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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 24th, 2023

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  • It’s a little longwinded and meandering, but it’s a good piece and a good message. This is why things like Linux and opensource are so important. On the surface it looks like a bunch of nerds making our computers slightly more of a hassle to use and slightly less compatible with everything else, but maintaining full control of what our systems do, what other system’s they talk to, and maintaining a chain of accountability that goes all the way to the hardware is so important. Sadly it’s important in ways that the average person doesn’t care much about, or rather they won’t care about them until it’s too late. Until every computer for sale everywhere is just a surveillance device shaped like a laptop that plays youtube and opens facebook while logging and sending off every click and keystroke.

    Now I’m all fired up. I’m going to go install Linux on an old thinkpad.










  • While I don’t have love for meta/facebook/instagram/whatever corpo name they’re deciding to lead with this month, the fediverse blocking off people who want to join it seems odd. Like, we want the fediverse to be a thing so that everything can talk to everything else and the content itself can be king without having to worry too much about where that content lives. So we have a standard (ActivityPub, among others) that we want people to use so it all Just Works™, and we have a large entity adopting it and we shit on them for it? Like I said I don’t have any love for threads or meta at all, but shouldn’t we be at least a little happy that the very concept of federation isn’t able to be ignored in this way? What’s the benefit of building all this that we want the world to use and then getting mad and booting people who choose to connect to it?

    I don’t have strong feelings about this one way or the other I just don’t see the danger or damage in letting federation happen and just letting users decide what they want to view and what they don’t.




  • I ran a cgiproxy instance with proper ssl certs that totally bypassed and trivialized the school’s internet filter. It was password protected with unique passwords per user and I had it set up in such a way I could tell when a password “got out” and I’d cancel it. It got added to the blocklist a couple times, but I was ready because I’d already registered like 20 dynamic dns services to point to the server. It would take them months to add it to the manual blocklist but just a minute to change a link on my forum so people used the next address in line. It was an open secret that I was running it, but I was pretty smart in how I ran it and who I provided access to. I also ran a forum that was popular with the student body and the passwords to the proxy were given out there, but only to people I trusted and could reasonably deduce who they were. Even then they didn’t know it was me running the whole thing.

    I mean most people probably did, but again I did it in such a way there was never any real paper trail. I never made any money or wanted any clout for it. I just thought it was fun that I got pissed off at the internet filter blocking newgrounds one day and thought “absolutely not”, and basically trivialized the filter schoolwide.