They use networking software that’s optimized for speed and low resource use (you’d rather be spending those arm/esp cycles handling video, right?) with a slow patch cycle and little chance the user (you!) will actually get up on a ladder and install the damn patches.

Some of them will dial out and try to get their patches, but did it work? Are they still running right after the patch? You don’t know that because you don’t even know they got a patch notification, dialed out, downloaded and installed it, silently changed a default or removed a resolution you relied on and aren’t sending video anymore! Do you even want them doing that?

Even if they weren’t doing all that, there are hundreds of vulnerabilities that allow a user on the local network to silently bypass auth and view them, change settings etc.

The above isn’t because they’re crappy (they are crappy.) but because they’re using some weird .005$ cheaper esp32 variant that needs a modified binary which isnt on anyone’s radar and had support dropped 2 years ago.

I have even run into modern ip cameras that would try to proxy their feed on a public facing ip that used to be owned by the (now defunct) manufacturer but is now some weirdo just slurping up what gets sent to them.

The simple solution is to put them on a derek zoolander vlan for network devices that can’t network good, cut em off from the outside world and check for updates manually.

You will not like this answer:

An old 11” macbook air or the 12” macbook circa ‘17.

They’re everywhere, last forever, parts are cheap, they’re durable, there is good Linux support, the screens are good and they don’t stick out when you’re using them in public.

I used to have 11” as my hard upper limit of diagonal size years ago but since then I realized it’s no big deal to carry a 13” diagonal computer now that they’re all incredibly thin and light.

YOU SHOULD NOT RUN YOUR CAMERA SERVER ON YOUR DOCKERPILE HOMELAB BOX THATS HOSTING 69 DIFFERENT THINGS!

If you have the time to set it up, learn the different use cases of cameras and monitor it for failure somehow then frigate is good.

If you’re using ip cameras you 100% no foolin without question have to put them on a vlan at the very least. They are an insane liability when it comes to network security.

If I had it all to do over again I’d have done power over ethernet, put them all on their own switch that does poe injection and done vlan by the one phy going from the poe switch to the router.

People will fight me about this, but ip cameras are all pretty much the same. They make available some video stream at a preset bitrate and resolution, use built in infrared or visible lighting and offer pan, tilt and zoom (ptz) controls to authorized users. Some have motion detection and object recognition on device which may or may not be surfaced to the camera server.

I always offload object detection and classification to the server even if the camera has it on board because even on cpu image inference is “okay” and with an old gt750 nvidia card you can do much faster object detection and classification. The reason for doing it all on server is in order to get consistent results.

If you are a computer savvy person: congratulations, you picked a project that uses memory, gpu and disk space at a time when they’re all at a premium! Hell yeah!

YOU SHOULD NOT RUN YOUR CAMERA SERVER ON YOUR DOCKERPILE HOMELAB BOX THATS HOSTING 69 DIFFERENT THINGS!

Fortunately you don’t need ddr5 for this so any old server is fine. Scale your ram needs up or down depending on the cameras you’re looking for.

Consider buying one of those ten year old servers with redundant power supplies. Even if they’re both connected to the same ups (and you need the camera server on it’s own ups) you can keep going when one dies.

There are two minds regarding disks in surveillance servers. The first is “fuck it, kill the disks, who cares, they’re a wear part!” The second is “no, careful management of our disks will ensure trouble free use for years to come.” I’m of the second variety and run a zpool of small (<2tb) disks with an optane cache. The cache saves the disks from some of the drive killing random writes and reads and lets me keep running at speed when reviewing things.

When you go to put in an old gpu, make sure the plastic cowling shaped like an anime titty isn’t too big otherwise the pcie standard sized spaces in most servers won’t be able to take it.

YOU SHOULD NOT RUN YOUR CAMERA SERVER ON YOUR DOCKERPILE HOMELAB BOX THATS HOSTING 69 DIFFERENT THINGS!

I have been robbed and had to hand camera data over to the cops and can offer you some more practical advice if you’re open to it.

No it’s because there isn’t any description or additional context.

