About 6 years ago when i worked for a local hospital in IT they got a new GE CT scanner. I got to help them with the usual network runs and whatever.
Everything was as default as they could leave it. The techs were told not to change anything unless absolutely necessary. I asked about passwords and they just smiled and shook their head.
A quick google search later and i got in via ssh as root.... i did let the GE support know that “our network scanner bruteforced its way into the scanner” but they didn’t care. They “made a ticket.” Before i left a few years later i was still able to ssh in.
I switched everything over to protonmail a few years ago.
I’m was never as invested in gmail as a lot of people, but it was my primary email for many years.
It was still a pain to switch, especially since i started fresh (no email / contact transfers). Now they have better tools to transfer email but after some thought, i wanted to start over with everything.
It did feel really good once it was done. It forced me to evaluate what was important vs what wasn’t, and it got me pretty organized.
Not for everyone but its doable. My guess is it took 6 months for me. I do have my gmail account yet just in case but its been a few years since anything important showed up there. I mainly keep it for youtube anyway.
I’ve used pfsense on some soekris 5505s (i think its been a while).
It was sort of a pain, at first, to get pfsense on them. Its been a while since I’ve done it, but heres the short version.
1. I found a version of linux (voyage maybe?) that had some pxe boot stuff setup automatically. I just had to set the dhcp range and a few other options. Any distro with pxe boot works but I’m lazy.
2. Plugged the soekris box into my laptops ethernet port. The linux distro was just a vm. Set up the vm so its nic could communicate with the physical laptop ethernet port.
3. Hooked a serial cable up to the soekris and set it to pxe boot. I had to find the manual to figure out what speed i needed for the serial port. I want to say default was 9600, but double check. Then it got the image from the linux vm and was enough to get me a cmd line via serial port.
4. I copied the pfsense cf (i think its called that) to a exfat USB flash drive and plugged it into the USB port on the soekris.
5. I mounted the USB flash drive on the soekris and used dd to copy the image to the internal cf card.
6. Reboot the soekris when done, change boot order on it, if applicable, and from there plug the soekris into the network or somewhere where it can get a dhcp address so you can finish setup from a web browser.
If you’re interested i might be able to find my notes on it, but its probably been 5+ years.
I have similar minded friends. They have no issue dropping a bunch of money on some cosmetics in a game or random garbage that gets thrown away immediately.
So i ended up just buying a bunch of licenses for threema and giving them away. I know that isn’t an option for everyone but it was how i was able to convert my friends over.
It isn’t a big issue for me to do that. Even with buying 10 licenses, it is a small enough amount that its easy to budget for. Plus, i like to support companies and developers who (at least to me) seem to care.
Everything was as default as they could leave it. The techs were told not to change anything unless absolutely necessary. I asked about passwords and they just smiled and shook their head.
A quick google search later and i got in via ssh as root.... i did let the GE support know that “our network scanner bruteforced its way into the scanner” but they didn’t care. They “made a ticket.” Before i left a few years later i was still able to ssh in.