Great video on the defects of the "they go low, we go high" strategy, in case you've never seen it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAbab8aP4_A

If you want to find solutions online, stop using Google.

Sometimes I post stuff to my blog about things that I could not find a satisfying solution to and where I had to figure one out myself. I post those things because I want it to be discoverable by the next person who is searching for it.

I did a quick test, and my posts don't show up anywhere on Google. I can find them via Kagi, DuckDuckGo, and even Bing. But Google doesn't show my stuff, even when hitting specific keywords that only my post talks about. And if my site even shows up, it is only about +6 months after I posted.

Even tried their search console thing, it doesn't report any issues with my site. So it must be the lack of ads, cookies, and AI generated content which makes Google suspicious of it.

So, If you are an engineer looking for solutions to your problems online, just stop using Google. It's become so utterly useless, it's ridiculous. Of course you will miss all the cool AI features and scam ads, but there's always some drawbacks.

Reposting my post from Mastodon yesterday, it felt relevant. https://infosec.exchange/@hertg/112989703628721677

Unprompted pro tip: I started running ytdl-sub on my server, added the channels I'm interested in, and now I watch youtube on my personal mediaserver and dont even open the youtube page/app anymore. Because I already know this shit is only gonna get more annoying as time moves on, and especially after the silicon valley growth imperative collapses in on itself. Let's hope we'll have ytdl working for long enough.

You can even configure it to download videos a few days later, after sponsorblock info has been submitted, then it also cuts that out. And you can set it to only keep the last {n} videos if you just intend to watch recent stuff and not keep an archive. It even works for non-youtube. I added Neo Magazine Royale from ZDF Mediathek, and it just worked (shout out to the germans who know what that is)

Cons: I don't get yt recommendations Pros: I don't get yt recommendations

But I still find good new stuff via other feeds, so 🤷‍♂️

Most email providers will automatically put emails coming from .xyz to spam. I'd advise against using any "new TLDs", if you can. But if you must, avoid those that are frequently used for spamming. A lot of spam detectors will already score your emails as suspicious just for the TLD.

See for example, https://github.com/apache/spamassassin/blob/trunk/rulesrc/sandbox/pds/20_ntld.cf

This reminds of a stupid filesystem pet idea I had a while ago. Running as a daemon, it walks through your filesystem and sometimes leaves traces (as files), maybe you'll find it sleeping in your downloads folder every now and then. I thought it was a cute idea, but didnt actually think about implementing it, for obvious reasons, it could go so horribly wrong 😂

Great video. I actually bought the domain opensource.rip a few weeks ago, just to list the affected projects and explain exactly what jeff geerling did here. Haven't started it yet, and I'm mostly commenting just to make myself commit to the idea.

Intending to create a static site with Zola, lmk if you wanna contribute. Submitting information like I asked for in the following post would already help me out :)

https://infosec.exchange/@hertg/112196322254411560

Since you are from Germany, simply say "Die Grünen sind Schuld". Everyone will understand and accept this reason.

Here are some feeds of individuals from my list:

• https://stephango.com/feed.xml (CEO of Obsidian)
• https://taggart-tech.com/atom.xml (A cybersecurity analyst)
• https://odersky.github.io/feed.xml (Creator of Scala, hasn't really published anything yet)
• https://www.da.vidbuchanan.co.uk/blog/rss.xml (Hacker, stumbled upon him for his Acropalypse discovery)
• https://jvns.ca/atom.xml (A software engineer and speaker, don't remember how I found her, but she puts out great content)

And I also started a blog myself recently. I'm just some dude though

• https://hertig.blog/atom.xml

I mostly agree with your comment. And you are absolutely not 'victim-blaming'. I think some might mistake your stance with a 'vote with your wallet' sentiment, but I interpret your comment about 'fighting back' as more than that.

Obviously, it is better to seek out the better options as a consumer, but that is not enough. People are not stupid for not seeking out alternatives, when the game is rigged against them in the first place. Fighting back also means trying to unrig the game. How one is supposed to achieve that is a question that I don't have a satisfying answer for. I for myself, started by educating myself, by becoming more vocal about the defects of the status quo, and by advocating for change. It's not a lot, but it can reach into your circle of friends. I attempted to reach a bit further with this blog post, even though it might just reach people that don't need any convincing.

In the spirit of trying to make a difference, what are some of the DRM-free options? Let's point people directly to better alternatives :)

I know of libro.fm for audiobooks.

I have both, a personal domain with my name and also an anonymous generic domain. I use the anonymous one for 90+% of my online stuff, and use a random unique address for every service (you can set up a wildcard in proton, so *@domain.org lands in the same inbox). I would recommend that for two reasons: if you own your anonymous domain you can move your mailprovider anytime (as opposed to using some email masking service), using unique addresses for every service enables you to easily figure out which one leaked your address if you start getting spam. Just make sure to use a generic name for the domain and dont get an exotic TLD (just get a .com .org or something). Some of the non traditional TLDs may negatively impact your spam scores, and its easy to find a .com or .org when you can literally choose any domain name you want.

Have also been using it for a while now, it's the best alternative I tried so far. downsides are cost, closed-source, and my fear that they're gonna take VC money in the future. So far, I can stand behind their offering tho. And the built-in feature to lower or raise results from certain pages is amazing.