It's not about scams, it's about commercial telemarketing calls.
Scams have been heavily hit in January when the French regulator mandated the telcos to implement a complete block of spoofed phone numbers (it's not an actual hard block, but unauthenticated calls will be market as "private number" which are ignored by most people already).
There will always be scammers who register an actual phone number to run their scams, but this rule will at least stop the constant phone harassment that made everyone unplug their landline phone.
> the French regulator mandated the telcos to implement a complete block of spoofed phone numbers
That is really great. I've had a lot of trouble with calls from spoofed numbers a couple of years ago (it ended when I installed a scam blacker on my phone), and when I looked into it at that time, my impression was that phone companies couldn't block spoofed numbers. On the other hand, if the scam blocking app can block them, there clearly must be some way to detect them.
Phone companies need to do a better job protecting their customers against this abuse.
The problem with spoofing is that there are legitimate uses of it. It's probably solvable by only allowing spoofing of numbers you actually own (so if a hospital has 20 phone lines, they can spoof their publicly posted phone number, but random spammers can't spoof your neighbour's phone number).
The fact that the phone companies haven't done this or much else yet goes to show how little they care.
> Telecommunications operators must block calls terminating from the public
international interface when the calling party number is clearly incorrect or the calling party number is a Finnish telephone number and the situation does not involve roaming as referred to in section 7.2.1.
It's not that they don't care, it's just that the protocol behind it was never designed for it.
Compared for example to email where when you want to send email to somebody, you discover its MX settings on the DNS level and then send it directly and the receiver can verify are you allowed to send those emails. With phone calls it's basically a network of interconnects so I'm sending the call directly to my provider but that provider to reach the destination has multiple steps and they have to trust each other with the numbers signalling. Compare it to a regular snail mail where everybody can write anything as a sender.
What most of the providers are switching to now is for enduser the case is if the phone number that you want to signal is not registered with us, you are not allowed to signal it. Which is fine and covers most of the cases but imagine that you are a business and have multiple providers And you have boughta number block with one provider and another one is offering you better minute price for outgoing calls. Or you want to have a forwarding to your cell phone number. Or you want to signal your number when you're calling prospects from CRM. The regulation usuall differs from country to country, but most allow you to signal any number that you own with any provider that you use. And this is correct, but the problem is verification.
Whatever the issue is, they should figure out a system that can't be abused by scammers. Failing that, I'm totally fine with also blocking companies that have their own reasons to spoof numbers.
All of the problems are solvable though, and if they weren't then it would still be better to make a hospital just use a few different numbers rather than allowing a billion dollar scam industry to operate unchecked.
>when the French regulator mandated the telcos to implement a complete block of spoofed phone numbers (it's not an actual hard block, but unauthenticated calls will be market as "private number" which are ignored by most people already).
This is good but not far enough. They should not show up as "private number" they should simply now show up at all. After some time, any networks that even allow spoofed outgoing calls should be disconnected from the phone system.
I store my pictures on a NAS jail. That directory is mounted read-only on another jail with NC and Memories. I like the guarantee that my gallery app cannot alter my files.
Also, many gallery apps don't allow browsing a directory tree. You have one level of "albums" and that's it. Memories support it. I have pictures 5-6 directories deep, following a system that makes sense to me.
I use wireguard as my main VPN to connect to my homelab from my phone and my laptops.
I also have an OpenVPN as a backup option, running behind sslh.
My same port on my router (443) serves both a webserver hosting photos, and that OpenVPN instance. This allows me to VPN into my home in most firewalled office networks.
i’m assuming because of the “web server hosting photos”. Probably Immich if i had to guess?
tailscale is fine if you’re somewhat tech savvy, but it’s annoying to show all your friends and family how to “correctly” access your web server. Too much friction. First download the tailscale app, sign in, blah blah. Then you also are unnecessarily bogging down everyone’s smartphone with a wire guard VPN profile which is…undesirable.
I like tailscale and use it for some stuff. But for web servers that i want my whole family (and some friends) to easily access, a traditional setup makes much more sense. The tradeoff is (obviously) a higher security burden. I protect the web apps in my homelab with SSO (OIDC), among other things.
I prefer to gatekeep "entry points" with Tailscale. A server can have HTTP/S exposed to the world, but its SSH can stay behind Tailscale to enable defense in depth.
