Raspberry Pi for your home network

The Raspberry Pi can provide a great deal of functionality to your home network.  Here are some uses I recommend:

1. Encrypted DNS
   So your ISP can't log what sites you visit and sell this data to marketers
2. Ad Blocking
   Significantly speed up browsing for all your home devices
3. Encrypted FTP
   Securely send and receive large files with friends and business partners
4. Route 53 Dynamic DNS
   So your FTP address (ftp.domain.tld) always points to your public IP

Wells Fargo two-factor authentication

A few years ago Wells Fargo notified me that someone had successfully gained access to my online account through the use of an alphabet attack.  I had to change both my username and password.

Recently the same thing happened to a friend of mine.  It will probably happen to you next.  So here's my advice:  Enable "Advanced Access" on your account.  Every time you try to log in to your account Wells Fargo will use a second form of authentication:  Possession.

Spam, courtesy of LinkedIn

Over the last few years I've been noticing an exponential increase in the amount of spam I receive from IT vendors in my company mailbox.  After occasionally replying to some of these messages and bluntly asking them where they obtained my email address, I finally learned something interesting:

Subdomain vs Address

Recently I heard an internet consultant refer to the address "blog.company.com" as a "subdomain" which led me to do a bit of research into what is causing this terminology confusion.

In my experience in IT, going back to '93-94 when companies were first getting up on the internet, the 1992 first edition of the O'Reilly book DNS & BIND was considered THE bible on DNS.  That book taught us early pioneers what a "subdomain" truly is.

So understand my surprise when Googling "address vs subdomain" today revealed that almost everyone now thinks that having a hostname other than "www" in front of your domain name is a "subdomain" - all thanks to internet hosting providers who don't even know what they are talking about.