Hold on a tick.

Specifically blacklisting a group of users because of the technology they use is, by definition, “targeting”, right? I mean, if not, what qualifies as “targeting” for you?

And, yeah. Posting a sign saying “No Nazi symbolism is allowed in this establishment” is - I would claim - targeting Nazis. Same as posting a sign, “no blacks allowed” - you’re saying that’s not targeting?

I know we’re arguing definitions and have strayed from the original topic, but I think this is an important point to clarify, since you took specific objection to my use of it in that context; and because I’m being pedantic about it.

There is a German song about the opposite. The title, loosely translated, is “the sweetest fruit is eaten only buy the biggest animals” because (as the song explains) the sweetest fruit grows in the highest branches.

This version has only German subtitles, but you might find one with English.

No.

Use S/MIME or PGP and directly encrypt emails to your recipient. This is the only E2E encryption available to email.

The best metaphor for email I’ve found is that you’re writing your message on a postcard and handing it to your neighbor closest to the destination, who hands it to her neighbor, and so on, until it gets there. There are usually fewer hops, but also your email is broken into packets which could go through god knows how many routers, each of which can read your email.

E2E requires setting up a private key; RFC 821 provided no such mechanism. Your only option is out-of-band negotiation, like PGP.

There is a good proposal out there that sets mail headed announcing that you accept encrypted emails, and includes information about your ID, which clients could parse and verify against public key servers; it hadn’t really gained a lot of traction, as it causes issues for data harvesters but also at the end user side. Like, how is notmuch and mairix supposed to handle these? They’d need permanent access to your private key to decrypt and index the emails, and then now your index is unencrypted.

There’s been a fair amount of debate about this, and it’s a lot of work that would need coordinating between teams of volunteers… it hasn’t made much progress because of the complexity, but it’s a nice solution.

I can almost not wait to be a motorcycle!

I know that none of them use a VPN for general-purpose browsing.

Interesting. The most common setup I encounter is when the VPN is implemented in the home router - that’s the way it is in my house. If you’re connected to my WiFi, you’re going through my VPN.

I have a second VPN, which is how my private servers are connected; that’s a bespoke peer-to-peer subnet set up in each machine, but it handles almost no outbound traffic.

My phone detects when it isn’t connected to my home WiFi and automatically turns on the VPN service for all phone data; that’s probably less common. I used to just leave it on all the time, but VPN over VPN seemed a little excessive.

It sounds like you were a victim of a DOS attack - not distributed, though. It could have just been done directly; what about it being through a VPN made it worse?

You’re saying targeting people who are taking steps to improve their privacy and security is ethical? Out do you just believe that there’s no such thing as ethics in CIS?

You know how popular VPNs are, right? And how they improve privacy and security for people who is them? And you’re blocking anyone who’s exercising a basic privacy right?

It’s not an ethically sound position.

That’s not what I’m complaining about. I’m unable to access the site because they’re blocking anyone coming through a VPN. I would need to lower my security and turn off my VPN to read their blog. That’s my issue.

They block VPN exit nodes. Why bother hosting a web site if you don’t want anyone to read your content?

Fuck that noise. My privacy is more important to me than your blog.

This is a really strong argument for not depending on non-federated, centrally controlled services. It doesn’t matter which country or company is behind Your Favorite Service™, they can be legally mandated to by Oppressive Regime (“it could never happen in my country!”), or they could just be arbitrary assholes.

I don’t care why Microsoft did it. I moved off Github when MS acquired them, although in this case it probably wouldn’t have made a difference. Regardless, what it proves is that you can not rely on a monopoly.

Thank you! I’ve heard the quote a few times, but never known the source. And I’ve always been pretty sure I was misquoting it.

Is been an hour and no one yet has quoted:

In theory, theory is the same as practice. In practice, it isn’t.

If Jekyll isn’t your jam, then Hugo probably won’t be, either.

I have a simple workflow based on a script on my desktop called “blog”. I Cask it with “blog Some blog title” and it looks in a directory for a file named some_blog_entry.md, and if it finds it, opens it in my editor; if it doesn’t, it creates it using a template.md that has some front matter filled in by the script. When I exit the editor, the script tests the modtime and updates the changed front matter and the rsyncs the whole blog directory to my server, where Hugo picks up and regenerates the site if anything changed.

My script is 133 lines of bash, mostly involving the file named sanitization and front matter rewriting; it’s just a big convenience function that could be three lines of typing a little thought, and a little more editing of the template.

