The western hemisphere isn’t just the Americas. It includes half of europe…

There are quite a few people in the western hemisphere that don’t even bat an eye when they walk past a 1000 year old building on their way to work every day.

For me the oldest building is just a random house from the 13 century.

I have set it up in a way where all the packets have to go through their VPN and if they don’t, they get dropped before they leave my PC.

That is the function of a firewall and not of the VPN. As I understand portmaster it does both. But that is not normal VPN behavior.

VPNs are not magic. They are a piece of software that encrypt traffic and send it to a special server. They do that by creating a virtual Internet connection (think like pluging in an additional Ethernet cable or connection to an addition WiFi at the same time). Everything that is sent through the virtual connection is encrypted. Your system now has (at least) two valid Internet connections (one real and one virtual). For every packet it sends it needs to decide which connection it should send it from. This is decided by something called the routing table. When you start the VPN it will put two routes into the table.

• traffic going to the VPN server goes through the real connection (so the encrypted VPN traffic is routed correctly)
• everything else goes through the virtual connection (the VPN tunnel where it gets encrypted)

The attack described is a way how a network router can add a new route into your devices routing table to basically override the second route from the VPN. The route is still there, there just is another one that has a higher priority.

A VPN is not the ultimate authority over your network traffic. It is just another program sending and recieving taffic.

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.

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.

Chrome doesn’t care about closing html tags. If they are mising the document is invalid but chrome will render it anyway and just add the closing tag where it thinks it should be.

At the other end, Firefox goes beyond the standard and will block certain connections that should be allowed by the fetch standard (the setting to disable that is called enhanced tracking protection).

So chrome allows things things it shouldn’t while Firefox blocks some it shouldn’t

That is a real problem. In a perfect world you would want all of your data to be available to everyone who can use it to improve your live. And only getting advertisement for things you actually want/need (not only think you want/need) is a real improvement of your live.

Sadly “improving lives of consumers” is not the goal of any of the big data collectors and as such any data collected is or will be missused to cause harm to the owner even if it is not directly obvious.