WangLu's Notes

Google Security Code (http://g.co/sc) is one type of 2-step verification. This is particularly useful when security keys and passkeys are not available. I have been using it in my LXC containers, until today I found out that it stopped working. It just kept saying "The code is invalid". It is easy to rule out some factors: The code works on other browsers on my laptop. The code works on other devices that are directly connected to the router. So it appears that Google also checks IP addresses besides the security code. Recently I have IPv6 enabled, so most devices that are directly connected to the router have both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses. But  I only enabled IPv4 for my LXC containers. So I guess when a code is generated by device A and used by device B, Google should be able to check that device A and device B are closely located. But in my case, IPv6 address appears on device A but not on device B, which may look suspicious. To fix the problem, I just needed to disable IPv...

Every month I receive ~5000 spam emails. I am not very surprised, knowning that my email addresses appear in ~20 data breaches. Email providers filtered out most of them, but after filtering I still receive ~100 every month. It is very annoying when I'm interrupted by an email notification, only to realize that it's from a spam email. Meanwhile I cannot just disable all notifications. Three months ago, I started to try to improve the situation. First of all I explored options for email aliases . Then in the past 3 months, I have been manually reviewing all email messages in the inbox. That are in total ~70k messages. Basically I'm creating a whitelist of senders, and I only enabled notifiation for allowed messages. This turned out to work quite well, I can clearly feel the improvement of life quality. Occassionally I may still need to manually review other messages, but that's OK. Meanwhile, I took this opportunity to review all accounts that I have previouly registered...