Well that could be considered the point where we lost our innocence, yeah. :(

Good point. On that note I am very happy having moved my home server from Apache to Caddy. The auto cert config is very nice.

More the latter :) … if only we could all just get along and be nicer to each other. Sigh.

Oh, definitely rose-coloured, but I am thinking even before those days… like when access to Usenet was restricted to colleges and universities, dial-up BBSes … and I didn’t use Windows or MacOS at all back then. ActiveX and js didn’t even exist back then. Boot-sector floppy viruses did, but those were easy to guard against.

Oh, I’m really just pining for the days before the ‘Eternal September’, I suppose. We can’t go back, I know. :/

This seems like a good idea.

So what’s the floor here realistically, are they going to lower it to 30 days, then 14, then 2, then 1? Will we need to log in every morning and expect to refresh every damn site cert we connect to soon?

It is ignoring the elephant in the room – the central root CA system. What if that is ever compromised?

Certificate pinning was a good idea IMO, giving end-users control over trust without these top-down mandated cert update schedules. Don’t get me wrong, LetsEncrypt has done and is doing a great service within the current infrastructure we have, but …

I kind of wish we could just partition the entire internet into the current “commercial public internet” and a new (old, redux) “hobbyist private internet” where we didn’t have to assume every single god-damned connection was a hostile entity. I miss the comraderie, the shared vibe, the trust. Yeah I’m old.

I have a script that watches apache or caddy logs for poison link hits and a set of bot user agents, adding IPs to an ipset blacklist, blocking with iptables. I should polish it up for others to try. My list of unique IPs is well over 10k in just a few days.

git repos seem to be real bait for these damn AI scrapers.

I’m gonna be that “acktually…” guy for a sec here. Oil & gas (mostly) are not dinosaurs… the vast majority of petrochemicals are from compressed dead algae, plankton and plant matter long pre-dating the dinosaurs: https://www.chevron.com/newsroom/2024/q4/explainer-where-do-oil-and-gas-come-from

Very good point… it would have been uncomfortable for many to cling to more foreign forms of their surnames during & just after WWII I suppose.

Yeah, you’re right there, that one makes more sense as it isn’t a common sound in English.

Good catch, yes.

Ya know what grinds my gears? This American penchant for pronouncing Germanic names incorrectly. Like ‘stein’ as ‘steeeen’. EpstEEN. WeinstEEN (even more frustrating, that last one, as the ‘ei’ is pronounced how it ‘should’ be, but not the second occurrence!).

Even the people with these names often insist themselves on these pronunciations. I mean it’s their right ultimately, it’s their name after all – but why/where/how did this pronunciation take root in the USA?

I was taught in German class that ‘ei’ is always a long ‘i’ – hence ‘schtIne’ not ‘stEEEn’. Hmmph.

Same with Robert ‘Muller’. His name’s spelled Mueller, so by German language rules it would seem it should be pronounced ‘Müller’ (‘ue’ in English being a substitute for the umlauted ‘u’).

I guess it falls out of what appears to be an American myopic view that everyone else has ‘accents’ and they must be purged from American speech since it’s ‘foreign’…

Grumble grumble… OK, I am done my little rant now.

Hmm. OK, I’ve been using AdAway (not AdGuard) as DNS and/or VPN, experimenting with both) under Pixel 9 stock OS, and it mostly works… but some apps and websites still get ads through.

LineageOS w/Adaway root /etc/hosts blocklists was 100% perfect on my older phone… that’s my main quibble with trying LineageOS vs. GrapheneOS.

I know some people recommend against rooting, but I’ve never had security issues doing it and it seemed to offer more bulletproof ad-blocking.

Can you tell me how the ad experience is with GrapheneOS? As in, do apps which try to insert ads in screen transitions (or anywhere) still do so? Or websites which put in AdSense popups?

GrapheneOS doesn’t recommend AdAway or other adblocking solutions, so does it do so itself?

As of today at least, I can still download video/audio from YT on my android phone with NewPipe…

Search for v2.79 (if memory serves) on oldversion.com for the last ‘good’ version of classic winamp, and the streamripper plugin is still floating around somewhere on the 'net…

An absolutely ancient tool I used to use was WinAmp (v2.x) with the Streamripper plugin. It would save out each song from a shoutcast or icecast station to a file with the artist/album/title/track like a champ. Maybe not quite what you want (won’t do youtube) but there are a ton of great indie stations on the vorbis icecast network…

Is… is vibe cat still with us?

Use a straw if available…