octosphere

Title is misleading. When I read "go dark" I think of a service doing the clever thing and burrowing itself in the darkweb where it's nearly impossible to take down (unless it gets DDOSed of course).

But even DDOS'ing can be mitigated by hardening your server, and doing rudimentary things like rate limiting and filtering out bots with captchas. Things are made even easier by using a tricked out NGINX[0] server or even Varnish cache[1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nginx

[1] https://www.varnish-cache.org/

I'm glad someone is talking about this and we can have a healthy discussion about it. Things like PrivacyPass[0] are a step forward, but for those who don't know about such a tool, they will continue to be 'tortured' and get repetitive strain injury from constantly having to solve recaptcha v2, at least, well if they browse under Tor heavily and will have to pass recaptcha's test multiple times, and even after proving they were not a bot countless times.

[0] https://privacypass.github.io/

I'm still waiting for sites like 8chan to be permanently housed in a darknet. I know they have an onion, but we get lost when we offer both a clearnet and an onion service. It's contradictory and hypocritical. Just offer the onion service under a really well provisioned VPS (that can handle absurd amounts of traffic) and be done with trying to find a WAF[0]/CDN every time shit hits the fan

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_application_firewall

A VPN should only be ever used to:

1.) Route traffic over hostile connections like shady Starbucks wifi etc

2.) Spoof your geolocation to route around censorship imposed by an ISP. e.g: my residential IP wont allow me to connect to thepiratebay.org

And that's it. Many VPN services suggest you should use them for privacy, but remember $5.00 per month is enough to pay for a lawyer's cup of coffee and not his/her legal fees

I like this, but it looks tricky to setup. There is an old dogma that has existed for a long time where people are advised not to run their own mail client because it's rife with show-stopping quirks that require lots of heavy Googling to fix and amend.

Interesting that their FAQ says it's easy to setup, but I don't buy it, at least from previous experience of setting up clients. (I once had to harden my VPS server rather substantially because they are juicy targets for hackers)...And I also once had to make it survive a reboot incase of too many connections were made by people trying to boot the machine offline (DDOS)

(https://www.mailpile.is/faq/#int-6)

> How hard will it be to install Mailpile?

> It should simply be a double-click to launch an installer on Windows, or dragging an app to the Applications folder on the Mac.

> On Linux we hope to provide native packages for most of the popular distributions.

> harness the full lightning energy of a thunderstorm

As in, walk into every chapel and install a device that works with the apparatus for 'catching' strikes? Not sure what they're called, but I know it's tradition of having a chapel higher than all other buildings which is used to capture potential strikes and earth the current through the ground.

I clicked because I thought it would talk about the actual Dark Web[0] but instead I saw a discussion about how many people use a CSS abstraction layer called Sass

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_web

There's enough tooling as it stands. In-browser devtools are a veritable kitchen sink of possibilities to tap into. And even a cursory glance at some open source projects on Github yields a plethora of tools, modules and snippets of code to use in your project. In essence you can do anything you want with some JS, CSS, and HTML. This is the beauty of the web. We get lost when we ask for more tools and techniques to do things. It's like a massive collective hallucination that the current stack(s) for developing are unworthy or need to be drastically improved. Yes, progress is good, but we've reached a tipping point IMHO.

> I've come to think of Edward Snowden as a traitor

For me he made the Great Game of Privacy a lot fairer. You should read the excellent entry on Wikipedia about the aftermath of the leaks[0]. If the leaks meant that privacy-loving folk went 'dark' in light of the leaks, then this is a net plus. Snowden's actions possibly hindered NSA in catching undesirables, but it's a small price to pay for a bolstered Internet and privacy-respecting comms. And who's to say that the apparatus even worked that well in foiling the efforts of plotters? Bill Binney[1] consistently drives his message home that the NSA's surveillance apparatus is very inefficient at foiling plots, and I agree with him.

Even if it stopped one plot in all the time of its existence, it's still an enormous effort and an enormous amount of money spent just to foil one plot. Old fashioned police work is better at foiling plots because it doesn't have to rely on big data algorithms sifting through the noise of Internet traffic (most of which is innocuous). Old fashioned methods work because they employ simple detective work - it doesn't need the NSA at every choke point and decrypting countless crypto.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowden_Effect

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Binney_%28U.S._intelli...

> 'Observatory' for Internet Abuse

We already have one, it's called the IWF[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Watch_Foundation

A VPN might be handy for bypassing the near-future UK porn block / age verification system[0] (by spoofing your geo-location). I imagine tech savvy teens/children are already investigating VPNs in light of the recent articles which outline the system.

[0] https://www.wired.co.uk/article/porn-block-uk-wired-explains

[0] https://www.ageverificationfacts.org.uk

Here's the important bit from the article where children will need to bypass:

> From the launch date in July, porn websites will have to show anyone visiting from a UK IP address a landing page that doesn't show any explicit content.

