Unfortunately, no, not really. They are absolutely able and willing to confiscate your devices at any time once you’re on Chinese soil, and once you’ve lost physical control, that’s the end of trust for that device. Even beyond that, it’s not unheard of for there to be vulnerabilities in Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, etc that make your device susceptible to wireless attacks. IMO it’s not worth the risk.

Here is just one example of this type of thing uncovered by The Guardian, New York Times, and others in a joint investigation: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/02/chinese-border-guards-surveillance-app-tourists-phones

Do not bring your normal personal devices to China. They are notorious for injecting spyware on foreign devices at every opportunity. Use a freshly formatted device and create all new accounts to use with it.

Regarding services: do not use self-hosted services unless you you spin up fresh, isolated instances of your services for use while abroad and spin them down afterwards, including formatting any OS they were hosted on.

Regarding VPN: because we are assuming that any device used in China is compromised, do not connect to your VPN unless you have set up a segregated VLAN and are connecting through a VPN server instance created specifically for use while in China.

Basically, assume anything you use in China is compromised. And assume your connections are being monitored. And assume that any device you are connecting to from China is at risk of being compromised. So everything needs to be segregated from the rest of your network and set up specifically to be deleted after you’re back home.

Just a heads up, people should be wary of playtron to a degree: the CEO is a guy named Kirt McMaster. Anyone from the Android enthusiast community may know him as the guy who convinced the creator of CyanogenMod to incorporate (becoming Cyngn) and then drove the company into the ground chasing skinning and theming revenue, and wouldn’t even allow the community to keep the cyanogen brand (they had to rebrand it to LineageOS)

Kirt sucks. He’s a terrible leader and a terrible businessperson. I’m sure there are plenty of great people involved in playtron but with him at the helm of the company I am not expecting it to end well

It’s literally a multiplayer competitive shooter. That’s the game.

My solution for this type of situation is MicroBin running on my home network from a non-standard port, with a port knocker to open and close the port when needed.

My router handle DDNS so I can always contact my home network easily. I port-knock to trigger an iptables command on the router to forward traffic to the MicroBin host.

I also have my phone set up to connect via openvpn to my home network so that I can remotely do things like start and stop services, set port forwarding rules, etc.

I mean to say that the connection attempt is failing because the traffic is never reaching the server.

There is no traffic on Port 8081 in those logs

Yeah your iptables is already set to up ACCEPT by default meaning no blocking.

My next step would be to determine whether the traffic is reaching the target machine. Look into how you can monitor inbound traffic and verify whether the server even sees the inbound connection attempt

First obvious question: do you have a firewall enabled?

From a terminal, type “iptables -L” and if there are any rules there (rather than just category headers) you will probably need to allow inbound traffic through the firewall

Oh boy, let’s take this piece by piece…

DISCLAIMER: I AM NOT A LAWYER AND THIS IS NOT LEGAL ADVICE

First: let’s talk about the difference between copyright, patents, and trademark

A patent protects a method of doing something - like a novel piece of code, or a newly invented drug formula - from being duplicated and used or sold without your consent.

Copyright protects creative works - like art, books, and computer software - from being mimiced. It literally deals with the rights to copy something

Trademark protects brands - like a logo or company name - from being used by other people for profit. It usually deals with marketplace confusion, as when someone creates a competing product with a similar logo to try to benefit from the logo’s recognition and popularity.

So, with that said, what are YOU dealing with?

Well, since you’re not selling software or utilizing anything from the WatchDogs game universe, you’re pretty much free and clear on both patent and copyright.

What about trademark?

Well, on the one hand, you are not competing with Ubisoft in any way, nor are you attempting to represent yourself as related to WatchDogs. So, by the letter of the law (in the US), they don’t have a valid complaint.

However, trademark under US law has this funny feature where an entity that holds a trademark is required to vigorously defend it when they become aware of potential infringement. This is to prevent the selective application of trademark. That is, if I know John is using my trademark and I don’t go after him, then Steve uses my trademark too, I can’t suddenly claim to have an interest in defending it when I didn’t care before. Steve can point at the fact that I didn’t go after John and say “you already gave up your trademark by failing to enforce it”.

