Under GDPR they can’t use it, unless you give them consent. They obviously do, but they can’t be too obvious, otherwise they’d have to pay huge fines again.

We use .lh, short for localhost. For local network services I use service discovery and .local. And for internal stuff we just use a subdomain of our domain.

I personally only turn it off when someone’s visiting over night and the noise disturbs them, otherwise I just leave it on nonstop. Mainly because it would annoy me to try to open whatever and find out I have to turn on the server first. I don’t have a UPS and never even thought about getting one (for the server, I’m thinking of getting one for my 3D printer).

I have no idea why you would use a pen to turn pages???

Because the pen can be held in the other hand which can be anywhere - you turn the page with a click of a button. And the pen doesn’t have to be anywhere near the screen. After a few hours of reading you can feel the difference between having your hand in a natural position and forcing it in a position to be able to turn the pages.

Looks interesting, but I’m biased against anything that has Mediatek inside, so it’s gonna be a no from me.

I use Proton Mail for my primary domain and then addy.io for redirects to it. It costs $10 a year or something like that and it’s all I actually need.

Replying to emails is as easy as just hitting reply, the only thing that’s slightly harder is sending entirely new email (as in not replying) but even that can either be remembered, or the special email address copied from the addy.io app.

There’s nothing reasonable in you having to share your location with them constantly.

If you cut off all such apps, prepare to be isolated from your peers who most likely don’t care about privacy (which is most people and in your age group perhaps close to everyone).

If you’re not ready to go out of the mainstream, try to minimise your usage of such apps to only what you need - if you need Instagram for communication with peers, use it for that, but don’t feed Meta the data of what you look at. I was on Messenger for ~2 years after I quit Facebook and even that made me feel better.

Use some privacy protection tools, I personally recommend Adguard, but feel free to choose other popular options.

Beware that no matter what you do, big tech will still know about you more than you’d like.

Avahi basically broadcasts to the whole network “hello there, my name is some-cool-domain.local”. When you request that address, your router checks if someone broadcasts that name and uses their IP if so.

Yes, indeed, it’s your local timezone.

I mean, I’ve seen a password on a post-it in our office, so yeah, maybe a good idea? We also have a company mandated Bitwarden and you wouldn’t believe how many times I’ve seen people type a password by hand instead of using Bitwarden when I help them set up VPN or something. It’s definitely upwards of 80%.

store all of the documents, desktop, downloads, etc. on a couple computers

Why use SSHFS for that? I recommend using Syncthing, it’s great for synchronizing stuff across multiple PCs (local and remote).

I doubt it, it’s much easier to mod the console. Or just use a boot disc (or whatever those were called, I had the chip mod, so I don’t remember, but my friend used to have the disc which he had to insert before playing a pirated game).

Well, I do care. There should be borders.

Yeah, not likely and not really wanted. You don’t want terrorists in your country.

Should it, though? EU should protect its borders.

Ah, I’ve only ever seen it in combination with a tunnel, so I assumed it’s part of that.

It makes a tunnel through to you and links to that.

True. But pretty much the same applies for dynamic DNS services, except you have to trust your dynamic DNS provider.

I meant more because people generally don’t have as much time to spend on IT security as companies, but yeah, it works for privacy as well.

My recommendation: host OpenVPN, change the default port and only access your NAS from the internet using your VPN. Also only allow the VPN port on your router firewall.