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8organicbits

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Hello!

https://alexsci.com/blog/

https://indieweb.social/@robalex

Feel free to reach out on email if our interests align: robert [at] robalexdev (dot) com

Statements are my own and do not represent the positions or opinions of my employer/client.

Posts257
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wordpress.org 5d ago

WordPress – Polls for ActivityPub

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1pts0
www.xda-developers.com 18d ago

Convert your RSS feeds into a static website

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4pts0
mecsa.jrc.ec.europa.eu 1mo ago

Assess the security of email communication between providers

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2pts0
www.internetsociety.org 1mo ago

The Shift in Peering Threatening the Internet's Foundations

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10pts0
mitxela.com 1mo ago

Virtual Precision Clock

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2pts0
www.feistyduck.com 1mo ago

Acme CAA Extensions to Become Mandatory

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3pts0
blog.apnic.net 2mo ago

Authoritative DNS over encrypted transport at OARC 45

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2pts1
www.dallasnews.com 2mo ago

A "Photonic" Guitar

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1pts0
blog.robbowley.net 2mo ago

SDLC is a power tool, not a compliance document

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3pts1
binhong.me 2mo ago

GitHub Action Runner Alternatives

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1pts0
bugzilla.mozilla.org 2mo ago

DigiCert: Misissued Code Signing Certificates

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1pts0
mousetrappedcomic.blog 2mo ago

Mousetrapped

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3pts2
lyonhe.art 2mo ago

A Sum of Errors

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3pts1
www.netlify.com 2mo ago

Netlify Database is now available

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1pts0
nesbitt.io 3mo ago

Forge: CLI for Multiple Git Forges

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4pts0
blog.apnic.net 3mo ago

Strengthening your network security with APNIC's products and tools

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1pts0
owltec.ca 3mo ago

Installing a Let's Encrypt TLS certificate on a Brother printer with Certbot

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246pts53
www.lkhrs.com 3mo ago

Text-scale should be the default

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3pts0
zeldman.com 4mo ago

RSS Creator on Bluesky and at Proto

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mxmap.nl 4mo ago

Email Providers of Dutch Municipalities

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alexschroeder.ch 4mo ago

I haven't thought about software patents in a long time

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github.com 4mo ago

Identify OpenClaw installations on managed devices

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rmendes.net 5mo ago

How to Self-Host FeedLand with Docker Compose

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nesbitt.io 5mo ago

Lockfiles Killed Vendoring

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www.makeuseof.com 5mo ago

I ditched Gmail for Thunderbird on my Android

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faultlore.com 5mo ago

Let's Corrupt the Web

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alexschroeder.ch 5mo ago

Locking the Gate

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3pts4
www.eff.org 5mo ago

EFF to Close Friday in Solidarity with National Shutdown

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87pts62
nesbitt.io 5mo ago

PkgFed: ActivityPub for Package Releases

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2pts0
www.netmeister.org 5mo ago

Use of PQC in SMTP STARTTLS

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6pts1

I think it's about user agency. When we say that infinite scroll is addictive, we mean that the user keeps on scrolling even when they wish they could stop. It's also about harm. Trapping users on their phones is harmful to their well-being. A person who wants to quit should be able to do so, addictivity that prevents that is harmful.

Reading the bill I see carve-outs for things like "commercial transactions", perhaps allowing Amazon and Temu to use infinite scroll, but not Facebook and TikTok

I may complain that I don't like the way a sleezy con man talks, and I may be able to detect his communication patterns, but that doesn't mean I want the con man to speak in a different way I can't detect as sleezy. I don't want to talk to the con man.

Obfuscating LLM output to trick the reader into thinking it wasn't LLM output is not respectful.

This is an important point, private videos should not be impacted by this as knowing the URL isn't enough to access the video. Unlisted videos are indirect-object reference by design. It's poor security, but the user is expected to understand the tradeoff (if they actually do is questionable).

How can you check other people's certs?

There are red flags you can look for, but you need to confirm with the domain owner to be sure. CAA records can tell you what CAs are supposed to issue a certificate. Many companies always use the same CA, so a change to a different one could be suspect.

For the wiretapping scenario, domain verified certificates do not protect against that scenario. If the wiretap has full control of your server's network, then it can issue a certificate of its own. No need to compromise a CA.

Anyone know the best practices for keeping AI crawlers off your RSS feeds? I know robots.txt works for the well-behaved bots. Other tools like interstitial captchas don't as the feed readers break if you send them anything but XML.

Putting just the post intro in the feed and linking to the website feels like a safer approach, assume you have bot protections on the website, but that's a poor experience for people who want to read in their feed reader.

Ad Infini­Tum 2 months ago

These approaches are obviously great if your goal is to force marketing down people's throats, but it kills the integrity of the platform.

I don't get why people would continue using Google search (other than familiarity/momentum). As a site owner I'm questioning whether I even want to be indexed by Google.

If someone enters a username that doesn't exist in the system then you randomly prompt for password or alternate method, so it looks like an account may exist.

Username enumeration isn't usually considered a vulnerability, but it does make other attacks, like credential stuffing, easier. I.E. you can focus attack resources on usernames that have active accounts.

It's very low on my list of concerns though, usually there's much worse problems when I pentest.

One suggestion for anyone concerned about this weakness. You can use the CAA record to pin the domain to a specific certificate authority, issuance method, and account. This is imperfect, as CAA record validation (edit: of CAA extensions) is not mandatory yet. But by March 2027 all the CAs a supposed to have support.

Sprinkle some DNSSEC on the CAA record too, if you'd like.

If the goal is to review every citation fully with 100% accuracy, then, sure, exhaustive human review is needed. But I suspect human review of a random sample would add value, catching some fraud, missing others, but having zero false positives (or as close to zero as human review can get).

An LLM could replace the random sampling. It doesn't need to be particularly good for the approach to provide value. I would worry about LLM bias though.

Another thing to consider is that readers can detect fake citations after publication, report to arXiv, and the author gets banned.

How much utilization do you have? For low scale, it's hard to beat GitHub Actions as they offer free runners for public repos and include a bunch of free hours for private repos.

Once you start paying for it, GitHub Actions runners are very expensive. I've used both Jenkins and GitLab before to self-host CI/CD, and you save so much using on-demand (or at higher scale, reserved) cloud instances. I do freelance DevOps work and I've helped clients with these sorts of challenges.

I maintain a similar index-of-indexes but it's intentionally non-curated, restricted to indexes that use the OPML format, and uses autodiscovery to expand the list. The site needs some work, but it's up to 356 indexes.

https://blogroll-network.alexsci.com/blogrolls/

I'd recommend looking at anything with "planet" in the name, there are a bunch of tech communities that manage community feeds and they are high quality. There are also a ton of personal blogroll recommendations via micro.blog too.

One challenge is that they have a ton of usage under their free tier, especially by free and open source projects which have near zero budgets. Its an artificial economy of projects that cannot pay for their own usage.

Another challenge is that the GitHub Actions paid tier is already very expensive, the quality of service is poor, and they have major security challenges. They could load shed by raising prices, driving customers to other platforms, but they already charge 10x what others charge (https://runs-on.com/pricing/#runner-pricing, https://www.ubicloud.com/docs/about/pricing). Anyone using GitHub Actions at scale would be somewhat price insensitive already.