I too, many years ago now started my smart home journey with cheap Tuya devices and didn’t know any better. The more I used Home Assistant the further I got down the rabbit hole and learnt about privacy. Now I am a privacy advocate and have a dedicated blog 🤓

You tell that to my kids 😂

Probably not much help but I purchased a domain to have my own email, I can then have a separate alias for every single login/site, that way I know who leaks my email and just move on to a different alias. I don’t even need to manually create email aliases and can make something up on the fly. All emails then come to a single, private inbox.

Thank you for taking the time, I will definitely take these points into consideration.

Always open to feedback

It’s crazy how quickly a policy debate gets compressed into online panic. Between people assuming their phones are about to become expensive bricks and others leaning entirely into the time to buy a dumb phone comments, it’s hard to separate the real threats from the noise.

Looking past the viral posts to see what’s actually being pushed, why the panic overstates things, and why privacy advocates are still right to be uneasy about the push toward OS-level age checks

https://unknownuniverse.uk/privacy-security/smartphone-id-panic/

Original content by The Unknown Universe, written by a human and not AI generated!

Thank you. It’s just me running the site and I hope to have at least one new article a week.

The images? I’m a system admin, not a graphic designer lol

I’m not saying privacy and convenience are the same thing, or that the situation is somehow natural or benign.

I agree that the real issue is power, distribution control, and the way mobile software has been turned into a duopoly.

What I meant was more practical, for ordinary users, the choice often ends up being between an ideal setup and one that still lets them do necessary day-to-day things like banking and navigation.

That doesn’t make the underlying problem any less political, it just means people are forced to make compromises inside a system they didn’t choose.

It is a fair bit of homework but for those of us who use Linux on a daily basis, we’d rather do the legwork once to have a private, predictable system than deal with the out-of-the-box bloat.

Regarding updates: that’s exactly why I focused on Group Policy tweaks rather than simple registry hacks or UI toggles. Policies are designed for enterprise environments where IT managers would be furious if an update reset their security configurations, so they tend to survive major build updates much better than standard settings, it’s not foolproof but it is the best way to stay ahead!

The UK PM has just announced an under-16 social media ban.

This is the ‘Trojan Horse’ in action. You cannot enforce a ban without an Age Verification layer, and you can’t have Age Verification without a National Digital ID or biometric database. They are using the ‘child safety’ card to build a mandatory surveillance gate for the entire internet.

Between the new taxes and the constant bans, it’s clear this government has zero respect for personal agency or digital sovereignty. If you aren’t already moving your data off the cloud and into your own home lab, start now. The gap between our current society and a total surveillance state just got a whole lot smaller.

Dedicated PC on LAN talks directly to VPS via Wireguard. The local machine acts as an exit node so when I add a local IP and port to my reverse proxy the whole thing acts like a local network.

I wrote about my setup last month; https://the.unknown-universe.co.uk/home-lab/wireguard-vpn-two-vps/

You’re right, I missed that.

I personally use a reverse proxy and Wireguard setup to access remotely.

I have a dedicated VPS with reverse proxy connected to my network via Wireguard. It acts as the front door to my network so I don’t have to port forward or rely on Cloudflare etc. I used to use Tailscale as the go between but switched to WG recently. Both work fine for streaming content whilst self-hosting all other services including my website.

The home server is an old, low-powered mini PC running Debian. It acts as the bridge between the WireGuard tunnel and my local LAN.

I’ve just finished migrating one of my AdGuard Home instances onto it today. Its role is now twofold:

Routing: It has ip_forward enabled and a bit of NAT (iptables/nftables) so that traffic arriving from the VPN can actually “hop” onto the local network to reach my other VMs and containers.

DNS: It provides ad-blocking for the tunnel. VPN clients point to this node’s internal WireGuard IP for DNS queries.

Technically, it’s just another WireGuard peer, but with AllowedIPs configured to advertise my 192.168.x.x subnet back to the hub (VPS2). This is what allows  VPS1 and my mobile devices to resolve and reach home services without a single open port on my router.

You’re right, and for a lot of people, one VPS is the sensible choice. I actually addressed this in the post:

"VPS1 is my web-facing server. It handles the public side of things. VPS2 is the VPN hub. At first glance, that probably looks unnecessary. Strictly speaking, it is unnecessary. I could have crammed WireGuard onto VPS1 and called it done. But splitting the roles makes the whole thing cleaner.

One machine serves public traffic. The other handles VPN duties. That means fewer networking compromises, fewer chances of Docker or firewall rules becoming annoying, and a clearer separation between the public-facing stack and the private tunnel. It also means I can change one side without poking the other with a stick and hoping nothing catches fire."

It’s not that I didn’t like it, I just wanted to back to basics! A simple config file on each machine, job done

Exactly that, VPS2 handles the WireGuard port and has no domain pointing to it, so it’s basically hiding in plain sight. VPS1 holds the domain and handles the web traffic.

I keep SSH open on both, but locked down (key-based auth + restricted to my IPs).

Your idea of using the provider firewall (Ionos in my case) as a “mechanical” lock is a good one, block it at the edge and only open it when needed. I’ve thought about doing that, but I’m generally happy relying on a hardened SSH config and the provider’s KVM if everything goes sideways.

Thank you for the heads up, turns out it was the custom html code in the code blocks causing the issue. Fixed now.

dist-upgrade and full-upgrade are essentially the same command but yeah, I won’t be using apt upgrade again in the future! Like I said in my post, the joys of being self taught is that you learn by my making mistakes and that’s part of the “fun” 🤣