A big issue is that this works for bots that announce themselves as such, but there’s lots that pretend to be regular users, with fake user agents and ips selected from a random pool with each ip only sending like 1-3 request/day, but overall many thousands of requests. In my experience a lot of them are from huawei and tencent cloud/ASN

I don’t actually know how nostr deals with messages if you’re offline, if at all, not that familiar with the protocol. But your idea sounds workable.

I tend to come at it from the other side, I like the federated model, but think the “supernodes” could behave more like dedicated relays. Like, a lemmy server right now does a lot of things, like serve a frontend, do expensive database queries to show a sorted feed, etc. and a lot of that does not scale very well. So having different kinds of nodes with more specialization, while still following a federated model makes sense to me. Right now if one of my users subscribes to some community, that community’s instance will start spamming my instance with updates nonstop, even though that user might not be active or might not even read that community anymore. It would be nicer if there was some kind of beefy instance I could request this data from if necessary, without getting each and every update even though 90% of it might never be viewed. But keeping individual instances that could have their own community and themes, or just be hosted for you and your friends to reduce the burden on non-techies having to self-host something.

Or put another way, instead of making the relays more instance-y, embrace the super instances and make them more relay-y, but tailor made for that job and still hostable by anyone, if they want to spend on the hardware. But I’m still not clear on where you’d draw the line/how exactly you’d split the responsibility. For lemmy, instead of sending 100’s of requests in parallel for each thing that happens, a super-instance could just consolidate all the events and send them as single big requests/batches to sub-instances and maybe that’s a good place to draw the line?

it’s iocaine not Locaine, tripped me up at first as well.

SBPlaysGames, super tiny lets play channel, but has been consistently uploading for 10 years and she picks some really good indie games (as well as board games) that i would otherwise never would have heard of. Plus pretty good analysis of the games, though of course the lets play format means it’s pretty spread out across episodes. And by analysis i don’t mean reviews, but more like movie analysis level. Though I’d love it if she’d lean into that part a bit more.

and i specifically picked her because it’s one thing to consistently produce good content when you have millions of views (and dollars?), but doing so with 28k subs and maybe 100-200 views, for over 10 years, that takes real dedication.

Oh and on the topic of video game channels, AnyAustin is amazing. Fucking weird but amazing. He also does video game analysis but not how you’d think…

this article and the accompanying discussion from lobsters is very relevant. Though the article itself is a bit one sided in favor of nostr, it doesn’t do a great job arguing why a relay really is better

so the obvious solution is to just have humans execute our code manually. Grab a pen and some crayons, go through it step by step and write variable values on the paper and draw the interface with the crayons and show it on a webcam or something. And they can fill in the gaps with what they think the code in question is supposed to do. easy!

What you said is like “i’m going to delete linux and install ubuntu”, but then there’s not really a name for the android that comes with your phone. “stock android” probably is the closest term you get to distinguish between the OS family and the thing actually installed, but all the companies customize their android, so it’s not like there’s just one “stock android”.

i mean, I’m sure samsung has some term for their android, but i doubt anyone use this outside of samsung.

Pinta is my goto replacement for paint.net on linux. It also loads really fast and has most of the basic editing needs covered.

You mean for the referer part? Of course you don’t want it for all urls and there’s some legitimate cases. I have that on specific urls where it’s highly unlikely, not every url. E.g. a direct link to a single comment in lemmy, and whitelisting logged-in users. Plus a limit, like >3 times an hour before a ban. It’s already pretty unusual to bookmark a link to a single comment

It’s a pretty consistent bot pattern, they will go to some subsubpage with no referer with no prior traffic from that ip, and then no other traffic from that ip after that for a bit (since they cycle though ip’s on each request) but you will get a ton of these requests across all ips they use. It was one of the most common patterns i saw when i followed the logs for a while.

of course having some honeypot url in a hidden link or something gives more reliable results, if you can add such a link, but if you’re hosting some software that you can’t easily add that to, suspicious patterns like the one above can work really well in my experience. Just don’t enforce it right away, have it with the ‘dummy’ action in f2b for a while and double check.

And I mostly intended that as an example of seeing suspicious traffic in the logs and tailoring a rule to it. Doesn’t take very long and can be very effective.

This is the way. I also have rules for hits to url, without a referer, that should never be hit without a referer, with some threshold to account for a user hitting F5. Plus a whitelist of real users (ones that got a 200 on a login endpoint). Mostly the Huawei and Tencent crawlers have fake user agents and no referer. Another thing crawlers don’t do is caching. A user would never download that same .js file 100s of times in a hour, all their devices’ browsers would have cached it. There’s quite a lot of these kinds of patterns that can be used to block bots. Just takes watching the logs a bit to spot them.

Then there’s ratelimiting and banning ip’s that hit the ratelimit regularly. Use nginx as a reverse proxy, set rate limits for URLs where it makes sense, with some burst set, ban IPs that got rate-limited more than x times in the past y hours based on the rate limit message in the nginx error.log. Might need some fine tuning/tweaking to get the thresholds right but can catch some very spammy bots. Doesn’t help with those that just crawl from 100s of ips but only use each ip once every hour, though.

