Ayesh

Sorry I meant that the oldish UI on PorkBun is a positive feature.

> their UI is a bit old school

This honestly is a (positive) feature IMO.

I have a couple of similar scrapers as well. One is a private repo that I collect visa information off Wikipedia (for Visalogy.com), and GeoIP information from MaxMind database (used with their permission).

https://github.com/Ayesh/Geo-IP-Database/

It downloads the repo, and dumps the data split by the first 8 bytes of the IP address, and saves to individual JSON files. For every new scraper run, it creates a new tag and pushes it as a package, so the dependents can simply update them with their dependency manager.

If they didn't have the password visible, "66668888" or "88888888" usually works.

I truly miss Vietnam.

I'm just an average programmer, and English isn't even my native language. But i had a blog since I was 18, and although it went through some new domains, some of the small blog posts evolved to more bigger things that I still affectionately work on.

- I wrote a blog post about a CloudFlare when they were just starting, which landed me a gig to provide a technical review for a printed book.

- Some reverse engineered router/phone IMEI unlock codes lead to a complete website to generate them.

- An Instagram photo/video download tool that got so popular Meta sent me a UDPR and a C&D demand to shut down.

- Various talks in conferences, some that even paid me.

- Small web sites that spun off to their own web sites.

I would argue that an average person is exactly who should have a blog. Because, majority of us are average, and having a blog or a blog post related to a particular topic (even a mediocre one) gives the boost to stand you out. Some of these opportunities may not generate a lot of money, if at all. But I like the excitement I get from them.

I occasionally working with WordPress sites, and I personally find ACF plugin as a smell when someone tries to bend WordPress into what it already is not.

Pretty much 100% of compromised WordPress sites I get are caused by a plugin like this, be it either a configuration issue or a vulnerability in code.

This is one of those reasons why I prefer prepaid cloud services. There are not many providers in this field (Vultr, Digital Ocean, etc). You can generally estimate the length of the runway based in the funds you have in your account.

It also helps that there are multiple funding sources, so I can split the bill between multiple cards or accounts.

I travel the major part of the year, and it is quite common to get my cards lost (often at my own fault) or compromised (Mastercard tends to suspend cards when they detect charges from multiple countries in a short time frame). I can wait for the new cards to arrive worry-free that my cloud services don't take a hit like this.

Those Audible/SkillShare/VPN ads ruined YouTube for me, and I consume a lot less content on YouTube nowadays. Sponsor Block addon has saved me hours automatically skipping them, but I can't help but worry that it is only going to make things worse in the long term as creator revenue drops.

I'm still not convinced that self hosting is cheaper though.

Where I live, both the electric grid and Fibre connections are unreliable, and the ISP charges about $3/month for a static IP. Assuming 2.5W for a RPi, it takes 1.8kWh a month, costing around $0.25 for electricity. This also has the downside of using residential IPs, having to deal with CGNAT/NAT if the ISP has no static IPs, exposing your home IP, slow disk speeds in SBCs, etc.

Services like Hetzner have private servers for almost the same amount, which gives you faster storage, server IP addresses (for email reputation), DDoS protection, and a whole lot more to sweeten the deal.

The only thing I self host today is a script that runs on my OpenWRT router, that uploads the probed data from my inverter and BMS to monitor my PV setup. I look forward to get rid of it too, once I get better BMS/Inverter.

> outrageous amount

Squatters have a pretty strong HODL game, often lasting several years because it only costs $10/year for them.

> So this only affects a small portion of 0.01% of their userbase.

I feel like this is definitely a lot more than that. Local banks in many countries, along with many online banks allow USD wire transfers that do not get converted. In countries like Sri Lanka, where the local currency is rapidly depreciating, many people actually never withdraw funds to local currency accounts to protect against this.

Ah good times. These forum software were so easy to available and ubiquitous to a point that everyone and their dog had their own forum.

Customizable signatures, BBcode, user flairs, reputation systems, register to download, etc all were pretty fun.

The privacy was superior too. Almost nobody used their real names, and the profile pictures were crafted animated gifs.

Sure they got hacked once in a while, and admins were often left paying for the servers out if their pockets or dumb banner ads.

