A software developer and Linux nerd, living in Germany. I’m usually a chill dude but my online persona doesn’t always reflect my true personality. Take what I say with a grain of salt, I usually try to be nice and give good advice, though.
I’m into Free Software, selfhosting, microcontrollers and electronics, freedom, privacy and the usual stuff. And a few select other random things as well.
Yeah, unfortunately the Fediverse isn’t as big as I’d like it to be. I can’t find people to talk about some of my interests, either. I’ll occasionally put in keywords on https://lemmyverse.net/communities , have a look at PieFed’s curated feeds and topics (Edit: another topic list)… But there’s probably just not enough people here who are into miniatures…
Delete the All feed! It’s just stupid. Subscribe to what you like. Maybe have a short glimpse at the All feed on a biweekly basis for 5min, but that’s it.
I feel at this point it doesn’t even matter. I’ve recently renovated parts of my IT infrastructure… And I mean they’re not only harming news outlets and Wikipedia… Everyone is under attack. They’re scraping my sites, searching for all kinds of stuff until the database process catches on fire. They put weird stuff into every web form, send plenty spam mails… Sign up random people for your newsletter, unsubscribe people from your newsletter… The OpenClaws are able to solve the CAPTCHAS and/or sign up… It’s crazy. Law aside, I don’t think I have any option but to block them myself. This will also block legitimate crawlers because I have to put in place some drastic measures with some services. But at least I can continue to run my website.
I see other people do the same. And I also run into rate limiting all the time. Back in the day, my Home Assistant could just query trashday, whether the train is on time, which flights are overhead… I could just run yt-dlp to save some YouTube videos. That’s all becoming more and more difficult because of all the countermeasures. There’s still some chance to force people to sign up and offer some protected API…
But whether someone passes a law or doesn’t… I think the internet admins are still going to (have to) kill the bots.
Hope it was a Golf 2 Fire & Ice edition…
Dunno if that’s “on purpose”. I think it’s more, back in the day .ml was the defacto standard instance, so lots of average people went there and you’d find a wider bandwidth of people. That might have changed with some people leaving and the new visitors not signing up on .ml anymore. That makes the rest of the group condense to people who pick .ml on purpose. But that’s not a deliberate plan, more how maths works. 😅
Seems to me like the big tech companies are way ahead anyway. Google probably has enough data collected to know whether someone (or something) is eligible to watch a video. At least they distinguish based on network, maybe behaviour and in doubt they’ll force me to log in and present my session cookie. That’s all bad for privacy as is.
I wouldn’t be surprised if they follow up revamping the captchas. Maybe in the future it won’t make you click on pictures with an omnibus in it, but directly talk to the Chrome browser on your device and make that (or some hardware chip in the computer/phone like a TPM) verify you’re a human. Of course that one might as well contain a unique ID and an advertiser ID… I think I read on the news how they’re considering to redo the captchas. Not sure if it’s going to end up like that. But my best bet is it’s gonna be bad in some way or another. Perfect opportunity to tie something down for the users, remove use-cases that aren’t consume only, and track them some more.