So how does this impact you? Well, unfortunately, even if you are technically allowed to use “dedsec” under US law, if Ubisoft has a trademark on the term “dedsec” specifically, AND if someone at Ubisoft became aware of your use of their trademark, they would likely come after you for trademark infringement just to cover their ass. You might even win in court, but it would cost a whole lot of money that you would likely never be able to recover.

The good news is that the very first step in a trademark dispute is a cease and desist letter. They’ll demand you stop using their trademark. At that point you can either comply, refuse, or offer to settle the matter by selling them the domain.

What you do with this information is up to you.

Troll mode: Rip the first 5 minutes of each movie then splice in Rick Astley

Troll activist mode: Rip the first 5 minutes of each movie then splice in Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion live reading

Troll comedian mode: Rip the first 5 minutes of each movie then splice in Monty Python’s The Life of Brian

Activist mode: Find a set of movies to rename that teach about the harm religion has caused

Ethical absolutist mode: Refuse to host them, and explain why

Non-confrontational familial support mode: Give Mom a unique user and make the god movies only accessible to that user

In all seriousness it depends on what your priorities are. Is it more important to you to provide judgement-free support to your mom so she knows she can rely on you, or is it more important to try to reduce harm in the world by deplatforming harmful media? Or maybe it’s more important to try to teach your mom what’s wrong with those movies and you can come to an arrangement where she can watch those movies only if she agrees to watch movies you choose in equal amounts (since you can track it) to counteract the propaganda?

What is most important to you?

That’s a non-trivial number of devices, so I would recommend a decent router that will last into the future, including service upgrades. Especially if anyone in the house is gaming and streaming movies at the same time

I recommend purchasing the modem and router as two separate units.

For the modem, because you have symmetric gigabit service, you’ll need one that supports gigabit upstream. That means the less expensive SB8200 is out. Instead, you’re looking at the ARRIS SURFboard S33. You can also find a comparable product from Netgear, the CM2000

For your router, I personally like and trust Asus. Their user interface is robust but user-friendly, and their firmware is well supported by the home networking community (including a stellar ‘expanded’ version called AsusMerlin that frequently has features pulled into the official firmware)

While you could go with an older model that only supports WiFi 5 (AC), those models have reached end-of-life and will only receive critical security updates. Instead, it’s worth spending a bit more for the WiFi 6 (AX) version.

The minimum you’ll want to support a symmetric gigabit connection like what you have is the Asus RT-AX86U. However, to support possible higher speeds in the future, and to get the most rock-solid performance, I recommend the Asus RT-AX88U. This is what I personally own for my symmetric gigabit connection

NOTE: There are older versions with the same model number that have extra LAN Ethernet ports (8 total) and no 2.5Gbps port. Do NOT get them! There are known issues when using ports 5-8 on these units

Again, you could find a similar product in the Netgear Nighthawk brand.

Anything above that is going to be extra bells and whistles. Things like extra WiFi bands, stronger radios, more 2.5Gbps ports, support for link aggregation, and some one-click gaming features that I personally think aren’t worth the money.

Depending on the size of your home and your personal use case, you may also find value in adding mesh WiFi nodes to your network. Asus and Netgear both have their own implementations here. Asus’ version is called AiMesh and is pretty seamless. All of their modern routers can act as the primary mesh node.

Personally I do not game on WiFi, so I went with 3x Asus ZenWiFi AX Mini (XD4) mesh nodes. They can be connected wirelessly to the main router, or by Ethernet to reduce latency. If I were going to be gaming on WiFi, I would have gone with the beefier ZenWiFi AX (XT8) nodes instead

Hope that helps, and let me know if you have any questions! Happy to go into more detail on whatever you need

Based on your edit, what you need isn’t MoCA. What you need is a cable modem and a router (preferably as separate units, not a combo one like you have. Happy to explain why if you care)

• What is your ISP?

• What is your current advertised upload and download speed for the internet plan you have?

• Do you get TV or phone service through the same provider?

• Is your house wired for Ethernet? Coax? Both?

• How many people live with you?

• How many sqft is your home?

• How many devices well be connected? How many are wired? How many on WiFi?

• What is your use-case? Simultaneous streaming in 4k and latency-sensitive gaming? Mostly non-competitive gaming? Big downloads? Do you plan to stream content from your home while traveling or similar?

