The Linux Thread - The Autist's OS of Choice

[HahaYes]

When contacting support I was alarmed by the level of detail they could see about my network was

If you're being serious, I have some bad news for you about what your IT team can see if you work an office job. They're your bloody ISP, did you think they just take all the activity from your network and throw it in the bin or? Always assume literally everything you're doing can be seen by them. You are beyond naive if you think that shit isn't logged and monitored.

In regards to locking down routers, it's extremely common for most providers to restrict what their customers can do with hardware they provide to you, same thing with restricting what ports you can open while with them. Their angle is preventing retards throwing open whatever ports they want, getting aids on their network then bitching said ISP out about it because they're too stupid to know opening RDP/SSH/whatever they feel like with no safeguard in place is a peachy idea.

 

[Betonhaus]

If you're being serious, I have some bad news for you about what your IT team can see if you work an office job. They're your bloody ISP, did you think they just take all the activity from your network and throw it in the bin or? Always assume literally everything you're doing can be seen by them. You are beyond naive if you think that shit isn't logged and monitored.

What I meant is that they could see the internal names of every device on the network and traffic that stayed within the lan

 

[HahaYes]

What I meant is that they could see the internal names of every device on the network and traffic that stayed within the lan

I mean yeah no shit, of course they can see that on hardware they own. That should be pretty obvious.

Anyway back on thread topic, kinda oldish news now but a newer version of AcidRain was spotted last month. Looks to have been adjusted a bit to include RAID arrays and beefy storage devices as targets by adding in DM and UBI logic. Here's an article about it and its archive. For a TL;DR it's a data wiper built to nuke and brick Linux x86 IoT and networking devices with a primary focus on routers and modems.

 

[0gh]

Fully locked down, no settings and can't replace them.

We had this in my country a couple decades ago, and the tradition still remains. Everyone has the ISP router and a secondary router, though these days it's not for lockdown issues but because the ISP one is very weak.

same thing with restricting what ports you can open while with them

You have to send one of those letter-of-intent types of requests to explain why you need to use specific ports, and if they don't like your reason they will deny it.

they could see the internal names of every device on the network and traffic that stayed within the lan

of course they can see that on hardware they own

If your router is locked down, it means it has some sort of custom firmware so they could probably overwrite whatever they want and do whatever they want. Get a secondary router.

If the router is just stock firmware and you can change everything, change your default password and see if they can still see things.

You guys are talking about the US/AU/UK I assume? Haven't seen this in Europe for a long time, especially now with things like GDPR making this highly illegal.

One trick you can do to see if this really is the case is to disable wifi and plug a single device via ethernet. Tell them a different device is not working, and see if they notice it's not connected to the LAN.

 

[Slav Power]

You've obviously not used the routers some ISPs force their customers to use. Fully locked down, no settings and can't replace them.

I am so glad my major ISP doesn't lock their routers down so hard, lets me set up some basic things, and most importantly, doesn't have any issues with me replacing their router with one that I bought that has way more capabilities. I guess the fact that the fiber optic network isn't theirs helps since they gave me an ONT so replacing the router was even easier.

Haven't seen this in Europe for a long time, especially now with things like GDPR making this highly illegal.

GDPR has nothing to do with the ISP being a cunt about the router access. GDPR is meant to regulate how companies store and process your private information and gives you the ability to ask for companies to remove all your personal data from their servers. This does not apply to how the ISP handles their router that you're paying them to use as per the contract you've signed with them. This is where anti-monopoly and pro-consumer laws need to come into play.

EU has the Regulation 2015/2120 that's meant to enforce that ISP's can't force you to use their router and that you have the right to replace it with your own, but it's not effective if it's not enforced by your country's government. And in Poland, UOKiK, the government regulatory body meant to fight with anti-consumer practices like this, so far doesn't care, so a whole bunch of big name ISP's have it in their contract that you have to use their router, you have zero control over it, and if you try and change it you breach the contract.

 

[0gh]

how companies store and process your private information and gives you the ability to ask for companies to remove all your personal data

In that part I was talking about them having employees able to fully control and view your network overriding your security settings(e.g password), and logging your internal traffic without your knowledge.

#notall of course, I don't know anyone from Poland, and there's probably some other countries where things are different. I do know people from quite a wide range of european countries, and in general the ISP has no idea if you're using wifi or an ethernet cable, or how much traffic goes between your NAS and your server.

However, I hear it quite often from people especially in the US and AU that the ISP resets their password for them, or sees that they're not actually connected via ethernet.

And in Poland, UOKiK, the government regulatory body meant to fight with anti-consumer practices like this, so far doesn't care

It's good that you can disagree with things without being kicked out or assraped by the EU. Not everything they do is great, it's just recently that their policies have been genuinely pro consumer

 

[Slav Power]

In that part I was talking about them having employees able to fully control and view your network overriding your security settings(e.g password), and logging your internal traffic without your knowledge.

