From my understanding, the impetus was that F5 submitted a CVE for a vulnerability, for an optional, “beta” feature that can be enabled. Dounin did not think a CVE should be submitted, since he did not considered it to be “production” feature.

That said, the vulnerability is in shipping code, regardless of whether it is optional or not, so per industry coding practices, it should either be patched or removed entirely in order to resolve the issue.

If they are also sending a validation email, it would fail, so no issue.

The generalized approach in industry is to use API calls, and create classes to structure the data you receive as JSON or XML. At that point, it is entirely up to you how to format and display the data from your classes. Take a look at some of the Lemmy client code like Mlem, Memmy, or Voyager as examples. Though they have gotten more complicated, they all follow this client-server model for front end development.

However, due to recent shenanigans around API and RSS by companies, mostly those looking to prevent AI companies from using their data for free, the alternative, much worse method is to take the HTML output from a standard web request, and try to reverse engineer the page information into a class structure. This sucks, breaks frequently, and requires you to code around ads and other junk on pages in order to get at the content.

TrueNAS has an OpenVPN plugin available, which is typically the recommended option.

You are trying to solve two different, but related problems, and there are discrete solutions for both.

One is a personal cloud. You need a secure place to store your shit from multiple users and devices, from multiple networks. You’ll need a mostly static IP and dyndns or your own domain, and certificates signed by a public CA/letsencrypt.

Then, you are looking for a backup application that supports rsync or sftp/scp over ssh or vpn, that is also cross compatible (Android and PC/Linux). Point this to the service above, and you are good to go.