Facebook groups took everything away, and the ads were replaced with creepy personalized ones.

A very low tech approach would be to create a video from the screenshots, and let the video codecs do this for you. Av1/x265 are quite mature in detecting differences between frames.

Thank you for running this. I'm using it for a few weeks now, and have been getting a good use from it.

Nothing to be ashamed of either. Several years ago, there was a GitHub Desktop app that neatly contained git binaries with added GitHub UIs. That's what finally made Git "click" for me. I no longer use it, and tend to use the Git CLI and JetBrains' tooling, but I still enjoy GitHub-CLI to easily checkout PRs.

Do you have a test host with the Zerossl chain that you speak of? Use https://aye.sh if you want to try a host using the ECC chain from LE.

Before 2020, ZeroSSL used to be a browser-based acme client using Lets Encrypt. I don't doubt that money was involved, and they switched to Comodo (now Sectigo), with no notice that I could think of. I used them for a few one-off certificates, but this rug-pull caught me off guard. I'd happily watch if they go down in this dumpster fire.

LetsEncrypt now has an ECC root and intermediates. You have to request the account ID to be included, and after which, the intermediate and root certificates will be ECC. More information here: https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/ecdsa-availability-in-pr...

As someone who is from Ceylon (Sri Lanka), I'd say to be careful of the most commercially available cinnamon that are meant to be used with food and tea too, because they may be flavored to dial down the otherwise strong taste/aroma of cinnamon.

I know because one of my friends has a cinnamon farm, and what he makes at his place is nothing compared to the cinnamon I could buy from supermarkets when I was living in the Netherlands. Look for Sri Lankan markets if you are looking for unaltered stuff.

> when developers of GNOME, Wireguard, Redox, etc are already able to self-host their own code on their websites

Yeah, but most of us are not developers of them. It often takes less than an hour to self-host Git/Mastodon/Email/DNS or anything else (most of which have ready to use Docker images anyway) that we tend to centralize, but they come with huge maintenance cost (time, money, backups, security, etc).

I self-host my web sites because that's something I actually want to maintain and have more control over. I will leave the rest to the experts because even us "(technies)" easily mess things up.

DNS over TLS and DNS over HTTPS.

> On Android:

Most phones nowadays should have DoT support built-in nowadays.

Yeah I recently started to pay for it too, after using many 12+ years with free storage. It was relatively low cost compared to Dropbox (etc), so it was a natural move. No more stressing over about deleting photos from Google Photos, and I configured that extra space to use as a backup endpoint too (using Duplicati with Google Drive).

Probably one of the best value online services I paid for.

That was a fun read, and I loved that little joke with NPM packages.

I find SQL, Regular Expressions, DNS, Client-side caching, CORS, TLS, and a few other things to be a MUST when hiring people, because most of the over-engineered crap can be avoided with a little bit of expertise with these. I spend most of my semi-leisure time with some good Regex books and golfing too.

Modern databases are amazing. Every few months, I take pleasure and not shy away in refactoring some complex and frequent queries into SQL views, carefully replace data logic (but not business logic) into stored procedures, and replace certain batch scripts with one-off queries.

I doubt it. Having used Firefox for over a decade, I never had to use flags other than a profile selection option and a safe mode flag.

I have come across more flags during my occasional use of Chrome.

Firefox's configuration flags are unified in `about:config` page. It has a whole bunch of configurations too, but they are neatly named (e.g `browser.ui.something.enabled`) and I prefer configuration options than flags.

It is a hit or miss, as some password fields don't get this. However, I personally fund it useful and use it about 100/% of the time in new signups/resets when available.

As much as a footgun HTTP Public Key Pinning was, HPKP would have solved a lot of issues/caveats mentioned in the article.

That said, I'm going to add this for my domains (all of which use Letsencrypt anyway).

WordPress does not require mpm_prefork. It works just as well with mpm_event (with php-fpm). Arguably, mpm_event is the most widely used one nowadays.

Unless you change it to something else, the ISP-set DNS servers get all of these data anyway.

I use NextDNS an all my devices. The amount of data you can gather from them about a person is mind boggling, given the amount of telemetry most services use, and the trend of very low DNS TTL.