Elvith Ma'for

My current setup for this:

I own a domain - say homelab.com - and use it exclusively in my internal network.

The public DNS records do only resolve to 127.0.0.1 (as my domain holster doesn’t want me to have no A record).

In my home network I have a pihole running that resolves this domain and it’s subdomains locally (say pihole.homelab.com, proxmox.homelab.com and so on).

For HTTPs: As this server is not publicly reachable, I use the DNS API of my domain host to get a let’s encrypt certificate with the DNS-01 challenge. That way, the internal systems do not need to be exposed to the internet.

Edit: Caddy can do DNS-01, but you usually have to compile it yourself to include the plugin for your provider. To circumvent that, I’m just using plain old certbot and told Caddy to use the certs that are already on the machine

Download doesn’t necessarily mean that they dumped everything on their local PC - they could just upload everything from all those servers to an S3 bucket or whatever.

That way the bottleneck would be either the ingress of the hyperscalers or the egress of the attacked company (which probably uses the hyperscalers anyway). I probably could also do that this way with my humble home Internet connection on a semi reliable WiFi…

Yes and no. They started to limit GPOs. Some are only valid on Enterprise Licenses or Windows Server and will be ignored by your usual Windows Pro License at home. With Windows Home, you’re SOL regarding GPOs.

Also they started to migrate some of these settings to their Intune Device Management and will ignore those if not set via Intune.

Read: Companies can still disenshittify Windows to some degree, but they make it harder and harder for normal people to do so.

You wouldn’t even really question your new device on the network. Since the monitor must forward the packets from and to your PC it’s MAC address would show up in the network, but that’s expected. And good luck separating the traffic of your monitor from that of your PC if it originates from the very same MAC address as it’s basically the new network card of your PC connected via USB C. And since it could act like a bridge, it could strip out the responses to its own requests and not forward those to your PC so you don’t even see them there. On the other side it’s all TLS encrypted so nothing to see either. Heck, it could even only send its own requests when your PC is actively using the connection so that it’s less noticeable.

You might do some DPI and check what IPs you connect to but good luck finding if it really is your monitor and not some random app on your PC. If it’s using DoH, you can’t even inspect its DNS traffic to get a clue what’s going on (SNI in the handshake might still offer some clue).

Also all of the above enables tracking and spying on you covertly. Ads are quite obvious, so there’s nothing to hide there.

HDMI and USB C are used in monitors. Both can transmit more than just the image data, e.g. tunneling an Ethernet connection. Not sure if Display Port also supports that

Most people will be on Win Home which usually locks you out of gpedit. Or ignores your settings there, some even from the registry. In the recent times there are even some GPOs locked for Pro and only available on an enterprise version or Windows server…

Correct. It’s Bayrische Motoren Werke which translates to Bavarian Motor Factories or maybe Bavarian Motor Workshops.

The German Werk has several meanings:

1. The process of work/the work itself needed to finish a specific task.
2. A specific action. E.g. used to imply someone did $thing
3. A specific thing that was produced by someone (e.g. a piece of art) or even someone’s lifeworks as a whole.
4. A factory or industrial complex BUT ALSO depending on context the workers on said factory/complex.

I’m with you, but I think they (large studios/publishers) may have that data anyways from their QA or when checking system requirements. They do not need to be completely precise. Even something like „well we’re using 6 GB VRAM, 4GB of that are textures. Increasing texture quality to the next tier is roughly a 25% increase in texture size, so it will probably take an additional 1GB of VRAM“ can go a long way to help gauging whether that setting might be bad for performance or not on your machine

Instead of focusing on what is “too much settings”, i prefer game studios taking the approach of the settings of e.g. Assassin’s Creed Origins. Not only do you get the usual presets in the menu, but also some stats to your performance. E.g. how much VRAM is used/available. What’s your GPU and CPU load, RAM usage,… And for every setting you hiber over and change, you will get a (cumulative) prediction in those graphs how this combination of setting will affect which part of the system. That way you can tweak the settings more easily to your preference and your system. You may not be able to get a decent frame rate with higher poly models, but you might have enough VRAM to afford higher res textures and get better image quality that way. Having denser crowds might affect CPU load more than GPU load, so your GPU might not be the bottleneck of that feature and so on.

I usually fall asleep very quickly. Yes, having some kind of anxiety about the next day or such can keep me up and sometimes there’s a night where I just don’t seem to fall asleep instantly by myself.

Rule number one: Keep your bed the place you sleep in. Don’t do anything else in it. You can’t fall asleep because of anxiety? Get up, go somewhere else, try to deal with it/calm down and then get back to sleep.

If you don’t know why you can’t fall asleep, get up, try to wind down a bit. Maybe drink a little bit of water, go to the toilet, whatever then come back and try again. Try to keep the lights off or as dimmed as possible in that time.

Sometimes if that doesn’t help, you can use some relaxation techniques to help. My go to: Lay down, find a comfy spot. The easiest: Focus on you I this moment. How does it feel in your bed? Focus on the warm fluffy place you’re in. “Feel” how you sink in more and more into your pillow and mattress with every breath. Usually that’s enough to get me to sleep. If you can’t fall asleep doing this, go a bit further. Imagine you’re in a meadow/on a beach/wherever in nature. Feel the imaginary sun on your skin. The sand/gras/moss/… Under your bare feet. Breathe the fresh air. Focus on your imaginary sensations and observe them.

Those imaginations can be hard if you’re not used to them. It’s OK if you’re not focused on them in the beginning and that some random ideas and thoughts cross your mind and keep breaking the illusion. Find a way to deal with them. Accept that it has happened and move on. My preferred way to “block them”: imagine a red heavy curtain falling like in a theater completely blocking your view of those thoughts/images. Acknowledge that you identified and consciously ignored them, “turn around” and return your focus to your imagination.