> This paper explores tracking and privacy risks on pornography websites. Our analysis of 22,484 pornography websites indicated that 93% leak user data to a third party. Tracking on these sites is highly concentrated by a handful of major companies, which we identify. We successfully extracted privacy policies for 3,856 sites, 17% of the total. The policies were written such that one might need a two-year college education to understand them. Our content analysis of the sample's domains indicated 44.97% of them expose or suggest a specific gender/sexual identity or interest likely to be linked to the user. We identify three core implications of the quantitative results: 1) the unique/elevated risks of porn data leakage versus other types of data, 2) the particular risks/impact for vulnerable populations, and 3) the complications of providing consent for porn site users and the need for affirmative consent in these online sexual interactions.

Sometimes I like to inspect the code of existing addons to look for malicious code. My first sweep is regexing through the code for any URLs which means checking for (http?s://) and the next step is looking for any code that is deliberately obfuscated.

That's because Brexit and climate emergencies are both essentially gradualist[0] topics. They are topics which will be sat on and dragged out for as long as possible because it's something to talk about in parliament. Brexit is something for them to do and make them look busy, but we all know Brexit and the climate emergency has been dragged out for far too long.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gradualism

It's already saturated IMHO. Hackernews is an obvious example of it. There is more tooling than you can shake a stick at, but the real question is who is going to leverage all these tools and curate them so that they pick the right ones, and most importantly, leverage them at the right time? I say the right time, because tools come and go, depending on how many people are using it. Some tools simply stay because they have a loyal userbase/customer-base, others vanish because they are under utilized. I doubt there will be higher funding requirements since these days we have nearly infinite leverage, and leverage without permission. It's now permissionless to invest, use tooling, train people, etc

There's a lot of emphasis on the visions people have on peyote in this article, but it never touches on the emotional effects it has, where it is similar chemically to MDMA and causes people to be highly empathetic towards others and nature in general. You could say peyote has the ability to make people ecophilic/biophilic.

At least from my experience with it, it opened up a world of emotions, some traumatic, some ecstatic, and at times listening to music made me feel the music in a very vivid way, as if the instruments were channeling through every cell in my body and made me feel intensely ecstatic and emotionally involved with the song, often inducing literal tears of joy.

Yeah but what's to stop a bad actor simply switching to a provably secure cryptographic system or app? Don't forget there's an arms race going on, where bad actors consistently try to outpace law enforcement by switching to provably secure and private systems. Take for example when 3DES[0] was discovered as insecure and all the criminals switched to AES[1]. And don't forget the old adage: If you outlaw encryption, then only outlaws will use encryption

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_DES

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Encryption_Standard

> It pains me to consider how much smart person energy is currently channeled into creating flavor of the day JS instead of building stuff with whatever tech they are already proficient with.

I always thought `diversity is good`, but maybe in certain instances it's not. Perhaps a certain saturation level is reached and diversity just adds noise to the system and causes enormous overlap and your "smart person energy" is mostly spent re-inventing the wheel

Which is why I always harden Edge after setting up Windows by disabling SmartScreen

Some people use Windows for games. Yes, I know you can run a lot of Windows games on Linux using Wine or PlayOnLinux, but some just prefer vanilla Windows. Scripts like these are great for freeing up memory and decluttering Windows 10 specifically for running games (typically offline) as connecting Windows to the Internet is generally not a good idea.

Hmm, I wonder what happens when I combine this with other popular scripts like Make Windows 10 Great Again https://gist.github.com/IntergalacticApps/675339c2b805b4c9c6... and Reclaim-Windows10 https://github.com/alirobe/Reclaim-Windows10 is there much overlap between all three scripts or do they all work great in tandem?

I sleep close to an electricity box and it emits a low frequency hum that can be maddening if exposed to it for long periods of time. It can even wake me up at night. I don't think it's the same hum as described in the article though. In general, EMF is something to avoid, although it's very hard to dodge it in urban areas where electricity boxes and wires are always within short distance.

Might need to fix the default banner slot at the very top. I'm seeing:

    {{ad.banner.text}}

In fairness, Bezos is only doing what billionaires are expected to do: do billionaire things like send rockets into space and do billionaire things like anticipate future utopias. He wouldn't be a billionaire if he wasn't into aeronautics and space flight. We all know about the old stereotype of Dr Evil and his moonbases. It was portrayed very nicely in the Austin Powers movies.

I always thought of 10x engineers as a specific type of engineer that follow the 10x rule, as detailed and discussed by Grant Cardone in his book `The 10x rule`. More on that book here: https://jamesclear.com/book-summaries/10x-rule

> The 10X Rule says that 1) you should set targets for yourself that are 10X greater than what you believe you can achieve and 2) you should take actions that are 10X greater than what you believe are necessary to achieve your goals. The biggest mistake most people make in life is not setting goals high enough. Taking massive action is the only way to fulfill your true potential.

> What are strobe lights used for?

> Strobe lights have all kinds of uses—from serious and scientific to recreational and fun

And I think the recreational & fun use-case is the most popular

I often delete a tweet if I make a mistaek in the spelling. For some reason it infuriates me more than I expected. I think this is because when I tweet, I commit to a permanent public record and the tweet will be scrutinized by someone eventually (if not currently by my followers) - and the tweet will be read and judged at some point. This is why Twitter needs an edit button.

Honestly thought this was something related to Tor Project[0], but is actually a site about science fiction and fantasy books. From their site:

> Tor.com is a site for science fiction, fantasy, and all the things that interest SF and fantasy readers

[0] https://www.torproject.org/

Also similar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_privilege