Usually they’re normal x86 PCs with nothing unusual about them so just your Linux/BSD distro of choice. You can look up the processor model to see what crypto acceleration it can do, or see if there’s any wireguard benchmarks available.

Some have interesting processors like PowerPC, or other strange hardware, but avoid them unless interesting is what you’re after.

You have the pi, give it a go.

If it’s inadequate then i’d recommend a used fanless thin-client type PC, such as a Wyse 5070, just make sure it comes with PSU and a few GB of RAM and SSD. And check reports of how much power it uses at idle.

Ok, it’s beginning to look like bad UI design on accounts.firefox.com:

If I click sign in at monitor.mozilla.org, it redirects me to an oauth process hosted on accounts.firefox.com which prompts me for my password then sends me back to monitor.mozilla.org.
The settings page at accounts.firefox.com then lists Mozilla Monitor under “Connected Services - Everything you are using and signed into” along with all my browser/device instances. But it doesn’t disappear when signed out from monitor.mozilla.org in the same way that a browser instance disappears when signed out from sync browser-side.

I’m supposing that list does not indicate what has access to sync data, which as far as I understood uses its own strong private keys browser-side which are never shared with the servers.

I’ve seen no documentation that Mozilla Monitor works by accessing one’s sync data.

The interface suggests that it only monitors email addresses manually added on monitor.mozilla.org’s UI.

Yes, I was aware of that at the time, and I probably assumed that my browser would be hashing each piece of data (e.g. each email address or username) before sending it to Mozilla Monitor or haveibeenpwned.

What concerns me is Mozilla Monitor appearing in the list of devices/browsers synced, each of which is implied to have cleartext access to all the data I decide to sync (bookmarks/history/tabs in my case, logins+passwords and more for many other people).

Most mass-marketed VPN services (the type marketed for accessing the internet) allow you to VPN into their private subnet where the thing you can access is their gateway router (which you use in place of your home gateway router/modem for connecting to the internet). You don’t need a VPN service to use VPN software between two points you control.

ublock origin does not have this disclaimer. It works well and is widely trusted.

If you’re using Mozilla’s level of endorsement as a metric, note this prominent disclaimer on the addon’s page:

⚠️ This add-on is not actively monitored for security by Mozilla. Make sure you trust it before installing.

What then? Maybe 98% supports + 2% doesn’t support the genocide?

That 2% because a genocide might be a bit inconvenient with an election coming up?

[alt-text for the vision-impaired] Image appears to be a twitter post from Craig Murray posted on 2023-10-14: “To be entirely plain. I have always viscerally opposed war. I have dedicated my life to conflict resolution and reconciliation. But in the coming Gaza genocide, every act of armed resistance by Hamas and Hezbollah will have my support. If that is a crime, send me back to jail.”

Hmm. Could be seen as a rather outlandish thing to say in the immediate aftermath of 2023-10-07, but in hindsight with what we know now in terms of what atrocities the Israeli military forces have brought upon the people of Gaza since that attack on Israel, it seems a reasonable statement to support armed resistance against the coming episode of genocide which indeed materialised and continues today.

Well within the budget of a private investigator or burglar or peeping-tom or abusive ex-partner.

No need to scale; plenty of privacy/security incursions don’t require mass-surveillance.

That said, I’d suggest that the attack does scale economically . Think war-driving but with one of these setups – cruising around in a van through a dense neighbourhood collecting short clips of cctv footage looking for something of interest.

[…] the attack is an extremely expensive nation state level operation that doesn’t scale.

About $250 at most. Quoting the linked page:

Below is a list of equipment we used for the experiments.

• (1) Software Defined Ratio (SDR): Ettus USRP B210 USRP, ~$2100.
• (2) Low Noise Amplifier (LNA): Foresight Intelligence FSTRFAMP06 LNA, ~$200.
• (3) Directional Antenna: A common outdoor Log-periodic directional antenna (LPDA), ~$15.
• (4) A laptop, of course.

Note that the equipment can be replaced with cheaper counterparts. For example, USRP B210 can be replaced with RTL-SDR that costs ~$30.

To reproduce the attack: our GitHub repository provides the codes and instructions for reproducing and understanding the attack. We have prepared a ready-to-use software tool that can produce real-time reconstructions of the eavesdropped videos with EM signal input from the USRP device.

I wonder when (if?) orbital radio receiver arrays (a la starlink) are sensitive and discriminating enough to be used for this type of attack.

No, the “distributor” is the part which runs on your portable device, receives the push notifications, and wakes up the target apps as necessary.

https://unifiedpush.org/developers/spec/definitions/

Conversations can be a unified push distibutor: https://unifiedpush.org/users/distributors/conversations/

…and I’d trust it (battery-wise) with that. I have an old tablet with conversations running without battery restrictions on it, and if I’m not actually picking it up and using it it regularly goes 1-2 weeks on an 80% battery charge before it dies, the whole time giving audible notifications for XMPP messages/calls (which I attend to on other devices).

To be clear though: by E2EE here I mean browser-side encryption with zero-knowledge on the server side.

Etherpad is still encrypted in transit with https; only the server can snoop.

Cryptpad and other web-based E2EE services can still be completely compromised server-side by serving malicious code to the browser, and practically the user would never know.

Cryptpad:

• Full-on google docs / office365 / libreoffice type replacement with collaboration.
• E2EE
• The complexity means it doesn’t work well on mobile, takes a while to load on a slow connection, more frequent bugs. (3.5 MiB page transfer)
• Self-hosting is complicated.

Etherpad:

• A competent collaborative rich-text editor. Doesn’t do spreadsheets or presentations or […].
• Not E2EE (you need to trust that the server a bit more).
• Lightweight, works on slower connections, works alright on mobile. (1.7 MiB page transfer)
• Self-hosting quite simple.

PrivateBin:

• Super-simple plain-text/markdown pastebin. No editing possible once saved.
• E2EE
• Very small. Works fine on slow connections and mobile. (0.2 MiB page transfer)
• Self-hosting very simple.

Use a good XMPP client like dino/siskin/conversations and OMEMO just works. XMPP client OMEMO support status.

You can’t argue “not all XMPP clients support e2ee” without arguing the same for matrix – not all matrix clients support e2ee.

BPA is found in polycarbonate plastics (acrylic) […]

Polycarbonate (BPA monomer) is a very different polymer to acrylic/PMMA (methyl methacrylate monomer).