Does she have the eyesight to see the quality difference?

Blocking VPNs isn’t really possible. You can block known IP ranges but ultimately there’s so many ways to encapsulate and encrypt traffic that no solution is 100%. I have specifically worked at places in which those in management positions are interested in sniffing DNS queries to “see what people are up to on company time” and those happened to also be the employers that were doing sketchy things that may or may not have been legal

I’ve seen a grand total of one influencer make a good argument for a VPN and that was Alan Fisher saying “have you observed your work skirting regulations that they shouldn’t be? Are you potentially reviewing legal materials on your work’s WiFi that your place of work might prefer you didn’t know about? To help avoid retaliation, you might need a VPN such as one from today’s sponsor…”

More like they operate a tollroad to the playground and are concerned about why there’s so many trucks of wood chips costing them much more to maintain the road to the playground. And OP freely admitted they’re taking truckloads of woodchips from the playground.

Except the analogy also doesn’t work because ultimately piracy isn’t taking, it’s just copying and sharing copies. There isn’t really a good analogy without directly describing digital distribution and piracy. Maybe an analogy involving a solar farm and a transmission company? Except that gets into technical details that are just as technical as just explaining it as it is

We are swiftly reaching a time where boycotting companies run by people you disagree with will negatively impact your ability to function. Consider abandoning this type of purchasing in the future.

Oh no please don’t boycott! The current boycotts are actually costing companies money and we can’t have people learning that boycotts can actually work!

Y’know what that was terrible writing on my part. Where I put “physical vlan” I just meant specifying each port be a specific vlan rather than a trunk port that has multiple clans on in

I should probably proofread more and write less when tired

Physical wire tapping would be mostly mitigated by setting every port on the switch to be a physical vlan, especially if the switch does the VLAN routing. Sure someone could splice an ethernet cable, which would really only be mitigated by 802.1x like you already said, but every part of this threat model makes zero sense. You ultimately have to trust something (and apparently in OP’s case that’s a third party VPN provider that charges extra to not block LAN access while connected and they remain entirely on the free tier of)

But at the very least, not trusting everything on the network is a very enterprise kind of threat model, so using standard enterprise practices of network segmentation, firewalling, and potentially MAC-binding and 802.1x if so desired isn’t a bad idea, if for no other reason than it might lead to a career in network administration. And honestly I mostly want to get OP to not think of VPNs like a magical silver bullet and see what other tools exist in the toolbox

Wait you’re seriously using a free VPN?

Sounds far more likely that either someone misunderstood that residential IPs change frequently/may be shared by multiple subscribers or the ISP made an error when responding to a subpeana and provided the incorrect IP. Unfortunately both are all too common with privacy enforcement

If you really think the ISP router is snooping and can’t by bypassed you could simply double-NAT your network with a trusted router and call it a day. Much less VPNing and much less unusual decisions of trust and threat model involved then

But supposing you absolutely do not want to tack on additional costs, then the only solution I see that remains is to set up a private VPN network, one which only connects your trusted devices. This would be secure when on your I trusted LAN, but would be unavailable when awat from home.

Traditionally this would be performed by creating a dedicated network of trusted devices. Most commonly via a VLAN for ease of configuration. Set the switch ports that the trusted devices are connected to to use that vlan and badabing badaboom you’re there. For external access using Tailscale or one of the many similar services/solutions (such as headscale, netbird, etc.) with either the client on every device or using subnet routing features to access your trusted network, and of course configure firewalls as desired

LLMs have been trained so heavily on Linux documentation that you can even have it hallucinate a Linux terminal at you!

The “support” most importantly includes security updates. You better bet every hacking group has been working at finding fresh zero days for Windows 10 and is stockpiling them to start hammering any PCs that can’t be upgraded this October

This is where I’m at too. If I go crazy and start installing stuff natively to experiment I end up with extra stuff auto configured that’s no longer needed and random problems I’m too lazy to figure out how to solve. Flatpak doesn’t do that and I don’t have to worry about that. I can install random stuff to play with and uninstall it cleanly. Some packages need more system access than flatpak gives natively and with those I’ll make the decision of if I want to set it up and tear it down manually or not.

Storage is cheap, my time not so much.

If you are administrating systems it’s extremely useful to know how to work with stuff by command line, both for remote administration via SSH or Ps-session and for rapid troubleshooting/settings changes and of course for emergency recovery when everything is super broken.

Honestly I personally use a mix of both GUI, CLI and hosted admin portals (the 11 ton gorilla in the room everyone arguing over GUI vs CLI forgets about) and will shift between tools depending on what is best for the given job.

Of course if you’re just an owner-operator, see Joe Average in Anytown America with his household laptop, the GUI tools are the only thing you’ll want to use and even that might get overwhelming or scary, but Joe Average is more often than not these days going to not even own a computer and instead just use their phone. That’s the other thing many folks in these threads forget, is the home computer is a market on life support. The average “not a computer person” does not own a computer at all, they use their smartphone for literally everything

Winget install [programname]

winget search [programname]

winget upgrade --all --silent

Oh look, its also super easy in Windowsland!

Btop will also show disc and network utilization while running much lighter than glances. Personally I keep both btop and htop installed on all of my machines because I feel like htop is better for quickly killing a processes when needed

Honestly, if it’s important enough to RAID, it’s important enough to do right and run full fat ZFS.

You could also go the mdadm route with individual disks but ZFS pools are so battle-tested that whatever unholy edgecase you manage to create will almost certainly be something someone has encountered before, and it’s probably well documented somewhere how to recover from

That’s one of the features Google should have stolen from Cyanogen/LineageOS long ago which had permissions differentiated between precise location and approximate

There’s a double-i in “settings” in the documentation screenshot

I certainly agree, but you can’t replace your entire software, server and groupware stack in a day. Start by transitioning the easiest stuff off of Microsoft, tie it into your existing stack then slowly transition away. Shutting off the last domain controller is a lot easier when you only have a handful of Windows workstations that rely on it than when you have 5000 of them