Looking at paranoia levels at home

This week I was playing with the iftop application, a tool to look at in- and outgoing network traffic, and I noticed it showed a few entries for Amazon servers. After I did shut down my browser and email client, they were still there... Was my computer broken into ??? I tried to stay calm and wondered what else could be causing the network traffic. Ahhhh, yes, using a weather applet on my desktop panel. After disabling it there was less traffic but still a connection to an AWS server. What else could be using this ? Looking at the ps processes tree I wondered about Geoclue. I closed down my Redshift applet, and ... tada ! That was it. Two of my desktop applets were using AWS.

And why ??? Apparently AWS is dirt cheap. Even Signal messenger sticks with it.

Relieved, slightly confused, but happy about this new experience.

More on iftop

More on AWS

Signal and AWS

(Image with iftop taken from Wikipedia page)