Continuing my work from the Web Browser telemetry article two years ago (which I plan to update, just to see the difference time does to telemetry data), I decided to make a log of all network connections a standard install of Windows 11 Pro (for ARM, 22H2, OS build 22621.1344) does.

The methodology is the same, standard setup without changing any of the default settings (Privacy ones, for example). Test device is a MacBook M1 laptop and Parallels Desktop, a clean user profile, all network connections blocked, application-level network connection whitelisting and only Little Snitch installed. So it’s actually Little Snitch that does all the heavy-lifting. Network traffic is routed through a VPN in Finland.

That’s 66 unique network connections to different hosts/domains for a clean install. Some are understandable, like Windows Update CDN, others like graph.microsoft.com and watson.events.data.microsoft.com are just the thing that would define Windows 11 as spyware. Definitely “more spyware” than DPRK’s Red Star OS.

RISC-V is an open standard instruction set architecture (ISA) based on established RISC principles. Unlike most other ISA designs, RISC-V is provided under open source licenses that do not require fees to use. A number of companies are offering or have announced RISC-V hardware, open source operating systems with RISC-V support are available, and the instruction set is supported in several popular software toolchains.

Below is a small list of some of the most important RISC-V SoCs (System on a Chip) and their development boards. I chose not to list the prices of the SBCs (Single-Board Computer) because they shift quite a bit depending on availability, location and the current Moon period.

StarFive JH7110

JH7110 is equipped with a 64-bit high-performance quad-core RISC-V processor core sharing 2 MB of cache coherency, whose working frequency is 1.5 GHz. JH7110 has a rich high-speed native interface, supports the Linux operating system, and has powerful image and video processing system. The StarFive ISP is compatible with mainstream camera sensors, built-in image/video processing subsystem supports H.264/H.265/JPEG codec. The integrated GPU makes its image processing capabilities stronger, such as 3D rendering. With high-performance, OpenCL/OpenGL ES/Vulkan support, JH7110 can further enhance intelligence and efficiency. JH7110 can complete a variety of complex image/video processing and intelligent visual calculations. Also, it meets multiple visual real-time processing requirements at the edge. source

• manual
• four RV64GC SiFive U74 application cores, one RV64IMAC SiFive S7 monitor core and one RV32IMFC SiFive E24.
• 1.5GHz
• 28nm

Background

The legendary newsgroup hierarchy alt.cyberpunk has been hibernating for a few years now, but that is no reason why this FAQ should not be useful. Usenet itself is rather dormant and not all ISPs provide access. Google Groups, formerly Dejanews, provide web access to the alt.cyberpunk hierarchy.

So here it is, dusting off the info dump and readying it for a world that is like the 1980’s all over again. This means much of the content is radically reorganised.

This is Version 5.1 preview 3 of the alt.cyberpunk FAQ. History is a little foggy, but it appears that previous maintainers/editors and version numbers are as given at the end. Presently, the maintainer follows alt.cyberpunk (which is easily done) and 4chan.org/g/cyb/ when operative and also anon.cafe/cyber which is a more recent hangout.

Telemetry is bad. Everybody knows it. However, monitoring the health and performance of one’s server is critical for preventing unnecessary problems and it is important to have a system in place that can collect system and application data accurately and display it in an understandable manner.

What is collectd?

collectd is a daemon which collects system and application performance metrics periodically and provides mechanisms to store the values in a variety of ways, for example in RRD files. collectd gathers metrics from various sources, e.g. the operating system, applications, logfiles and external devices, and stores this information or makes it available over the network. Those statistics can be used to monitor systems, find performance bottlenecks (i.e. performance analysis) and predict future system load (i.e. capacity planning). Or if you just want pretty graphs of your private server and are fed up with some homegrown solution you’re at the right place, too ;). homepage

This configuration monitors the following:

• basic system resources (load, processes, CPU cores)
• swap and RAM
• disk(s) usage
• networking on ports 22 (SSH), 80 (HTTP) and 443 (HTTPS)
• number of logged-in users
• sensors data

As you already know if you are reading this article, the TSA No-Fly list was exfiltrated by a Swiss hacker from the U.S. national airline CommuteAir servers a while ago. After it was put up for sale on the breached.vc forums by someone, that someone made the list(s, because there are two .csv files) free to download.

Long story short, here it is the list, in all its glory, no strings attached.