Quickly Make a Mastodon bot with IFTTT

If you recently joined mastodon or another fediverse instace of something and thought to yourself, “If only x was here from Twitter” or “If only this feed was in mastodon”, well do I have a solution for you. The easiest way to turn a tweet (or a variety of things) from anyone into a toot from a bot is with IFTTT (Pronounced, If This, Then That) Let’s say my usecase is I want my tweets from my twitter account to foward to a Mastodon account I setup for a bot.
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Leaving Birdland

This week, I deleted all my tweets on Twitter and posted a signpost to my new Mastodon account at https://infosec.exchange/@L0G1S, might delete the whole thing next week, we’ll see. I’ve noticed from others within the infosec.exchange instance that there are some various growing pains for some when moving from Twitter to a federated community and I wanted to speak about why that is. Moving from a centralized community to a federated instance of something requires a shift into a new mindset of how you approach online communities in general.
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Archiving Youtube Channels with YT-DLP and Plex

I’m going to try my hardest not to ramble. Is it possible to archive youtube channels and use Plex to organize and watch them? Yes, here is how. YT-DLP Located here https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp My Plex server is already installed and running on Ubuntu, so thats the POV that this guide is written from. Yt-dlp does have a windows binary though, but there may be some slight differences. If you’re running ubuntu, you can install it via snap https://snapcraft.
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Welcome To The Age of The Last Man

Earlier this week, I stumbled upon r/HermanCainAwards on Reddit and have found myself looking at story after story with sympathy, yet at the same time this odd, frustrated anger. r/HermanCainAwards is named after the infamous Herman Cain who died from COVID-19 last year after catching it at a Trump Rally. It consists of screenshots of post after post of people denying the various risks of the current pandemic, share ignorant memes and misinformation only to have a follow up post that they eventually died from it.
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Spinning up a Matrix Homeserver in Ubuntu 20.04 in 15min*

This guide was adapted from Jonathan Bossenger’s guide here. He spins up in SQLite and then migrates to Postgres where I kept running into problems, so here I trim it down a little more to go right into Postgres. Also Arul Muhammad’s guide here can be of use if you run into any issues. Also, all the other matrix guides normally reside here. Mathew Hodson(co-founder of matrix), has a video guide here that does everything including jitsi.
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Decentralizing Social Media and E2EE Communication with Matrix

Since around the beginning of COVID, I’m found myself in the unique position where I have a foot in a number of different chat circles and discord servers and group chats on varying services. While at the same time I’m on the journey to deactivate and end my usage of Facebook only to pop back in a few months later. I’ve been moving my conversations around from various places, and then to eventually signal, which I still like, but I found it limiting besides generally 1 to 1 chat.
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The Fascist Fruit of Donald Trump

I’ve written about Donald Trump a few times in the past and in those posts, I tried to highlight how he clearly was never a conservative and how the Evangelical embrace of him would eventually backfire and probably lead to the largest exodus in years. Now to be honest, I’ve danced around the elephant in the room cautiously while also trying to highlight just how bad it is while at the same time the regret is eating at me a little for not being more forceful.
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The Forest is Already Burning

After 17 year old Kyle Rittenhouse shot and killed 2 protesters and wounding a third in Kenosha, Wisconsin at a Black Lives Matter protest. I started seeing many different arguments between various people online about the numerous different variables in the case, but in my opinion they’re all missing the crux of the situation that’s upstream. I’m quickly learning that arguing about the justification of most shootings are just a waste of time.
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Quitting Facebook

The more and more I have chewed on this issue on this the more and more I am convinced this is the correct decision for myself. I caught myself scrolling my newsfeed for about 15 minutes today and I was trying to keep track of things on my feed and asked if this was something I needed to see. Heavy emphasis on need. After that 15 minutes I didn’t see a single update from either friend updates or news that was worth my time.
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What’s In My Facebook Data?

In the spirit of my last blog post, I’m in the process of writing a guide on how to properly quit Facebook and try and replace the services it provides for you with other more privacy centric solutions, while at the same time not letting perfection be the enemy of doing any good. So to start, I wanted to download all my data first, The main thing I knew I wanted to ensure I had was a copy of my videos or stories, everything can be deleted without the bat of an eye.
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Facebook Has Already Done What They’re Worried TikTok Will Do

TikTok is in the news, Trump is going to ban it and a couple other Chinese apps as well. The Department of Defense and various military branches have banned it from government phones and have strongly discouraged its use on personal devices. The reasoning according the the Department of Defense was, “the app’s popularity with Western users including armed forces personnel, and its ability to convey location, image and biometric data to its Chinese parent company, which is legally unable to refuse to share data to the Chinese government”
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Remote Playing PC Games: Building your own “Stadia” in Google Cloud

It’s been about a year since my last blog about remote playing PC Games. Has has my personal use of it changed? Did I stick with it, or was it a one time experiment? Well, as of today, I play about 25% of my PC games on the couch via remote play and I would probably be there more if I didn’t just buy a fancy new G-sync monitor for my desk.
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Some Pihole Blocklists

I’ve been running a pihole with unbound for about a year and I’m VERY happy with it. I haven’t run into any issues where my lists have blocked too much things either. I only needed to whitelist 16 urls after applying. Other Sources I have found where I went to build my list. https://www.github.developerdan.com/hosts/ (Helpful collection of ad and tracking list courtesy of u/lightswitch05 on reddit.) https://firebog.
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The Police Do Not Protect and Serve

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been seeing clip after clip of cops beating protesters, shooting rubber bullets and beanbags at people’s faces, pepper spraying indiscriminately, antagonizing peaceful protesters, firing pepper rounds at medics. It always begs one to ask, is this protecting and serving? Unfortunately, that question is irrelevant, because constitutionally speaking, the Police do not have an obligation to protect someone from harm. Basically, they don’t have a duty to protect and serve.
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I Survived A Sim Hijack

About 2 months ago, I was leaving a restaurant in LA after dinner when I noticed that my cell phone had no signal, so I restarted the phone (which normally fixed it) and was greeted with the following text message. I immediately knew someone was either in the process of breaking or have already broken into one of my accounts, so I quickly sprinted across the parking lot, jumped in my jeep, dialed T-Mobile, and slammed on the gas.
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Is a VPN The Answer?

With COVID-19 keeping everyone inside for the last few weeks, I’ve been getting a lot of questions from friends about VPNs from and if they are worth the investment. My answer has always been the same, “Oh shit, well, umm I will try and write a blog about it.” Because it’s never that simple, it’s never a yes or no scenario. Everything comes down to the nuances of your specific use case and threat model.
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Remote Playing PC Games: Streaming Outside Of Your Home

Ok so I can finally play my PC games while laying on my couch in the other room, that’s neat. However, despite the fact that playing anything on a bike at the a gym makes me feel like a total POS, I want to see if I can play my PC games from there. From some initial tests, I was getting good connections, but it would always cut out and terminate the connection to the point where every place, even my work’s fast internet wasn’t playable.
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Remote Playing PC Games

Note: Because everyone’s network is different, The best way to be 100% sure of how Moonlight runs on your network is to try it out on yours. This post is not a technical deep dive, but more of a brief overview with a couple quick examples from within my local area network. The next part is going to go a little more in depth in requirements to stream outside of a LAN and some attempts to stream over different connections.
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