Security

$0.01. That’s what my first full test session of on-demand US VPN cost — a cloud server created in ~35 seconds, up for a quarter of an hour, destroyed in 22 seconds. Billing rate while it exists: $0.006 an hour. Billing rate when it doesn’t: zero.

No VPN subscription, no always-on VPS, no shared commercial VPN IP that every streaming service has already blacklisted. The whole setup — four Terraform resources, a hardened cloud-init bootstrap, a Tailscale policy and a Makefile wrapper — was built in a single evening with an AI coding agent (GLM-5.3 via OpenCode).

A turbo model booked parking for the wrong day, and a stock-market agent reported a -2.21% drop that was really -0.26%. Both had the correct instructions written down. Both ignored them. Prompts are suggestions, not guardrails.

In my previous post, I shared how to install Home Assistant OS (HAOS) inside a KVM on a Raspberry Pi 5. While having a powerful local server is great, it brings up a major question: How do you access it securely from the outside?

For this setup, I wanted to achieve two specific goals:

1. Enable a free and secure VPN for my mobile device (so I can surf safely on public Wi-Fi).
2. Gain seamless remote access to Home Assistant without exposing any ports to the internet.

The answer to both is Tailscale.

Kippo is an SSH honeypot written in Python. Kippo is used to log brute force attacks and the entire shell interaction performed by an attacker so I have installed it on my cubieboard2 Lubuntu version. According to wiki a honeypot is a trap set to detect, deflect, or, in some manner, counteract attempts at unauthorized use of information systems.

So lets start to install and test my first honeypot.