the helm of the company I am not expecting it to end well







  • My solution for this type of situation is MicroBin running on my home network from a non-standard port, with a port knocker to open and close the port when needed.

    My router handle DDNS so I can always contact my home network easily. I port-knock to trigger an iptables command on the router to forward traffic to the MicroBin host.

    I also have my phone set up to connect via openvpn to my home network so that I can remotely do things like start and stop services, set port forwarding rules, etc.