Yeah, the TR-069 protocol. Gives your ISP complete control over the router without you having a way of knowing they're accessing it. Good for ISP's to keep routers for your average consumer in check, bad when you know this can be abused like in case of DSP A-logs. It's one of the many reasons for why you'll want your own router.

It's good that you can disagree with things without being kicked out or assraped by the EU. Not everything they do is great, it's just recently that their policies have been genuinely pro consumer

It's not that UOKiK is disagreeing with the regulation, it's that they've been so far apathetic to the issue at hand, since the types of people that get affected by ISP's bullshittery is a very small percentage that doesn't even complain to UOKiK enough for them to do something about it. I'm sure that if UOKiK was to look into the issue they'd take proper action, they're known for being one of the few government bodies in Poland that actually does shit and does it right.

 

[indomitable snowman]

You've obviously not used the routers some ISPs force their customers to use. Fully locked down, no settings and can't replace them.

Yeah, the worst one I have seen is the Google one for Google fiber. You have to log into your Google account online. There is no local management and there about 5 settings you can change including AP name and password. If the Internet is down, I don't think you can access the router.

Thankfully it's not too difficult now to use your own router with Google fiber.

 

[Betonhaus]

One trick you can do to see if this really is the case is to disable wifi and plug a single device via ethernet. Tell them a different device is not working, and see if they notice it's not connected to the LAN

If you have something like cable internet then sometimes the modem and the router are seperate, so you can unplug the ISP provided router completely and plug your router directly into the dedicated modem

 

[TheDataHorder]

ive been autisticly making my own bootable linix distro. its got syslinux as its bootloader, linux as the kernel and busybox as the userspace.
a lot of videos about doing this use initrd images but i decided to waste a few hours getting it to boot without an initrd.
managed to do it by just slaping an init script in etc. only downside is that its formatted as fat and i cant use sybolic links as a result.
so the busybox binary is just copyed and renamed to various system utils and it takes up a lot of space.
bit shit but i cant be arsed to figure out how to swap the filesystem to ext4 so meh.
i have intentions of trying to get more working like htop and some minimal xserver named mindows or sonething up and running on it.
when its finished i'll christin it Kiwi Farms Linux or something because i think it'll be funny.

 

[Creative Username]

ive been autisticly making my own bootable linix distro. its got syslinux as its bootloader, linux as the kernel and busybox as the userspace.
a lot of videos about doing this use initrd images but i decided to waste a few hours getting it to boot without an initrd.
managed to do it by just slaping an init script in etc. only downside is that its formatted as fat and i cant use sybolic links as a result.
so the busybox binary is just copyed and renamed to various system utils and it takes up a lot of space.
bit shit but i cant be arsed to figure out how to swap the filesystem to ext4 so meh.
i have intentions of trying to get more working like htop and some minimal xserver named mindows or sonething up and running on it.
when its finished i'll christin it Kiwi Farms Linux or something because i think it'll be funny.

duplicating the busybox binary 50 times defeats the point i think

 

[Betonhaus]

ive been autisticly making my own bootable linix distro. its got syslinux as its bootloader, linux as the kernel and busybox as the userspace.
a lot of videos about doing this use initrd images but i decided to waste a few hours getting it to boot without an initrd.
managed to do it by just slaping an init script in etc. only downside is that its formatted as fat and i cant use sybolic links as a result.
so the busybox binary is just copyed and renamed to various system utils and it takes up a lot of space.
bit shit but i cant be arsed to figure out how to swap the filesystem to ext4 so meh.
i have intentions of trying to get more working like htop and some minimal xserver named mindows or sonething up and running on it.
when its finished i'll christin it Kiwi Farms Linux or something because i think it'll be funny.

just tar the install, move the file off while you format to ext4, then unzip it's contents back on. then run a command to find all the identical files and symlink them into one

 

[std::string]

duplicating the busybox binary 50 times defeats the point i think

bro let him cook, this shit sounds awesome

 

[Creative Username]

bro let him cook, this shit sounds awesome

I wonder what niche it will end up fulfilling.

 

[Kiwi2Shoes]

I wonder what niche it will end up fulfilling.

Imagine it being an OS solely made for browsing, archiving and gathering documents

 

[Betonhaus]

linux works for everything a normie does

even playing Sony Productions games?

 

[DavidS877]

even playing Sony Productions games?

That's what the PS5 is for, geez, you'd make a terrible normie.

 

[indomitable snowman]

even playing Sony Productions games?

Helldivers 2 works.

 

[Mister Uno]

Helldivers 2 works.

Surprisingly well considering that it has that really shitty anti-cheat built in. Why they use it, let alone for a PvE game, I will never understand.
Tried Cyberpunk 2077 and it runs OK, but I notice the audio crackles and performance degrades overtime. Latter of which seems to be a me only issue.

 

[Battlefield42]

GDPR is meant to regulate how companies store and process your private information and gives you the ability to ask for companies to remove all your personal data from their servers.

reminds me of how people keep asking this from me on a website im janny on. i never forward these requests and i just ban them. is it bad? yes. do i care? no.