Home surveillance systems debate An overview of the debate Home surveillance systems are everywhere now.  As of October 2022, nearly half of American households with broadband internet had a home security system, networked camera, video doorbell, or combination of them. That is a lot of cameras! The data is not stored in your home, it is in the cloud. Even more frightening is that most of the time it is not encrypted with a key that only you have. The debate over privacy and security when it comes to home surveillance systems is being decided by large tech firms and those who want ..read more

  Self-Hosting at Home When many people talk about self-hosting they are talking about a private server on the internet which is rented by you from a company that has servers. I am going to tell you about another way to think about self hosting. Do it at home right on your local network. It used to be that doing this required a great deal of technical knowledge (or hiring someone and having them on call if something broke), but this is no longer the case. There are programs out there to make things much easier. Yes, you do need to follow the setup steps and sometimes they are tedious. I t ..read more

  Here is a collection of some of the cool tech that you need to take a look at. The list will be updated to keep it current. All Metal 7.0 inch Touch Screen Ultra-Light Mini Laptop At $449.99 (at the time of writing) this little laptop is one to put into your tool  kit. The laptop comes with 12GB of RAM and a large 960GB SSD, providing plenty of memory and storage space. It comes with Windows 11 Pro which is nice, but it easily can be reformatted with a Linux distribution of your choice.  You can connect to various media via built-in WIFI, built-in Bluetooth, USB3.0, mini HDMI ..read more

What is Threat Modeling for Individuals? Threat modeling is a way of thinking about risk. It is not all technological solutions but they do play a role in thinking about how to mitigate or lessen the threats. When you think about defense, start with thinking about what you’re defending, and how valuable it is. Lets start off with an example that you might already have in your house. Using smart speakers in your house (Alexa, Echo or Google). Here are some of the things I thought of while visiting this issue: What do you want to protect? My Location Privacy Search History Voice Recording ..read more

  Home Network Diagram Part of the Home Cybersecurity series Once we have a good inventory of what is on our network, it is time to draw a diagram of what we have to get a good picture. Visualizing your home network with a home network diagram will help you to plan and visualize what you have on your network. A typical home network is fairly simplistic. You have the router that your ISP gave you which sometimes is also WIFI. You have two networks: the first is wireless, sometimes you also have a small switch and a wired network. Here is a diagram of what we are talking about:   &nbs ..read more

Step-by-Step Home Network Inventory Guide Article Two – Home Cybersecurity series Taking an inventory of your home network is the first step in getting your network under control. There is an old adage that you can’t control what you don’t know about, and the same is true for your network. You have to know what is plugged into it to manage it. This article is a step-by-step home network inventory guide. Take a look at your network as it stands right now. Take a pen and notebook with you because we are going to start writing things down.   Starting your home network inventory     ..read more

Home Cybersecurity updated I have wanted to update my network cybersecurity and tell you all of the things that I have learned. This will be a series of updated in-depth articles that will help you to setup your own cybersecurity in your own home. I know that this is going to be an ambitious project, but it seems that it is needed for many people and would be apprecieated by some. Take a moment to comment and to sign up for my newsletter (Just monthly – no spam). Here are some of the things that we will cover in detail to make your home cybersecurity much more bullet proof. 1. Finding everythi ..read more

Organizing for 2024 at the command line Yes, you can use the power of the command line to help you to get ready for 2024. What I wanted was to make a file with all of the months in a few places (My overall schedule, Bills and Financial and such). I did it with one command! Let me walk you through it.   Here are the steps: I went into my home directory and then into Documents. I made a new directory named 2024 Here is the “magic command” to create directories for all the months at once (IFS=’;’; mkdir(1) $(locale mon)) With a simple ls command we can see that they are all there! I ca ..read more

Celebrating 50 Years of Ethernet: The Backbone of Modern Connectivity On May 22, 1973, a groundbreaking technology was born that would forever revolutionize the way we connect and communicate. Ethernet, the underlying technology facilitating the transfer of data across networks, has now reached its momentous 50th anniversary. It was invented by Robert Metcalfe, David Boggs, Chuck Thacker, and Butler Lampson at Xerox Corporation’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). This article celebrates 50 years of Ethernet! Why is this still important now? The main reasons are: Ethernet is the backbone of the ..read more

  Why do i want to randomize my MAC Address? Giving out your MAC address is telling people information about your computer. Knowing information gives away your privacy and gives an adversary something to go on in breaking into your system. This is not a good idea. So, giving them a made up MAC address gives away nothing. This is why you should randomize your MAC address. What is a MAC address? Just as an IP address is your “Logical address”, a MAC address is a “Physical address” which is tied to your network card. It can be Ethernet or WiFi.  So you could have two different MAC addre ..read more