DigitalDilemma

Surprised at the level of negativity here. Having had my sites repeatedly DDOSed offline by Claudebot and others scraping the same damned thing over and over again, thousands of times a second, I welcome any measures to help.

Fuck this project, but… their source code can be free and open source even if they distribute binaries which aren’t.

An example of how this didn’t work for one project. (From memory, and it was a long time ago - 2005/2008 ish)

Xchat was once the best IRC client for Windows (after Mirc). It was free software, but the developer started charging for the Windows builds of it. Linux binaries were still free, but he claimed that it was time consuming to build on Windows and etc etc (A bit rich considering it was mostly his code - and there were suspicions he made it deliberately so)

Some people were pretty pissed off about this, especially as it used some other code that was foss and it was felt against the spirit.

Anyway, it was cloned into Hexchat which is fully free on all platforms and apparently not so difficult to build binaries after all.

15 years later to today, Hexchat is thriving and Xchat has been completely dead for 15 years.

I don’t think it’s blind devotion - most of us would acknowledge the guy can be a bit of a dick sometimes.

But we’re also grateful. Without his silly idea in the 90s, linux wouldn’t exist. Computing today would be massively different - big, commercial, massively expensive unixes like Sco and Solaris dominating the industry. My main hobby for 20 years would be very different. My career for six years wouldn’t exist.

That Linus has stayed an actively contributing member whilst not selling out in any way at all for 34 years is… wow. Could you do it? I’m certain i couldn’t. I have neither the ethical strength nor moral compass to do it. And I’m certain if he dropped out, some of the massive egos that satellite around Linux, or the monetizing businesses would seek to take over and twist it to their needs.

And, y’know, on the matter of technical detail like this. He’s nearly always right. Seriously, look it up. He’s not polite, he’s not diplomatic, but he’s nearly always right. And when he’s not, he’ll admit it. Again, not your normal human.

So yeah, that’s why we respect him and, when he talks, we listen. Even if it’s not something we’re involved with, it’s usually an interesting ride.

Spez was a total musk fanboy during the early Twitter changes and said that he used him as an inspiration when changing Reddit’s api, breaking all the decent phone clients. I don’t doubt he’ll do anything to join the big boys club.

Surely it’s up to the advertisers to choose where who they pay money to use?

It’s not that we “hate them” - it’s that they can entirely overwhelm a low volume site and cause a DDOS.

I ran a few very low visit websites for local interests on a rural. residential line. It wasn’t fast but was cheap and as these sites made no money it was good enough Before AI they’d get the odd badly behaved scraper that ignored robots.txt and specifically the rate limits.

But since? I’ve had to spend a lot of time trying to filter them out upstream. Like, hours and hours. Claudebot was the first - coming from hundreds of AWS IPs and dozens of countries, thousands of times an hour, repeatedly trying to download the same urls - some that didn’t exist. Since then it’s happened a lot. Some of these tools are just so ridiculously stupid, far more so than a dumb script that cycles through a list. But because it’s AI and they’re desperate to satisfy the “need for it”, they’re quite happy to spend millions on AWS costs for negligable gain and screw up other people.

Eventually I gave up and redesigned the sites to be static and they’re now on cloudflare pages. Arguably better, but a chunk of my life I’d rather not have lost.

Atlassian is shit for forcing us into the expensive cloud for a shit product.

I feel your pain. Or rather, I felt it once and am now freed!

We were big into Atalassian when they announced they were going cloud only. We had on-prem versions of Jira, Confluence and Bitbucket

We pretty quickly said “Fuck that”, mostly because we have an on-prem policy for IP protection.

I was pretty happy to spend some time searching for replacements, mostly because it was my job to apply upgrades to these steaming, tottering piles of badly written java horseshit. They looked pretty, but the upgrade process was convoluted and quite often failed terminally. I still think that the difficulty of upgrading the hosted versions was a driver towards cloud only, mostly because it exposed how shite the things were and how many complaints they must have got for offering an on-prem product that was so hard to maintain, despite looking pretty.

I take some pleasure that the Atlassian share price is now half what it was before they did this.

(If anyone was interested; Confluence and Jira were replaced by Youtrack. Bitbucket by Teamcity. Both by Jetbrains, both much easier to upgrade (Teamcity is web-based one-click), and our licencing costs are about half what we paid to Atlassian)

And that despite charging for it, they fill many versions of it with adverts, install without asking bloatware and crap paid for by other companies to shove down your throat, and also sells your personal information to (checks) at least 801 third parties.

I’m beginning to think this term is more about Vance more than Trump. At least, that’s the plan by those behind Trump.

Let Trump go mad and do everything evil at a hundred miles an hour, which is what’s underway. Create utter chaos and make it impossible for anyone to draw breath and structure a defence. Then when the country finally pushes back (Maybe after about year) and he’s impeached, slip in JD Vance as a more moderate leader and everyone will be so grateful the Republicans secure several terms by turning against and blaming everything on Trump.

I could be wrong. Anyone making predictions in this chaos is guessing.

Traccar - a GPS tracker.

It tracks devices around on a map and records stats about them. Used by fleet managers to monitor thousands of vehicles simultaneous, and also people like me with just two. The interface is a little quirky, but otherwise it’s a very solid and capable program. It shows a web map with live positions of the devices, battery state, speed, direction and other datapoints.

My wife and I like to know where the other is because we both do dangerous shit solo. (She horseriding, me motorbiking, and we’ve both got health conditions). I get notifications when she enters any number of geofences, and can see where she is at any time - and vice versa. This has eased anxiety for both of us.

Initially we used Life360 which is a nice and easy app to use. Then we found out that they sell your information to actively work against you. Not just basic stuff for advertising, but your driving habits, speed, style, accelleration rates - to car insurance companies so they can raise your policy costs, or potentially deny your claim entirely. (Just one reference but there’s heaps more)

So we went self-hosted. Traccar is free and I keep our information private. Install a small app on your phone and register it, and done. Or it integrates with dozens of commercial and open source tracking systems.

Disclaimer - not involved with the project, just a user and a fan.

(Just noticed my wife’s left her phone behind when she went off riding… I guess no system’s perfect!)

Agree. I use it just for GPSLogger - the best tool for logging and sharing comms ever written. So good, Google made it impossible to list on the play store, and F-droid allows me to continue using it easily.

Yep, absolutely.

Although when doing so, that would make your regular PC a server. Doesn’t stop it continuing to be a regular PC as well.

You need a way to connect to your home server from the internet, yes. You can do it easily using cloudflare tunnels or using one of the many vpn systems for your phone.

Look into Syncthing if you have a home server - very easy phone backups that cost nothing.

A lot of people have made it their main income. Whether you or I think that’s good or not is irrelevent, but it does mean hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of Americans will lose their jobs as a result of this.

If they don’t have an online presence and neither do their peers, how would they be cyber bullied?

Fun fact, I was called by my bullies on my parents landline and bullied when I was a kid in the 1980s.

Bullies are gonna bully - the method varies but never the motive.

The Qur’an?

How we’ve done it recently:

1. Put domain on cloudflare or another registrar that supports an API. Generate a token with the right privs.
2. Use certbot with the cloudflare plugin, and that token, and generate whatever certs you need within that domain using the DNS01 method.

No need to have port 80 open to the world, no need for a reverse proxy, no need for NAT rules to point it to the right machine, no need to even have DNS set up for the hostname. All of that BS is removed.

The token proves your authentication and LetsEncrypt will generate the certs.

No sign of that happening yet, especially with the results of a certain election in a certain country.

If this was just about the X/Twitter accounts, then X could just suspend them.