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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: January 17th, 2026

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  • A white hat hacker (also called penetration testers) has permission from the target to hack them. And if they succeed in hacking them, they write a report about how they did it, this allows the target to fix the security vulnerability, and therefore avoid getting hacked in the future. The white hat hacker of course gets paid for this service. Because they have permission, this is completely legal. Some companies also offer “bug bounties”, this is essentially the company offering an open invitation for anyone to hack them, as long as they promise not to break or steal anything, and to also report their findings to the company.

    A black hat hacker does not have permission from the target, they break in and steal data, break things, or sometimes just gather information. They can then black mail the target, sell the data or try to monetize their services in many other ways. This is of course illegal.

    Fiinally there are grey hat hackers. These people blend the above two. These are people with noble intentions, but they don’t have permission from the targets, but they still report their findings anyway, or in some cases even fix the security issues themselves. This is still illegal, because they don’t have permission, but in many cases the target doesn’t want to press charges, because the grey hat hacker tried to help without expecting to get paid. There was a case many years ago where some regular printers has a massive security vulnerability, which allowed hackers to break into the network the printer was on, and use the printer to hack other things. And since no one ever patches their printers, they were left vulnerable. A grey hat hacker took it upon themselves to break into all the printers and force the printers to update, fixing the vulnerability. And since the people who had the printers didn’t have any idea about the vulnerability or the hack, they didn’t press charges… Needless to say, grey hat hacking is very dangerous, because your good intentions, and benevolent actions might still land you in jail if the company or person you are trying to help doesn’t like it.



  • While PETG certainly has a lot more moisture problems than PLA, PLA can still give you a lot of grief if it isn’t dry enough. Stringing, oozing, uneven extrusion, and many other weird problems. I would definitely try to dry the filament…

    But this could also look a bit like over/under-extrusion… Have you tried calibrating your e-steps?



  • The containers in my setup are running in a Kubernetes cluster. My Kubernetes cluster consists of 3 physical servers (one old desktop computer and 2 Intel NUCs).

    On that cluster I run many different things, Jellyfin, Plex, *arr-stack, downloader, Immich, zigbee2mqtt, home-assistant, audiobookshelf, calibre-web, Forgejo, ArgoCD, Homebox, Paperless, Factorio servers, Velero, and a bunch of other stuff.

    Because I run so many different things on the same 3 physical machines, using containers, then there’s no way to split this into VLANs.

    I could make a “kubernetes” VLAN, but everything else on my network would need to be connected with it anyway. All my computers, phones and TVs need to access Kubernetes (Jellyfin), and Kubernetes need to access everything else such as EV charger, heat pump, and the power monitoring in my power meter. Therefore I need to control my networking at a different level.



  • That depends a lot on what you do with them…

    VLANs work on a layer where devices can either reach each other or they cannot.

    Let’s say you have your main desktop computer in the “main” VLAN, and your Jellyfin server in the “jellyfin” VLAN, and a third server for your home-assistant in the “home-assistant” VLAN, and finally some IOT devices in the “iot” VLAN.

    You connect the VLANs as follows:

    • “main” can reach the Internet, but you also want to access your jellyfin and home-assistant, so you connect it to those two VLANs (“jellyfin” and “home-assistant”)
    • “Jellyfin” can reach the Internet (because you want updates), but Jellyfin doesn’t need to reach anything else on your local network… However since you already connected “main”, then “jellyfin” can reach it.
    • “home-assistant” needs to reach the Internet, but also the “iot” VLAN where some of the devices it controls resides. You also already connected “main” because you wanted to access home-assistant from your computer.
    • “iot” is blocked from reaching the internet, and it’s only connected to the “home-assistant” VLAN because home-assistant needs to reach it.

    Remember that all connected VLANs much be bidirectional.

    Now someone compromises your Jellyfin. They now control and has access to everything on the Jellyfin server, but they also have network reachability to your main computer, because your “main” and “home-assistant” VLANs are connected. They can now try to exploit your main computer.

    If they are successful in exploiting your main computer, then they can use your main computer to jump to the home-assistant server because again, these two VLANs are connected. And you likely have the credentials for accessing home-assistant available on your main computer somewhere.

    Now they are on your home-assistant server, and they can now start trying to exploit your IOT devices.

    If VLANs are connected, they don’t care which direction the traffic flows.

    If you want to control traffic flow directions you need a firewall. A firewall can sit between VLANs and block traffic coming from one to other, but not the other to the one.







  • Well… That depends entirely on your threat model…

    In my setup, the backup is encrypted locally, and then uploaded to Backblaze. If I leak my encryption key, then yes, Backblaze and any state actor that can compel Backblaze, might be able to read my backup (and the same goes for an encryption vulnerability). But since the connection to access the backup is also authenticated, the rest of the public would not be able to read my backup. If I leak my access credentials, then everyone could get my encrypted backup data, but not be able to decrypt it. Of course if I leak both the access credentials and the encryption key, then yes anyone that obtains both can read my backup.

    Many regular people use Microsoft Onedrive or Google Drive, which offers even less protection, but it’s certainly sufficient and well enough protected to keep your dissertation protected.

    In most backup services you have the option to choose what gets backed up, and what does not. But sure, it entirely depends on who you want to protect yourself from.

    If your main concern is state actors, then yeah… You probably shouldn’t use something like Backblaze. You should keep everything on your own hardware. And convince a friend or some family to have a NAS sitting somewhere that can host your backup destination.

    For my case I’m mostly concerned about data continuity (not losing data). But privacy is certainly also a concern, and here I have chosen to believe that the encryption is sound enough, and that my ability to keep my encryption key safe, is sufficient for the data it protects.