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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Yeah, that’s fair enough, though I’m not sure it’s very different from malicious instances creating normal user accounts?

    You can see when users from an instance are all suspiciously voting the same way at the same time regardless of whether they are usernames or IDs.

    There’s lots of legitimate users that only vote but never post so doing it based on that doesn’t seem very effective?

    The second problem is solved using public key cryptography, the same way that you can’t impersonate someone else’s username to post comments. Votes and comments are digitally signed (There would need to be a different public key for voting to maintain pseudonymity though).


  • How about pseudonymous as a compromise? Votes could be publicly federated but tied to some uuid instead of the username. That way you still have the same anti spam ability (can see that a user upvoted these things from this instance at this time) but can’t tie it directly to comments or actual user accounts without some extra osint.

    It might be theoretically possible to correlate the uuids with an account’s activity and dox the user in some cases, especially with some instances having a single user, but it would be very difficult or impossible to do on larger instances and would add an extra layer. Single user instances would be kind of impossible to make totally private anyway because they can be identified by instance.


  • It’s not that it’s on the 172.16.0.0/12 range. That’s totally normal and used for all kinds of stuff.

    It’s that it’s in 172.16.42.0/24 which is the default dhcp settings for a wifi pineapple. It’s the /24 mask given on the .42 that’s a little suspicious because that’s not a common range for anything else.

    Being assigned one of those specific 253 hosts with that subnet mask would definitely make me think twice.




  • Yeah, I like his argument about profiles maybe going to be able “e.g., to eliminate most range errors relatively soon.”

    Well maybe C++ could be considered safe “relatively soon” then but not right now.

    Like he says: “Of the billions of lines of C++, few completely follow modern guidelines, and peoples’ notions of which aspects of safety are important differ.”

    That said, I don’t really consider C++ to be inherently unsafe, there’s a lot that goes into secure programming in any language. Just because you can’t write to an array out of bounds in python doesn’t mean your code is magically immune to vulnerabilities and just because you can in C, it doesn’t mean your code is magically vulnerable to RCE from some buffer overflow.

    I also don’t really trust myself to write perfectly safe production C++ though. I feel like it’s still too easy to feel like you know exactly what you’re doing and accidentally miss something small (hence the many thousands of memory safety CVEs in professional software).



  • Best is very subjective.

    .world is a good general purpose instance for just about anything. I think it has the biggest population at the moment, so communities there are likely to get at least some engagement.

    For “general discussion” it doesn’t really matter. The instances are federated so you’ll likely get general discussion in comments from lots of people from lots of instances anyway, wherever your community is based.

    Some people get almost nationalistic about their chosen instances or have grudges against people from certain other instances. There’s sometimes inter-instance politics with some servers defederating with others or threatening to for various reasons. It’s kinda fun to watch in a popcorn drama kind of way. For the most part, the instance doesn’t matter.


  • That’s pretty cool!

    Although that’s probably what op is actually asking for, I don’t think it’s a modem. It’s a router with an access point.

    It does have SFP for a fibre connection and pcie and USB for you to potentially add a modem or whatever else you want.

    I’m guessing OP is just looking for a wifi router? Otherwise we’d need to know what kind of modem they’re looking for, like Cellular? VDSL? HFC? Satellite? It depends on the internet connection. Different parts of the world need very different kit.






  • TechLich@lemmy.worldtomemes@lemmy.worldold web grandma
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    9 months ago

    It’s really not… A domain name is what… $5-10 per year? Web server software is free (nginx, apache, lighttptd, pick your poison). You could run a website on your phone. It doesn’t need much hardware or network requirements unless you start hitting thousands of users.

    A static IP helps but dynamic DNS is a thing. If you need more juice or you’re located somewhere that NATs IPs, a public web host is like $5-10 a month if you’re getting ripped off.

    It costs more to get a streaming service subscription.

    Hosting a popular webapp with tens or hundreds of thousands of concurrent users interacting with complex backend code and a database (see Lemmy) gets more expensive but it always was and it’s now cheaper than ever.

    Edit: I should point out that I’m pretty anti-corporate and I’m not defending the current state of social media or search results. I’m just also agreeing with the guy who pointed out that the web is still open and you can host a website on a potato.


  • TechLich@lemmy.worldtomemes@lemmy.worldold web grandma
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    9 months ago

    I feel like that’s not a fair comparison. You can’t ride a horse on a freeway but you absolutely can host a website that anyone in the world can access instantly.

    Back when the web was “open” and “free” and not dominated by social media, the 99% of people, the millions and billions of users, weren’t using it. It’s not like your Geocities page in 1999 had a billion visitors (despite what your “one billionth visitor” blink tags proclaimed). Even after it got added to that popular web ring for like-minded netizens.

    I feel like people have forgotten what the old web was really like and that most communities only had a handful of active people. You can still do that and in fact there are thousands of such small independent websites and communities in forums and platforms like this. Hell, a bunch of the old forums and IRC channels etc. from back then are still running and some actually have more users than ever just because of more overall internet adoption.

    It’s a bit sad that Google SEO favours large platforms and garbage medium blogs over smaller personal websites but search was mostly shit back then too (metacrawler ftw).