Tag: How To

How To Install Pi-hole on a Headless Raspberry Pi

A close of up a Raspberry Pi.

It might come as a surprise, but I don’t really mind internet ads.

What I do mind, though, is how internet ads work today. To present you with relevant ads, the advertisement companies will track your every move on the internet. You might think that the sites you visit are isolated from each other, but ad trackers keep following you around everywhere you click.

That’s why I use EFF‘s Privacy Badger, a browser extension that blocks tracking cookies. By blocking this horrendous cookies, you fall off the advertiser’s radar. Because of this, I see very few ads on the internet. So Privacy Badger solves the problem for me.

But there are more people in our household that use the internet. Installing the browser extension on every device isn’t really feasible, and there is a lot of trackers that Privacy Badger won’t block. Mobile app advertisements is a good example. The ads shown in the apps my oldest kid plays on their tablet also track their every move.

So it’s better to attack the problem at its core.

This is where Pi-hole comes in. Pi-hole enables network-wide ad blocking. Configured as a DNS service, it will check every internet address that is accessed through the local network against a set of blacklists of known trackers. If the address is on one of the lists, the DNS request is blocked, and the tracker will receive no information.

With Pi-hole, everyone who is using our Wi-Fi access point are protected from pesky ad trackers.

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The KeePassXC User Guide

The KeePassXC User Guide. A yellow padlock.

Here’s a basic KeePassXC user guide where you’ll learn how to store and use your first super-secure password.

If you haven’t done so already, please install KeePassXC on your computer. You can do this by following my guide to installing KeePassXC on Windows 10. When that is done, return here.

KeePassXC might look a bit daunting at first sight, but there is no need to worry. To use KeePassXC as a basic password manager only requires basic knowledge of the application. And when you’ve finished reading through this KeePassXC user guide, you’ll have the knowledge you need.

Without further ado, let’s get cracking!

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How To Install KeePassXC on Windows 10

Follow this guide to quickly download and install KeePassXC on Windows 10.

In a post published last month, I concluded that KeePassXC is the best open source password manager. The time has now come to tell you how you can quickly get KeePassXC up and running on your Windows computer.

First, a word of caution. KeePassXC is a local password manager without any built in cloud synchronization mechanism. This means that all the passwords you manage in KeePassXC will only be available on the computer where the password manager is running. Also, as a natural consequence of this, your password database will not be backed up automatically. But fear not. We’ll cover cloud backups and synchronization across all your devices in a later post.

Now let’s get password managin’!

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How To Stop WordPress SPAM

A bunch of STOP SPAM signs on top of each other.

Is your WordPress website being flooded with SPAM? Here how to stop WordPress SPAM.

WordPress now powers a third of the web, so if you’re running a website, there’s a good chance your using WordPress. Since it’s such a popular platform, it’s also a huge bulls eye for spammers looking to promote their bullshit.

There are two types of WordPress SPAM; automated and manual. Automated SPAM is created by computer programs, or bots, that try to post SPAM to every WordPress site they can find. Manual SPAM is created by people who enter SPAM manually on WordPress sites.

CAPTCHA

A common way to stop automated SPAM bots is to use CAPTCHA. This is a type of challenge-response test used to determine whether or not a user is human. The first CAPTCHA implementations were very basic. You just had to recognize a few numbers and letters in a picture, and enter them in a form to prove you were not a pesky SPAM bot. This was a trivial task for humans, but very hard for computers.

But the spammers soon caught up with the early CAPTCHA technology, and taught their bots to solve the simple CAPTCHAs. In the inevitable game of cat-and-mouse, the CAPTCHAs then had to become more advanced to stop the bots. The result was that, more often than not, a CAPTCHA was too hard for humans to solve as well. This made the technology a less desirable way to stop SPAM since they also stopped legitimate users.

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ArchiveTeam Warrior

You’d think that everything on the internet lasts forever. But it doesn’t.

Through Jason Scott’s escapades on Twitter, and his podcast, I have in many ways re-discovered the Internet Archive. It’s the modern day reincarnation of the Great Library of Alexandria, and contains a significant part of the internet as it was. The Archive is also crammed with all kinds of files, from books to recordings of live music performances.

But is the internet, and everything on it, really something that has to be preserved? Yes, it is. Even though it’s mostly cat pictures, porn, and incoherent ramblings, it’s is an important part of our cultural heritage. The internet is a unique gateway into life in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, and will be important when future generations try to figure out what went wrong.

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