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.

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.

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.

I’m not sure where you’re going with the git simile. Git isn’t performing any proof of work, at all. By definition, Proof of Work is that “one party (the prover) proves to others (the verifiers) that a certain amount of a specific computational effort has been expended.” The amount of computational power used to generate hashes for git is utterly irrelevant to its function. It doesn’t care how many cycles are used to generate a hash; therefore it’s in no way proof of work.

This solution is designed to cost scrapers money; it does this by causing them to burn extra electricity. Unless it’s at scale, unless it costs them, unless it has an impact, it’s not going to deter them. And if it does impact them, then it’s also impacting the environment. It’s like having a door-to-door salesman come to your door and intentionally making them wait while their car is running, and there cackling because you made them burn some extra gas, which cost than some pennies and also dumped extra carbon monoxide into the atmosphere.

Compare this to endlessh. It also wastes hacker’s time, but only because it just responds very slowly with and endless stream of header characters. It’s making them wait, only they’re not running their car while they’re waiting. It doesn’t require the caller to perform an expensive computation which, in the end, is harmful to more than just the scraper.

Let me make sure I understand you: AI is bad because it uses energy, so the solution is to make them use even more energy? And this benefits the environment how?

I think decentralized currency is the best part of crypto. Much of US strong-arm policy has been through leveraging control over the dollar? Remember a few years ago when OPEC were making noises about maybe tying oil prices to something other than the dollar? The US government has a collective shit fit, and although I never heard it reported how the issue was resolved, but it stopped being news and oil is still tied to the dollar. It’s probably one of the reasons why the Saudis were about to kidnap, torture, and murder of Jamal Kashogi in the US.

I am 100% in support of a currency that is not solely controlled by one group or State. For all of its terrible contribution to global warming, Bitcoin has proven resistant to an influential minority (e.g. Segwit2x) forcing changes over the wishes of the community. I especially like anything that scares bankers, and usury scabs.

Satoshi made two unfortunate design choices with Bitcoin: he based it on proof of work, which in hindsight was an ecological disaster; and he didn’t seize the opportunity to build in depreciation, a-la Freigeld, which addresses many problems in capitalism.

We’re all on Lemmy because we’re advocates of decentralization. Most of Lemmy opposes authoritarianism. How does that square with being opposed to a decentralized monetary system? Why are “dollars” any more real than cryptocoins? Why does gold have such an absurdly high value?

Not hypocrisy by the author, but by every reader who cheers this while hating on cryptocurrency.

IME most of these people can’t tell the difference between a cryptocurrency, a blockchain, and a public ledger, but have very strong opinions about anyway.

Yeah, then definitely just install VLC. Far easier than mucking about with Jellyfin.

What, exactly, is your end goal? To have a way to play movies that you’re bringing with you on the hotel TV?

Edit: I only all because this seems like a hell of a lot of work just to play movies while you’re traveling, when you could just play them with VLC directly.

Or, if you really want to steam movies to your phone, put VLC on your phone, run minidlna on the computer, and plug it into a GL-iNet Slate Plus.

But if you’re really, like, going to some big get-together and are responsible for media entertainment for a crowd of 20 in a rental, then yeah, taking Jellyfin makes sense. But the hardware doesn’t, unless you make damned sure there’s nothing that’ll need transcoding. One movie, most CPU/GPUs can manage, but if several people are transcoding multiple movies at the same time, it’ll be a fairly beefie machine.

Oh, god, yes. Video games waste vast amounts of energy while producing nothing of value. For sufficient definitions of “value,” of course. Is entertainment valuable? Is art? Does fiction really provide any true value?

POW’s only product is proving that you did some task. The fact that it’s energy expensive and produces nothing of value except the verifiable fact that the work was done, is the difference.

Using the video game example: the difference is the energy burned by the GPU while you were playing and enjoying yourself; cycles were burned, but in addition to doing the rendering there was additional value - for you - in entertainment. POW is like leaving your game running in demo mode with the monitor off. It’s doing the same work, only there’s no product.

This point is important to me. Cryptocurrencies aren’t inherently bad, IMO; there are cryptocurrencies based on Proof of Stake, which have less environmental impact than your video game. And there’s BOINC, where work is being done, but the results of the work are valuable scientific calculations - it’s not just moving rocks from one pile to another and back again.

Ah, yes. Kobo does, indeed, support DRM. Calibre does a not. You can still use non-DRM books with both.

Also, it turns out that there is a piece of software that someone built that happens to work with the very excellent Calibre plug-in system which, if you bought the eBook and have the software proof of purchase, will strip out there DRM from books and allow you to read the books with Calibre. I’m not suggesting you do that, because the unethical and corrupt DMCA bought by from crooked politicians by the media industry in 1998 stripped owners of fair use rights which they’d enjoyed until then. But, it’s easy to find and trivial to use, and once you have it you tend to forget you installed it.

That’s not proof of work, though.

git is performing hashes to generate identifiers for versions of files so it can tell when they changed. It’s like moving rocks to build a house.

Proof of work is moving rocks from one pile to another and back again, for the only purpose of taking up your time all day.

Which party of git performs proof-of-work? Specifically, intentionally inefficient algorithms whose output is thrown away?

Hook into BOINC, or something? That’s an idea.

Sucks for people who have scripts disabled, or are using browsers without JS support, though.