What do you gain by doing this? I trust both proton and mullvad to not fuck up their encryption so attackers can’t read your traffic even through one VPN. The second one doesn’t offer additional security here.

In your setup, proton will only know you use mullvad but not know which sites you visit in the end. Mullvad knows everything just the same as without proton. So the outer VPN doesnt add privacy either.

If you are suspected of a crime, forcing mullvad to disclose your identity/IP is enough and proton doesn’t help.

If you are worried about traffic correlation analysis, then yes 2 VPNs will help. But honestly for normal usage I don’t see the point of 2 VPNs.

And about the DoS fear. Just do it the other way round? Mullvad on the router, proton on the device? From protons perspective you produce the same amount of traffic, it just comes from a mullvad server. The outer VPN is the one where you have increased traffic due to 2 VPNs. But I am pretty sure neither will be a problem and tunneling a VPN through a VPN is not a TOS violation

You DONT want to turn it off. Digital forensics work WAAAAAAY better if you have a memory dump of the system. And all the memory is lost if you turn it off. Even if the virus ran 10h ago and the program has long stoped running, there will most likely still be traces in the RAM. Like a hard drive, simply deleting something in RAM doesn’t mean it is gone. As long as that specific area was not written over later it will still hold the same contenta. You can sometimes find memory that belonged to a virus days or even weeks after the infection if the system was never shut down. There is so much information in ram that is lost when the power is turned off.

You want to 1: quarantine from network (don’t pull the cable at the system, but firewall it at the switch if possible) 2: take a full copy of the RAM 2.5: read out bitlocker keys if the drive is encrypted. 3: turn off and take a bitwise copy of the hard drive or just send the drive + memory dump to the forensics team. 4: get coffee

There is a famous experiment , where a person gets 100$, and have to offer an arbitrary percentage of that to a stranger. If the stranger declines, both get nothing.

From the strangers perspective, getting offered even 1$ is a win, but the vast majority rejected anything below 30%

Can’t remember exactly what happened but it involved changing permissions on /bin /sbin and similar. You know for security …

In the end I didn’t have permissions to run chmod, su or sudo

Fortunately there is little that can’t be fixed by booting from a live image.

If you want any system to connect to you, you need to open a port. You don’t need to do that for outgoing connections (the OS and your router will automatically open ports for the return connection). So if everybody connects to one central system, nobody needs to (explicitly) open any ports (except for the central connection point)

Most VPNs use UDP. So set up a wireguard, tailscale or openvpn.

But you still need to “open up the firewall”. UDP still works on ports the same way as TCP. I do agree however, that exposing a VPN port is more secure than exposing a port for a game server, as you don’t know about the security of that server software.

A drive label is just a string that can be set by any privileged process. Seems like this installation of the new distro didn’t do that. Or you skipped a step in the install where you could have chosen the drive label.

If it is a bug in the installer or if you missed it, I can’t tell.

But you can just change it in gparted or something else.

They sometimes buy keys using stolen credit cards. When the fraud is found out, the banks will request the money from the developer. They in turn often don’t have a way to lock the fraudulent key, so it remains valid.

The costs for the initial bank transfer, plus the time invested in returning the money to the credit card holder are payed by the developer.

The key reseller has a 100% profit margin, the customer has a valid and cheap game key, and the developer actually lost time and money.