Keeping Tailscale as the only security layer will be foolish of course, but keeping the entry points hidden from general internet is a useful additional layer, if you ask me.
As a matter of principle, I like keep the number of open ports to a minimum. Let it be SSH or VPN, it doesn't matter. I have been burned enough times.
I've applied the same principal to my network. Though, I do have plans to re-open some additional ports beyond just SSH / VPN.
Thinking through how I would achieve this introduced me to the concept of a DMZ-zone. The DMZ places publicly accessible services in a highly locked down environment.
DMZ is a very old concept, and applying it is easy when everything is in a single room, connected to a single network, and everything can be isolated there.
When the network is distributed on multiple sites, things get exponentially harder if you don't own a dark fiber from site to site and have essentially a single network.
I personally manage enough servers to scratch that itch, so I yearn for simplicity. If Tailscale gives me that isolation for free (which it does), I'd rather use that for my toy network rather than an elaborate multi-site DMZ setup.
My requirements were:
- ability to sync the TODO lists between devices (web and android).
- ability to have sub-items, so that I can organise my complex lists into magnificent trees of tasks. I sometimes have 5 levels of details on some travel checklists.
- ability to handle periodic tasks, and ability to create a task and hide it until a specific date (topics for my future self)
- ability to be self-hosted.
I'm now using Vikunja, and Tasks.org for the Android side. That setup has worked for me wonderfully for a couple years now. Vikunja has a ton of features I don't use, and that's fine. They don't get in the way.
You shouldn't root Graphene, it breaks its security model and is certainly the reason why Revolut doesn't work on your phone. It works like a charm on mine.
OPDS (Open Publication Distribution System) is protocol in the background. Jellyfin has a plugin for OPDS and works by simply dropping a file in specified directory, but it doesn't support multiple catalogues (i.e. one per library/directory).
Protocol is atom based, chatgpt was able to make a custom OPDS server for my needs within minutes, it took another hour or two to fix and customize generated code.
I document technical things on my blog and hardly anyone reads it.
But later on when I need that thing again, I just go there and I have the perfect documentation available for the topic (it's perfect since I wrote it hahaha).
I used to do that, now I just keep a OneNote with the things that would have been blog entries once upon a time - it's available across all my devices and I can export it to PDF when I do need to share something with someone - and I don't have to worry about someone defacing or hacking the site hosting it.
Same. I keep a couple of blogs on different topics and try to write up any challenge I come across. Not only does it help to cement ideas in my head and expose areas I'm foggy about, but I've referred back to my previous experience this way countless times.
I don't know. I stopped bothering to look, since it's never going to drive income or anything. It's worth it to me because 1) I get to help others, which brings satisfaction and 2) I can read what I wrote from anywhere and send someone a link if necessary.
This happens to me all the time. I could make notes about how I did something and lose them, or I could spend an hour or two extra and convert it into a blog post, and I'll be able to refer to it over and over again.
Same, I created https://softuts.com exactly for this, to write fixes to technical issues I encounter, when I can't find another solution via a Google search.
There starts to be some traffic, I am happy to assume that any person visits my blog for a fix will probably save a good amount of debugging time.
Your intention is still to pass on the knowledge though regardless of traffic otherwise why even publish if it’s just for you? What is the difference from the Documents dir at that point?
I can stay in my browser and use Google, DuckDuckGo, or even my on-site search (I use Apache Solr, I'm a little weird compared to the typical hosted blog) and don't have to go into some webapp or search on some local notes app.
I can also add permalinks to any of the posts from anywhere, and share them in public documentation or bug reports and such, a handy feature.
I do not understand the need to never-leave-the-browser especially with modern window tiling, but I respect it as a preference that other people have. As for syncing I just use file sharing (Syncthing), I hardly live collaborate on documents and if I did everyone else in the group ended up doing the typing. Otherwise it’s write then get reviewed then reiterate. So unfortunately nothing about the online text editors really strike my fancy. I also find the browser almost too distracting and often get sidetracked while using it for research during writing time.
If you nominally have an audience (if you feel like you do, regardless of the reality), you'll perform differently, same as with speaking. This may be a good thing.
That new law is not going to change the number of spam calls most people will get, as they're not from properly registered businesses.