If I wanted to watch youtubes based on their titles and thumbnails I’d click on the address bar of my browser, type “youtube.com”, press enter and do it myself.

I’m not gonna pretend to be a lawyer or expert in Swedish law. My understanding is that the framework for what amounts to free speech for corporations in Sweden is much more restrictive than in the us.

So what amounts to an easy win by simply saying “we’re against it” in the us may have consequences elsewhere.

E/os isn’t graphene and doesn’t have a duress pin feature.

They suggested nym which uses a technology called a mixnet that’s almost self explanatory: you have a network that mixes up the path communication takes so that it’s harder to determine the sender.

Unfortunately that’s got a bunch of problems that basically boil down to it’s more complicated and therefore easier to screw up and the more compromised nodes an attacker has in the mixnet the easier it becomes for someone to screw up.

It’s cool tech but not trustworthy yet compared to the simple alternatives.

Also nym will let you log in with google credentials. Theres some very careful scrutiny a user would want to apply to that.

I do not think nym is a bad vpn like service thing, just that its not comparable to mullvad.

I think you did a good job characterizing the party’s immigration platform, but I don’t think that qualifies as alt right in the way it’s generally understood in the English speaking world.

That’s not to say it’s not fascist or right wing, just that I think unqualified the phrase alt right doesn’t tend to mean what that party bills itself as in addition to its immigration policy and where it seems to fit inside Swedish politics (which I don’t pretend to understand, only to recognize that it doesn’t seem to be called alt right in Swedish sources).

A couple of major differences are the English speaking alt rights strong religious current as compared to orebros explicit secularism, the alt right anti-liberal arts stance (it’s the bastion of cultural Marxism, you see) compared with orebros educational policy stance of encouraging music and arts education, the alt right urge to tear down social programs in general as opposed to orebros general position of building them up.

I wasn’t trying to suggest that orebro isn’t right wing but instead that it’s not alt right by any definition. I don’t think it even has a similar origin to the English speaking alt right having split from an existing party.

Again, that’s not to say it isn’t right, just that it’s not alt right.

The party isn’t properly alt right in any way that an anglosphere dweller would recognize.

It’s not a bad sign for the company in any way. Remember that mullvad was the vpn of choice for pedophiles distributing csam until it wasn’t.

Mullvads recent statement is also extremely carefully worded to avoid taking what the state would call a political stance. While we may recognize that not condemning the donor is political, what the state considers political is support or detraction from some party or of some speech. If mullvad were to make such a political statement it could be subject to a whole different kind of law.

It’s a famous historical novel about the stuff people did in europe around the time of ww2.

The book is kinda big and complex but one of the things that stuck out to me is all the ways people’s different beliefs were compromised in order to accomplish different goals sometimes as imperative as survival.

It’s a pretty good book.

Anyway, like I said, there is not an alternative. If a person doesn’t actually need a bulletproof vpn then some other services might work if that person is careful about using them.

Idk if it’s a good business move, some of those kitchen sink providers can offer a user a lot of value. I’m perhaps not the target demographic for that.

Completely off topic, but what kind of phone duress setup do you use? It’s not often I get to talk to someone who is primarily concerned about the state.

Have you used any of the other stuff they offer like the dns or mail thing?

I have only used their WireGuard config file -> into /etc/WireGuard simple kind of man setup.

There are not any.

If your use case doesn’t prioritize your own safety then tell me what it is and I can help you figure something out.

I’m all over the other recent thread telling people there isn’t one. Especially for what you describe there isn’t one.

I have used mullvad in a similar way and can’t recommend anything else for it.

I can recommend the book aesthetics of resistance to help apply balm to the soul of a person who wants to switch.

I have used ivpn in the past, before apps, and have some accounts for its present iteration that are not tested yet.

The biggest problem I see with ivpn is how complex its offerings are and by extension how difficult it is for even a user who has passing familiarity with VPNs like myself to make good choices.

While recently it’s been made the default, the user can still opt to create a username and password that are subpoenable pii, if that’s a word. Able to be subpoenaed.