Ban based on the bot user agents, for those that set it. Sure, theoretically robots.txt should be the way to deal with that, for well behaved crawlers, but if it’s your homelab and you just don’t want any crawlers, might as well just block those in the firewall the first time you see them.

Downloading abuse ip lists nightly and banning those, that’s around 60k abusive ip’s gone. At that point you probably need to use nftables directly though instead of iptables or going through ufw, for the sets, as having 60k rules would be a bad idea.

there’s lists of all datacenter ip ranges out there, so you could block as well, though that’s a pretty nuclear option, so better make sure traffic you want is whitelisted. E.g. for lemmy, you can get a list of the ips of all other instances nightly, so you don’t accidentally block them. Lemmy traffic is very spammy…

there’s so much that can be done with f2b and a bit of scripting/writing filters

Yes a days earning, at least 30.-, at most 3000.- per day, can be converted to equivalent time in jail* or equivalent time doing community work(4 hours community work = 1 day fine). at least 3 days, at most 180 days (more would mandate jail).

suspended means there’s a trial period where the punishment isn’t enforced and after which it can be fully or partially dropped if the guilty party didn’t commit another crime.

And in this case it’s 30 days worth of fine, how long the probation period lasts isn’t specified. It’s usually 2-5 years

*not going to figure out if jail or prison is the right term…

It’s pretty normal in taiwan, everything is presented in a cute way. E.g. the signs against sexual harassment on public transport https://www-ws.gov.taipei/001/Upload/405/relpic/18288/136717/69e3b002-46fe-4880-a801-3a88b9d5c5a2.jpg

In a perfect world, yes.

In reality, i knew what i did and why i did it, two years ago, after which i never had to touch it again until now, and it takes me 2 hours of searching/fiddling until i remember that weird thing i did 2 years ago…

and it’s still totally worth it

Oh or e.g. random env vars in .profile that I’m sure where needed for nvidia on wayland at some point, no clue if they’re still necessary but i won’t touch them unless something breaks. and half of them were probably not neccessary to begin with, but trying all differen’t combinations is tedious…

Crazy how it went from this 5 months ago to this two weeks ago, talk about Streisand effect

Or even worse, reading online that there’s some super special item you could have gotten 20 hours into the game if only you didn’t open that one regular chest in the starting area in the first 5 minutes of the game. I forgot which Final Fantasy did this? 9 maybe? Pissed me off to no end, i’m not playing through everything again for this… just seemed mean spirited.

More generally, when decisions early on influnce later stuff that you have no way of knowing about yet. I’m not going to play your game 50 times to see all options. So either i play with the wiki open to not miss anything, ruining the fun, or i realize later on that i could have gotten something but it’s now forever locked because of earlier decisions, pissing me off.

Baldurs Gate 3 had a lot of that…

DS9 has lots of stuff against racism, either with aliens or black people in time travel episodes. And the one where Quark transitions for an episode and it’s not just milked for laughs or similar, for the 90s that was handled pretty tactfully. lots of womens rights topics, especially with Ferengi.

And in a way that whole show was a critique of imperialism/colonialism

they did and i’d be surprised if it didn’t continue with more strikes

I’d be really curios to see some sort of study done on this. I mean, it’s not just americans and most of the west is not insulated from america, either, at least not online. and you don’t know from talking to someone online where they’re from. At the same time, there’s rising fascism and neoliberalism bullshit in europe, too.

I’d love to know how much of it is people getting antsier in general because they’re in a shit situation and how much it’s ‘infectious’ from talking with people in shit situations elsewhere, spreading bad vibes. Is this also happening in the chinese web? How about other countries that are more politically/economically aligned with the west but culturally less part of the english speaking web?

There has to be some sociologist out there somewhere studying this, no? But i wouldn’t know where to look. if anyone knows of something along those lines, i’d love to hear it.

oh for going out ours will sit in front of the entry door and look in our direction, even if we’re two rooms away. we really need to pay attention to notice if he suddenly disappears and then check the entry.

It’s really interesting how you start to be able to distinguish the different kinds of look they give you, like I couldn’t say how but I know if he needs help, needs to go out or if he wants to play depending on how he sits and looks.

My dog is pretty smart, but sometimes he’s smart in pretty stupid ways.

One thing he does is, if he needs help he will sit in front of the thing he needs help with. That’s it, just sit there. Now, he’s a black dog and he will sometimes do this in completely dark corners of the apartment. Maybe he played with his food ball and a treat has fallen under some furniture, he will just sit in front of it in the dark and expect us to help him, just sitting there for 20 minutes sometimes. Usually we only notice once he lets out a sad grumble after having sat there for a long time but I’m sure there’s other times where he just gave up and we didn’t notice at all. And this is not something we taught him, he just figured sitting quietly in a corner is the best way to get attention.

That and he likes to check if there’s anything going on behind him while on walks, which often causes him to walk head-first into obstacles…