Help me help you :p

Just to make absolutely sure: you are POSITIVE that the device you’ve been renting is a MoCA-WAN router, and NOT a cable modem?

In the US at least, most of the single-unit devices that receive a coax input are DOCSIS 3.x, not MoCA. They are combining two pieces of hardware in a single physical unit: a docsis modem and a router.

Prior to having fiber internet, when my provider was Comcast, I owned two separate devices instead of renting the single device from my ISP: a DOCSIS 3.1 modem from Arris, and a standard Ethernet router

Just want to make sure you are absolutely confident about what your ISP is actually providing before you spend money on new hardware :)

That’s actually a GREAT idea.

Server admins should be able to opt-in to pulling in the top N posts per hour/day/week from connected instances. Could even have an option like “if a community shows up more than X times this way, subscribe the server to that community”, and then toss all that stuff into Discover section or something.

While you may be correct, that was my experience. As a new user, I joined two Lemmy instances, was unsatisfied with the full feed on both, and said “screw it, I’m going to the biggest server”.

The problem with telling people they can fetch the missing comms are threefold:

1. It becomes a perpetual maintenance task. New communities are being created all the time and I don’t want to have to reference other servers’ feeds regularly to stay up to date on the newest stuff. I might as well just be on that other server

2. Part of the joy of the firehose is seeing when some completely obscure community has a wildly popular post that one time because it’s extra funny or shocking or whatever. Those posts just won’t make it to most smaller servers.

3. It’s an “unknown unknowns” problem. Sometimes you know what it is that you don’t know and can go find it. But often I don’t know which things I don’t know, so I can’t seek it out to add to my server. The beauty of a big server is that I don’t have to do that legwork or even think about it.

All it takes is one user on the server subscribing to the Western Spotted Bull Frogs community for me to see it when they have a post blow up. The chances of one such user being on my server go way up here on lemmy.world. I’m sure there are smaller servers that are “good enough” in that regard. But why would I bother when I have what I want right here?

Not trying to be argumentative, just calling out what I see as a fundamental truth about Lemmy, compared to other fediverse applications. Like, on mastodon a big server’s fedirated feed is more or less unreadable. That makes smaller servers appealing as it helps prioritize what makes it into the feed. On Lemmy, the voting system does that prioritization, removing one of the big reasons to avoid larger servers in the first place :)

I tried a smaller Lemmy server first and it didn’t meet my needs.

I used reddit in two specific but different ways:

1. About a dozen subreddits that I would visit individually. Small Lemmy instances work fine for this. Just subscribe to the ones I care about

2. Browsing r/all, taking in whatever was popular at any given moment. This only works on big Lemmy instances with wildly diverse federation.

I love the firehose of “what bizarre things bubbled to the top today? Oh snap, there’s a scandal in the professional bowling community. This Farscape meme is hilarious even without context. Wow, look at that crazy picture of an owl riding another owl riding a bear” or whatever.

There was never enough content on small Lemmy servers to satisfy that itch. But scrolling the main feed on lemmy.world is good enough

First, does your Motorola have Dolby Atmos? If yes, disable that crap. It is hot garbage IMO, except for the built-in speakers

Second, check which versions of AptX each of your devices supports. If your watch and buds support a higher quality version of AptX than the phone does, you’ll get better audio from the watch every time.

Lastly, consider checking out the app Wavelet and its use of AutoEQ. Ever since discovering the AutoEQ project I have started using it on every device I can. It helps restore audio to near “studio reference” EQ levels, which is how the audio engineers design the music to be heard in the first place.

I’m genuinely not looking for an argument. My original comment was “yup, this isn’t for me, because it’s too much time/effort”. It only became an argument of sorts when person after person came in to try to tell me why I was wrong for feeling that way?

Like, I get it. There are different variants and options and arch is mostly for people who want to tinker.

But my original comment was literally just “well, this post confirms what I suspected: arch probably isn’t for me because I don’t have the time”. I didn’t intend to be pejorative with the term ‘timesink’. Just too much for me. But I’ll admit I probably got a bit defensive after being told I was wrong for xyz reason by so many people on a matter of personal priorities

So then I’m still exactly correct about my assessment of Arch? That is too much of a time investment for me and the closest I will want to get is manjaro?