We never had one growing up but we did have a home PC. Like with AOL, all of the dial-up numbers were long distance so the costs to use it for any length of time would have been crazy. We basically had to wait another 2-3 years for a local dial-up company (basically 3 guys in the area bought a T1 line and a bank of modems) before there was a non-long distance number we could dial to get online.

The real crime is that rag existing at all.

I thought they were a cool idea, at least conceptually. In practice, no one really wanted to read web pages or email from across the room on a fuzzy CRT.

That would be cool. I didn’t dive too deep into it, but the server project for it seems like you can configure the menus any way you want since they’re just HTML. You’d probably have to do server-side rendering or otherwise put all the HA API logic in the backend, but that could work!

I loooove that WeatherStar 4000 emulator and run a copy at home. It seems like it relies on Javascript so sadly may not play well with those old set top boxes. But if you get it working, please share.

It may be a bit crude, but I’ve always laughed at the thought of something like a butt plug being an anti-AI symbol because all of the AI logos look like buttholes.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg26635411-700-why-do-so-many-ai-company-logos-look-like-buttholes/

At best. And it’s probably gonna be a <= $2 Google Play Store gift card.

🍻

I may have seen the actual music video once. Listened to the song a ton of times on the radio and streaming.

Same. This post was the first time I’ve seen the video but I’ve enjoyed the song a million times.

Well, removed yes. Deleted, not always.

That gave me an idea for an April Fool’s Day easter egg in Tesseract. Represent upvotes as negative downvotes and downvotes as negative upvotes.

Here’s hoping I remember to do that lol.

I remember both of those going downhill in real time but the one that hit me the hardest was Discovery Channel. One day it was Bill Nye, Mythbusters, Shark Week, and science documentaries and the next it was Pawn Stars, Swamp Loggers, and American Chopper. At least we got a nice meme template out of that last one.

Fuck it, it’s Christmas Tuesday.

I’ve been looking into crowdsec for ages now and still haven’t gotten around to even a test deployment. One of these days, lol, and I’ll get around to it.

Oooooh. That’s smart. I mostly host apps, but in theory, I should be able to dynamically modify the response body and tack on some HTML for a hidden button and do that.

I used to disallow everything in robots.txt but the worst crawlers just ignored it. Now my robots.txt says all are welcome and every bot gets shunted to the tarpit 😈

I’ve got bot detection setup in Nginx on my VPS which used to return 444 (Nginx for "close the connection and waste no more resources processing it), but I recently started piping that traffic to Nepenthes to return gibberish data for them to train on.

I documented a rough guide in the comment here. Of relevance to you are the two .conf files at the bottom. In the deny-disallowed.conf, change the line for return 301 ... to return 444

I also utilize firewall and fail2ban in the VPS to block bad actors, overly-aggressive scrapers, password brute forces, etc and the link between the VPS and my homelab equipment never sees that traffic.

In the case of a DDoS, I’ve done the following:

• Enable aggressive rate limits in Nginx (it may be slow for everyone but it’s still up)
• Just stop either Wireguard or Nginx on the VPS until the storm blows over. (Crude but useful to avoid any bandwidth overages if you’re charged for inbound traffic).

Granted, I’m not running anything mission-critical, just some services for friends and family, so I can deal with a little downtime.

I used to use HAProxy but switched to Nginx so I could add the modsecurity module and run WAF services. I still use HAProxy for some things, though.

I have never used it, so take this with a grain of salt, but last I read, with the free tier, you could not secure traffic between yourself and Cloudflare with your own certs which implies they can decrypt and read that traffic. What, if anything, they do with that capability I do not know. I just do not trust my hosted assets to be secured with certs/keys I do not control.

There are other things CF can do (bot detection, DDoS protection, etc), but if you just want to avoid exposing your home IP, a cheap VPS running Nginx can work the same way as a CF tunnel. Setup Wireguard on the VPS and have your backend servers in Nginx connect to your home assets via that. If the VPS is the “server” side of the WG tunnel, you don’t have to open any local ports in your router at all. I’ve been doing that, originally with OpenVPN, since before CF tunnels were ever offered as a service.

Edit: You don’t even need WG, really. If you setup a persistent SSH tunnel and forward / bind a port to your VPS, you can tunnel the traffic over that.