84
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2026
84 points (94.7% liked)
Technology
87002 readers
2875 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
Seriously, this is the lowest hanging fruit. Never trust hotel WiFi.
E: infants and their alts
Wrong. Never download and install any wifi profile package, escpecially if it has certs to install. That is just asking to have all your traffic decrypted and data taken.
Hi @pHr34kY@lemmy.world
Agree with your sentiment especially not trusting hotel Wifi (or heck all open network for this matter).
I'd even err on the safe side and suggest not download any certificate and encryption profile at all.
Even if I find myself as a tech literate person, I'd not trust my ability to identify the legitimacy of the download.
extremely low hanging fruit. I travel a lot for work and all my laptops have VPNs with encrypted DNS. Even had to set that up on one of my FreeBSD installs (which was a god damn pain and with the shit wifi on that there really wasn't much of a point at the end of the day).
it's even more mandatory for places that have NO captive portals. Those connections are opening themselves up to a can of worms. Looking at you Union Station in Toronto Canada. seriously, fix your shit. One of the biggest transit hubs in all of Canada and their wifi is completely 100% open.
lol same at Union Station WDC and all Amtrak trains (if the wifi even works). Finally switched to a gl.inet (openwrt) hotspot for work travel and haven’t looked back.
I don't think anything can monitor or mess with your local web traffic once you have encrypted DNS.
VPNs don't add any privacy over HTTPS+DoH. Installing CA certs and whatnot is insane.
Stop getting your opsec advice from influencers on youtube. It's snake oil.
Hotel can see every site you connect to and you’re exposed to SNI fingerprinting by their ISP. Metadata leaks over both LAN and WAN (traffic volume, timing patterns, dest IPs, connection frequency) and both netadmin and ISP can infer your browsing habits without actually seeing the content. Other guests with wireshark and too much time on their hands.
Moreover, many types of traffic aren’t HTTPS, including NTP, DHCP, SNMP, FTP, SSH (without HTTPS), most IoT devices, VoIP, gaming traffic, many application APIs, apps with embedded DNS overrides (really apps in general, especially mobile apps, especially meta and alphabet apps), even email unless TLS is explicitly configured. And many websites simply don’t serve HTTPS and will attempt to redirect to HTTP.
This is without getting into encryption strength and post-quantum standards. And I was referring to 802.1X/MDM enterprise profiles not CA.
Wireshark is useless on WPA3. Although hotel wifi typically doesn't use it.
SNI is encrypted with ECH.
I disabled plaintext SMTP on my mail server years ago. Requiring TLS actually reduced spam by 99%. No reputable mail server will use plaintext.
Almost nothing uses plain HTTP. The only thing I typically see is my phone's internet connectivity check, which simply returns an HTTP 204 (No content). It's practically a ping.
HTTPS + DoH is enough because all of these problems are solved.
"VPNs don't add any privacy over HTTPS+DoH"
For someone so smug, you sure say some stupid shit. In what world would wrapping all of your traffic in an encrypted tunnel not provide additional privacy when using a public endpoint?
You're routing all your traffic through a single inspection point. They too can scrape anything that isn't HTTPS. They can list every site you visit without DoH.
Corporations are just as unaccountable as ISPs and governments.
That's not what's at argument here. You said that VPNs offer no additional privacy, which is completely incorrect. They have their own pitfalls, yes. But that's not what you were arguing. You can't just move the goalposts when someone points out that you're wrong.
Hi @LordCrom@lemmy.world