It is not immediately clear what the security surface is on their various product tiers. I won’t go into all of them but the top features a third party firewall program called portmaster that’s developed by a different vpn company called safing. Perhaps this is useful to you. I found it to be another fractal galaxy of loose ends to tease out.

The above stuff is largely the same boat proton is in. You can set up a simple vpn account. Will you? They would love to give you a good deal on a big bundle…

Mullvad avoids this with a single product offering, no additional attack surface (except for their now ubiquitous version of the vpn app) and no way for the user to put them in a situation where they ever even have your information.

What remains to be seen is real strongly investigated results of a legal action against ivpn. Those legal actions have happened but they’ve largely been what get called “fishing trips” by exhausted public defenders in procedural dramas. There hasn’t been anything on the scale of what’s been pointed at mullvad and with the Byzantine stuff on offer by ivpn in comparison to mullvad it would be a real hoot to dig through that disclosure if and when it comes along.

It may behove you, as it once behove me (is it really spelled the same in past and future perfect tenses, like a read/read situation?) to disregard guides or recommendations and instead look into the information directly and draw your own conclusions.

For example: Often times, a guide or recommendation is formatted as a spreadsheet and the best option is the one that accumulates the most check marks across its row. That type of decision making system would give an advantage to services that support the use of the openvpn protocol since it’s one more check than those that don’t. Except for the common modern use case of openvpn is embedded edge devices like routers that may not support safe openvpn configurations.

So presence of footgun is a plus in many systems used to recommend VPNs and that’s just a simple example.

Everyone’s different and everyone’s needs are different.

There isn’t one.

If you don’t need to have a legally tested system to protect yourself and can yolo it and also understand how to navigate their sites to pay cash only and not set up a normal account then both Ivpn and proton are fine.

Don’t use air for privacy. They’re a piracy service. They’re really good at that though.

Don’t use nym for a while. Even if they were trustworthy their tech is green and relies on the same systems that proof of stake cryptocurrencies do.

Safing is a little too complicated to recommend.

Just be safe with it. I don’t trust them yet but as a pool of IPs to let ml systems proxy https through they’re fine.

There isn’t one with feature or operations parity and a similar history of success.

If you are actually concerned for your safety or legal status or something then I wouldn’t switch from them.

If you’re trying to accomplish something else there are good alternatives. Air for example is a great piracy vpn but I wouldn’t trust it for my own safety.

If you’re using wrt or pfsense or something (no word on if their tomato guide works for freshtomato devices yet), you’ll probably like ivpns router support: https://www.ivpn.net/setup/router

They even have instructions for asuswrt-Merlin which I always thought of as niche.

Hey I made a big reply about this to someone else a while back but if you trust the news and what the police say then mullvad is safe.

A long time ago they had port forwarding and pedophiles were allegedly using it to trade csam back and forth. Interpol got together with Swedish cops and did a warrant raid and came back empty handed. They had every legal ability to record user data and wiretap the servers but were unable to. Eventually Interpol pressured cdns and major providers to blacklist mullvad servers and rather than give up user information mullvad stopped offering port forwarding. A lot of people left them because of it.

If you don’t trust what the cops say or what mullvad does then you still gotta see mullvad as safe.

Why would the police put pressure on cdns to drop mullvad traffic if it’s a honeypot? That doesn’t make sense. If it’s a honeypot then why would mullvad drop port forwarding and lose tons of customers who rely on it for piracy? That also doesn’t make sense.

As far as why anyone would ever pay a company to act as a proxy vpn, it’s to anonymize the traffic. Some vpn companies don’t have “accounts” with username (tied to email) and passwords, it’s just one secret, the account number. They might also take anonymous cash payment as well. In that case they can’t really do anything to give you up because they don’t know who you are.

Like anything else it’s a negotiation of what degree of trust you accept. Many small metal shops around here are run out of a commercial type building next to the owners house. My favorite small fabricator is in a little building nowhere near his house (I found out because the neighbors dog was running loose and came up to get a pet and said “is this your dog?” And he said “I don’t even live on this road”). If you trust the people you do business with to not bother you at home then there’s no problem with them knowing your home address. If they never know it to begin with then you don’t need to consider or accept that level of trust.