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Discord Will Not Help [video]

2 points by ogogmad 4y ago

LinuxBender 4y ago
This won't likely help after the fact but I would suggest separating artwork and game development discussion into their own Discord servers and then move all business partners and certainly financial information discussion with employees into private self-hosted servers so that one has control over the server, chat filters, IP/domain blocks and even approved/denied web links. It's not perfect and some may not be happy about having to register on a second site friction and all but it sounds like in this case it would have helped. Leave cloaking disabled on the business server so you can see where people are connecting from ahead of time and password protect sensitive channels. Additionally IRC server filters can be updated daily with the most prevalent scam domains using the same sources as uBlock and a few other git mirrors on github. One could even block all text that appears to be any kind of URL and instead require them to get on voice chat to verify themselves. uMurmur is a tiny daemon that is very easy and quick to set up and one can also password protect channels on uMurmur. There is an android client for uMurmur called Mumla. Take a look at Ngircd [1] and TheLounge [2] as a quick way to set up a private secure chat server with chat persistence in less than 20 minutes. uMurmur [3] takes even less time to set up. All three daemons are available in sever Linux distribution repositories and have example configurations. For a more advanced form of chat filtering a good but more complex setup would be UnrealIRCD [4] as an alternative to Ngircd but the UnrealIRCD setup requires a bit more reading and understanding of how IRC works. Even if one did not want to manage a tiny IRCD instance, then at least one could shut down the server nuclear option if something odd is going on as a desired way to control blast radius per the comments in the Youtube video. I say Tiny but most IRC daemons can handle 10K-20K people using IRC clients or several thousand using the web client. TheLounge can eat some ram if one allows for long chat retention. [1] - https://ngircd.barton.de/ https://ngircd.barton.de/ [2] - https://thelounge.chat/ https://thelounge.chat/ [3] - https://github.com/umurmur/umurmur/wiki/Configuration https://github.com/umurmur/umurmur/wiki/Configuration [4] - https://www.unrealircd.org/ https://www.unrealircd.org/
- ogogmad 4y ago
  Thank you for writing out this comment. It's an interesting suggestion to use two chat apps at the same time: One for convenience, and the other one for safety (but at the expense of convenience).
  - LinuxBender 4y ago
    No problem. Maybe the easiest first step would be to just set up uMurmur since it can do both voice and text and password protected channels and uses next to no ram. This may be a safer way to handle business, financial and otherwise sensitive discussions. The one downside is that there is no chat persistence so once people log out the text chat is gone. The upside is that there is no chat persistence so when your discussion is done, the data is gone and harder for malware distributors to grab anything sensitive. There is also no way for chat platforms to quietly safe voice-to-text transcriptions in the background without your knowledge since you are hosting the server. This may also be a useful fallback in the rare occasions that Discord is offline. Save sensitive data in an encrypted ledger, password manager like keypassxc or encrypted archive and of course back it up to multiple encrypted external ssd drives. Sharing of the encrypted files is best done on SFTP on your own VM or physical server. There are GUI applications for people not comfortable with the command line. One can set up a cron job to either move files to a place outside of the chroot SFTP or set them immutable with the chattr +i command or make some directories append-only so that malware and ransomware can not destroy your data. There are documents on the web for how to set up a chroot sftp-only server. but at the expense of convenience Some may complain at first, but once they realize they have a silo'd platform that has as little censorship or no censorship based on whatever rules you create, they may find it quite refreshing.

2 points by ogogmad 4y ago

This won't likely help after the fact but I would suggest separating artwork and game development discussion into their own Discord servers and then move all business partners and certainly financial information discussion with employees into private self-hosted servers so that one has control over the server, chat filters, IP/domain blocks and even approved/denied web links. It's not perfect and some may not be happy about having to register on a second site friction and all but it sounds like in this case it would have helped. Leave cloaking disabled on the business server so you can see where people are connecting from ahead of time and password protect sensitive channels. Additionally IRC server filters can be updated daily with the most prevalent scam domains using the same sources as uBlock and a few other git mirrors on github. One could even block all text that appears to be any kind of URL and instead require them to get on voice chat to verify themselves. uMurmur is a tiny daemon that is very easy and quick to set up and one can also password protect channels on uMurmur. There is an android client for uMurmur called Mumla. Take a look at Ngircd [1] and TheLounge [2] as a quick way to set up a private secure chat server with chat persistence in less than 20 minutes. uMurmur [3] takes even less time to set up. All three daemons are available in sever Linux distribution repositories and have example configurations. For a more advanced form of chat filtering a good but more complex setup would be UnrealIRCD [4] as an alternative to Ngircd but the UnrealIRCD setup requires a bit more reading and understanding of how IRC works. Even if one did not want to manage a tiny IRCD instance, then at least one could shut down the server nuclear option if something odd is going on as a desired way to control blast radius per the comments in the Youtube video. I say Tiny but most IRC daemons can handle 10K-20K people using IRC clients or several thousand using the web client. TheLounge can eat some ram if one allows for long chat retention. [1] - https://ngircd.barton.de/ https://ngircd.barton.de/ [2] - https://thelounge.chat/ https://thelounge.chat/ [3] - https://github.com/umurmur/umurmur/wiki/Configuration https://github.com/umurmur/umurmur/wiki/Configuration [4] - https://www.unrealircd.org/ https://www.unrealircd.org/

ogogmad 4y ago
Thank you for writing out this comment. It's an interesting suggestion to use two chat apps at the same time: One for convenience, and the other one for safety (but at the expense of convenience).
- LinuxBender 4y ago
  No problem. Maybe the easiest first step would be to just set up uMurmur since it can do both voice and text and password protected channels and uses next to no ram. This may be a safer way to handle business, financial and otherwise sensitive discussions. The one downside is that there is no chat persistence so once people log out the text chat is gone. The upside is that there is no chat persistence so when your discussion is done, the data is gone and harder for malware distributors to grab anything sensitive. There is also no way for chat platforms to quietly safe voice-to-text transcriptions in the background without your knowledge since you are hosting the server. This may also be a useful fallback in the rare occasions that Discord is offline. Save sensitive data in an encrypted ledger, password manager like keypassxc or encrypted archive and of course back it up to multiple encrypted external ssd drives. Sharing of the encrypted files is best done on SFTP on your own VM or physical server. There are GUI applications for people not comfortable with the command line. One can set up a cron job to either move files to a place outside of the chroot SFTP or set them immutable with the chattr +i command or make some directories append-only so that malware and ransomware can not destroy your data. There are documents on the web for how to set up a chroot sftp-only server. but at the expense of convenience Some may complain at first, but once they realize they have a silo'd platform that has as little censorship or no censorship based on whatever rules you create, they may find it quite refreshing.