There’s no federation, though. I’m not sure what a “federated blog” would look like, anyway; probably something like Lemmy, where you create a community called “YourName”. What’s the value of a federated blog?

Edit: Oh, I forgot until I just checked it: the script also does some markdown editing to create gem files for the Gemini mirror; that’s at least a third to a half of the script (yeah, 60 LOC without the Gemini stuff), which you don’t need if you’re not trying to support a network that never caught on and that no-one uses.

@Xanza’s suggestion is a good one. For me, it’s sufficient to fuse mount the backup and check a few files. It’s not comprehensive, but if a few files I know changed look good, I figure they all probably are.

Sounds delicious. You have the recipe?

I do recall Logic class being classified under philosophy, but it’s been a long time.

The difference is disprovability. Can you construct an experiment that would, if successful, disprove Buddhism? If not, it’s not science, and there is an enormous difference between Science and not-Science.

There have been thousands of philosophers, and dozens of philosophies which disagree on key points and are therefore incompatible. Can you reconcile Ayn Rand’s libertarianism and Buddhism? If not, how can you determine which is the correct way to live? If it boils down to personal choice, like whether blue is better than red, then it’s opinion and tells us nothing about reality except what you, the individual, prefer. Which is not very useful to more than a handful of people.

I would suggest that what they’re describing is a scientific theory which might be experimentally provable, based on some experiments that strongly point at the theory being true.

Whereas Buddhism is a religion. Or a philosophy, if you prefer.

I don’t remember the exact quote, but I love the thing about “the thing about science is that it doesn’t matter whether you believe it or not.”

I’m not the person who brought git up.

Then I apologize. All I can offer is that it’s a weakness of my client that it’s difficult and outside the inbox workflow to see any history other than the comment to which you’re replying. Not an excuse; just an explanation.

Work is the thing you’re complaining about, not the proof.

If given the option, I’d prefer all computing to have zero cost; sure. But no, I’m not complaining abou t the work. I’ll complain about inefficient work, but the real issue is work for work’s sake; in particular, systems designed specifically where the only important fact us proving that someone burned X pounds of coal to get a result. Because, while exaggerated and hyperbolically started, that’s exactly what Proof-of-Work systems are. All PoW systems care about is that the client provably consumed a certain amount of CPU power. The result is the work is irrelevant for anything but proving that someone did work.

With exceptions like BOINC, the work itself from PoW systems provides no other value.

Compare this to endlessh.

This is probably wrong, because you’re using the salesman idea.

It’s not. Computer networks can open only so many sockets at a time; threading on a single computer is finite, and programmers normally limit the amount of concurrency because high concurrency itself can cause performance issues.

If they’re going to use the energy anyway, we might as well make them get less value.

They’re going to get their value anyway, right? This doesn’t stop them; it just makes each call to this more expensive. In the end, they do the work and get the data; it just cost them - and the environment - more.

Do you think this will stop scrapers? Or is it more of a “fuck you”, but with a cost to the planet?

Honey pots are a better solution; they’re far more energy efficient, and have the opportunity to poison the data. Poisoned data is more like what you suggest: they’re burning the energy anyway, but are instead getting results that harm their models. Projects like Nepenthes go in the right direction. PoW systems are harmful - straight up harmful. They’re harmful by preventing access to people who don’t use JavaScript, and they’re harmful in exactly the same way crypto mining is.

It’s a rant, for sure

first of all, bitcoin in its original form was meant to be used as a transaction log between banks.

Satoshi Nakamoto, they guy who invented Bitcoin, was motivated by a desire to circumvent banks. Bitcoin is the exact opposite of what you claim:

A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution. … Commerce on the Internet has come to rely almost exclusively on financial institutions serving as trusted third parties to process electronic payments. … What is needed is an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust, allowing any two willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a trusted third party.

https://www.bitcoin.com/satoshi-archive/whitepaper/

My comment is a rant, because I constantly see these strongly held opinions about systems by people who not only know nothing about the topic, but who believe utterly false things.

cryptocurrencies result in a centralisation of power by default, whether they use proof of work or proof of stake, because they are built so that people with more resources outside the network can more easily get sway over the system

Ok, now I have to wonder if you’re just trolling.

Bitcoin, in particular, has proven to be resilient against such takeovers. They’ve been attempted in the past several times, and successfully resisted.