Security

A little while ago I got a disgusting ad; or highly targeted, not that there is a real difference, so I got a VPN. The VPN was doing its job but the ads I got from that point forward were a horrid mess, so I setup a pihole system.

The pihole is amazing at blocking ads, but the occasional one would still get through. So I searched out how to stop them all, adding more ad lists was the answer. Over 4 million domains later I see practically no ads, I am hoping that there are no trackers getting through but when I turn on my TV and look at the ads being blocked wow! The “smart” TV really wants to get to know me, I believe I wrote about it before. YouTube was getting around the pihole though sad face.

I got looking at my DHCP addresses, I don’t use my ISP’s router functions because those things are rarely updated and therefore insecure. There where a few things on there that I didn’t recognize so I checked them out, one happened to be something from another ISP and how it got there I don’t know. It was removed as well as the other unknown things, we will have to see what stops working if anything.

I got reading stuff about tracking and the dangers; hence the 4 million plus urls in my pihole, while writing this I checked out the https://haveibeenpwned.com website again and yes my Gmail account had been pwned several times over. My password got changed (for the first time in 6 years, I know that’s just disgusting) and I want to find a way to get the Google to force me to change it more frequently, with no luck. I have decided to stop using Gmail, not because it has been pwned but because the Google reads it all to try and sell me ads. I have all of those emails forwarded to an Apple hide my address and an automatic reply to people saying I no longer check it. As of yesterday all of my Google photos where deleted and all of my files have almost been moved out of Google Drive. If the Google didn’t own YouTube I would say ta ta Google but instead I pay for YouTube premium; so I don’t see the the mish mash of ads, the Google is still trying to sell me to advertisers don’t get me wrong but I am going to make them work for it.

I had decided to take a break from Facebook a little while ago. I just deleted it from my phone to stop getting those notifications, I will continue using messages to talk to friends so the book of faces will only have one way of tracking me. I went through my preferences and turned of location tracking and cross app communications. Doing this lead me down the rabbit hole of checking out all of my apps. Of the many that had tracking turned on they had no reason to be tracking me while I was not using the app or while I was using the app.

I had heard of the inbox zero fad happening, but never really understood it, what if you wanted to reference something or reply later? Recently I discovered the archiving feature, who would have thought about that? When I check my mail and only see the new stuff it is a rather good feeling. I went through my pseudo professional archive email this morning and deleted a bunch of stuff that didn’t need to be there. I also found out that the emails sent to the trash remained on the server for some reason; that has been fixed, I went from 85% of my space being used to less then 10%.