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A hands-on look at Sniffnet, the 40K-star open-source network traffic monitor built in Rust. Real-time charts, 6,000+ protocol detection, completely free.

Three major regulations — EU Chat Control, India’s domain KYC mandate, and Mexico’s social media child protection law — landed within two weeks in July 2026. Each targets a different layer of what used to be anonymous online activity. So here’s what they mean for VPN users — and why the old privacy playbook isn’t enough anymore. ...

Disclosure: Some links below are affiliate links. If you sign up through them, I may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Last week, a patent filed by Meta appeared on r/privacy and racked up over 480 upvotes in under 12 hours. The patent — published by the USPTO and fully public — describes a system that analyzes voice characteristics to infer the emotional state of the person speaking. Not from a specific app’s recording, but from raw microphone data across the device ecosystem. ...

Disclosure: Some links below are affiliate links. If you sign up through them, I may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. DigitalOcean — $200 credit for new users Your UniFi controller shows you throughput graphs and connected clients, but it never answers the hard questions. Why did your speed drop at 8 PM? Is that IoT VLAN actually isolated? When a device phones home past your DNS filter, would you know? NetworkOptimizer is a self-hosted NMS built to fill those gaps. After 887 GitHub stars in six months, the project is scratching an itch UniFi owners have. ...

You get a text from your carrier: “Your SIM has been transferred to a new device. Call us immediately if you didn’t request this.” By the time you finish reading, your phone goes dead. No signal, no texts, no calls. Someone else now gets those “reset password” codes — for your email, your bank, your crypto exchange. But here’s the reality: this isn’t a rare edge case. The FBI’s 2024 Internet Crime Report logged over 1,700 SIM swap complaints with losses exceeding $110 million. A recent r/privacy thread (189 upvotes, 112 comments) walks through exactly how accounts get drained in under an hour. ...

Last week we reported Chat Control was dead. But it turns out that was only half the story. On July 10, the European Parliament passed Chat Control 1.0 — a limited version of the mass surveillance proposal that had privacy advocates up in arms for the last two years. But here’s the tricky part: what got rejected on July 8 was an alternative, more aggressive draft. What passed on July 10 was the final, narrower bill. Two different texts, one massive information gap. ...

Getting a self-hosted VPN up with a proper WireGuard setup usually means wrangling systemd services, firewall rules, and config files for half an afternoon. The hwdsl2/wireguard-install script changes that — one command, five minutes, you’re done. And it comes from the same developer behind the 28,000+ star IPsec/L2TP VPN server installer. What It Does This is a Bash-based VPN server installer that automates the entire WireGuard deployment on Linux. Run it once and it handles kernel module checks, package installation, firewall configuration (iptables/nftables), and client profile generation. Plus, it spits out a QR code so you can import the config into the WireGuard mobile app without touching a text editor. ...

Look, zero trust access is what every security team talks about. Yet self-hosting a proper ZTNA stack means Kubernetes, CEL policies, and identity brokers — infrastructure stuff most people don’t want to touch. Octelium, an AGPL-3.0 project with 3,922 stars on GitHub, wraps all that into a single deployable stack that runs on a $6 VPS (affiliate link). Our quick take: Octelium is a standout open-source ZTNA option for teams who need self-hosted secure access without per-user licensing fees. The CLI-based installer handles everything from cluster bootstrap to TLS certificates in one script. And the policy engine supports CEL expressions and OPA-style rules for fine-grained access control — the kind of flexibility you’d expect from Cloudflare Access, but fully self-hosted. ...

Disclosure: Some links below are affiliate links. If you sign up through them, I may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. NordVPN — starts at $3.49/mo (2-year plan) Surfshark — starts at $2.39/mo (2-year plan) DigitalOcean — $200 credit for new users Your ISP sees every site you visit. Streaming platforms block entire countries. And somewhere in a data center, a server logs the fact that you connected at 2:14 AM. ...

Disclosure: Some links below are affiliate links. If you sign up through them, I may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Most DNS ad-blockers fall into two camps: the heavyweight (Pi-hole with its web dashboard, PHP backend, and dependency on FTL) and the bare-bones (a single hosts file slapped into dnsmasq). Blocky sits in that sweet spot between them — a Go binary, a single config file, and DNS blocking that supports DoH, DoT, DoQ, and DoH3 out of the box. ...