Privacy

After months of disappearing, I’m able to come back blogging, with A LOTS of drafts. I’ll be updating more details about my current situation in a more dedicated post. But for now, let’s talk something technological interesting. Dell Optiplex 3050 Micro has been my ideal open source desktop PC for quite a while, probably since the first time when Libreboot added its support. Recently, I got the chance to have one of these as an upgrade from my older mini PC build. ...

Background Last month, Cisco researchers detected over 1,000 Ollama instances within the first 10 minutes using Shodan scanning on 11434 port. Other services such as vLLM/llama.cpp/LangChain on 8000, LM Studio on 1234, GPT4All on 4891, are also identified. Later, Censys found 10.6K Ollama instances publicly available online, and 1.5K of these instances respond to prompts. That poses not only a great security risk of RCE, injection and poisoning, but also possible to expose private chat memory via unauthorized prompting. ...

Recently, YouTube is messing with user disobedience again. For the sake of that, FreeTube has been updating with fix multiple times. Although FreeTube has fixed the API block done by YouTube, I have to deal with a new IP block from my end as its aftermath. “YouTube has blocked your IP address from watching videos. Please try switching to a different VPN or proxy.” There are many ways to get around this IP block. Because I think switching VPN server is too heavy just for this, I would like to use a proxy. ...

Recently, I started sending/receiving documents to/from untrusted sources. In my threat model, this requires extra operational security to prevent privacy exposure and security risk. Since the offical guide is not so detailed for Windows, I decided to write one while installing on a Windows 11 LTSC. First, in Windows Terminal/PowerShell, run wsl --install to setup WSL2. Read my previous post for more detail. Because the latest verisons of Dangerzone 0.9.1 and docker desktop 4.44.3 have unsolvable bug (reports unknown error '2'), I have to choose the ealier version which works properly. ...

Recently, I have encountered a very rare out-of-print book that I decided to save it for the world with modern technology. Because I don’t have a real scanner, I tested all sorts of scanner android apps that are open source. OpenNoteScanner not working on every phone, auto cropping not working properly, capture fast with postprocessing, high quality result. OpenScan no auto cropping PDF-Doc-Scan auto cropping not working with book at all docus not so good auto cropping, no retouch CleanSCAN no auto cropping OSS-DocumentScanner with functional auto cropping most of the times, has filter and postprocessing but at cost of slow capture, very high quality result It ends up OSS-DocumentScanner is the best of all. To make things easier, I customized the best gamma, contrast and filter as default, based on my lighting and book condition. ...