Looks like it needs a meta account? As soon you hit enter it wants to log-in. I guess I won't try this any time soon. :)

I recall we could dial up a super slow connection over telephone lines, get all our mails into such client in less than 4 minutes over said slow line, just to dial off again.¹ Afterwards we would read all our mails offline with all the time in the world, carefully crafting replies and put those into an "Outgoing" folder for the next time we could dial up a connection again (usually the next day). :)

¹) back then you paid Internet by the minute, or in case of the Deutsche Telekom it was a 4 minute tact in the evening, so you had to wait until after 21:00 to get the cheaper prices.

That worked because while the link may have been slow, it was circuit-switched and generally provided the 2400 bits. "Bad wifi" is unbelievably bad compared to an old dial-up link. It's so much worse than you're imagining.

Macs that no longer get reboot-requiring updates by Apple usually have long(er) uptimes. :) My record here with my primary Mac mini was a bit over a year. Only to be forced to reboot because of a power outage.

Generally it feels like sometimes you boot into a stable "session" that can go on forever, but often enough you boot in a "session" and something goes wrong quickly and you'll have to reboot after a week or two. But I do experience the same with my Raspberry PI. :)

When I wrote my own brainf*ck interpreter (in C) at the start of the year I was really struggling to find a use for the language. Eventually I had the idea to obfuscate emails on my websites with the language.

Basically each email gets written as a brainf*ck program and stored in a "data-" attribute. The html only includes a more primitively obfuscated statement "Must enable Javascript to see e-mail." by default which then gets replaced by another brainf*ck interpreter (in JS) with the output of the brainf*ck code. Since we only output ASCII we can reduce the size of the brainf*ck code by always adding 32 to each value it outputs. The Javascript is loaded from what seemingly looks like a 3rd party domain. There we filter basing on heuristics and check if the "referer" matches before sending out the actual interpreter code.

Of course all this would not help if a scraper properly runs things through Javascript too.

Recently I read you soon will be able to run DOOM via CSS, so certainly it should be possible to have a brainf*ck interpreter in CSS? That would be the next step… just to get rid of the Javascript, but then I'm okay with all the downsides of using Javascript just for the e-mail obfuscation.

Anyway… I also regularly (at least once a year) rotate those public contact addresses.

How does this approach meaningfully differ from having javascript that XORs the email with a random sequence of bytes stored in that JS?

It's more fun? :)

/edit

And you can combine both approaches: XOR'ing the code first for good measurements. :)

How does that work if the scraper takes a screenshot to feed to a LLM or OCR?

That seems like a very expensive way to crawl the internet

Scrape normally collect emails, if no email seen take screenshot and OCR OCR is cheap and REGEX is cheap

It would be interesting to show bf code rather than the actual email on the webpage. A lot of OCR systems struggle with this kind of repeated symbols where the exact count is required.

Sounds interesting. I always wanted to use a Raspberry PI as router (to have one as backup in case the OpenWRT Linksys goes down), but couldn't wrap my head around properly how to overcome the single network port (I think the usual recommendation is to use an extra USB network card/adapter). Can you elaborate more about this VLAN stuff (you would put your modem, your router, and all your machines on the switch... and in the switch you tell the router connection to double use the connection for WAN and LAN separated via VLANs? And put the modem into the "WAN VLAN" too?)

Ideally the PI also should to what the extra DSL Modem does… but I guess that's where the dram must stop. :D

When you setup your single ethernet port (let's call it eth0) as a VLAN trunk port, you'll get the ability to configure multiple virtual interfaces off of it. How many virtual interfaces you get depends on how many VLANs you want to tag traffic for. For example, if you have 2 VLANS with ids 100 and 200 (100 being your public Internet-facing traffic, and 200 being your LAN traffic), you would then have interfaces eth0.100 and eth0.200 to work with that you can then use in your firewall scripts as if they were two separate, physical interfaces.

This of course means you need a VLAN-aware switch that this single ethernet port can plug into, configured as a VLAN trunk (in Cisco terms) port. You would then want to configure one of the other switch ports as a VLAN access port assigned to VLAN 100 (untagged). This is the port you would plug your cable modem into. Then (in the simplest example) you could assign all the rest of the switch ports to VLAN 200 (untagged), and you would plug all your LAN devices into them.

I've created a blog post about this: https://louwrentius.com/raspberry-pi-as-a-router-using-a-sin...

The TL;DR is to have two vlans on the cable from your switch (called a "trunk"), "lan" and "wan", carrying the respective LAN and WAN networks. Then, on the Pi, create two vlans on the underlying Ethernet interface. Then those two VLAN interfaces can be configured just like the LAN and WAN interfaces of the router. On the switch, you’d dedicate one port to the WAN by adding it to the WAN VLAN without tagging, and the other interfaces do the LAN VLAN, also untagged.

I'm with a slightly older Firefox and can't use many websites at all anymore because the Cloudflare cancer.

Of course then you got sites like gnu.org too that block you because your slightly outdated user agent.

I... Don't think it does that? It shouldn't, anyway. How long has that been a thing? They've been hit pretty hard by the slop crew lately but I couldn't imagine it being so bad they require an up to date UA

It's going on since quite a while. Want to update some GNU software, or look up something? I have to switch the user agent to "curl" to be able to visit the sites.

Needs a recording of an Amiga reading in a floppy disk... and the floppy drive just waiting to be feed. Those were the sounds! :)

(The interface on the website is a bit confusing to use, IMHO)

It is weird to think, computers are almost completely devoid of whirring nowadays. Other than the fan, and fans have gotten quite quiet. Floppies, CDs, hard drives. Tapes even (although I’m not that old).

It’s just kind of funny, I guess, the upcoming generation will never have the surprising “wow, my computer is silent” moment. I guess that was a one-time thing.

I tried to describe to my kid the sound of a 5.25" floppy disc the other day. MMWA MWA mmmmmm MWAMWA mmmmmmm.

He has seen 3.5" discs, but never the large floppies. His mind almost exploded when I talked about games needing 7 or 8 discs and hitting certain points where the game would pause while you put a new disc in.

I remember when the hard drive on my PowerMac 7200/90 started to fail (I was told that some of the ball bearings the platter rotated on were broken [0]). When the drive detected a 'wobble' on the platter, the entire computer would just power down with no warning at all - it was like the sound of a vacuum cleaner powering off. Silence and a blank screen that looked like a power cut, followed by that "oh sh!t" moment.

0. Note sure how true this was!

I love that Amiga emulators (FS/E/Win)UAE have an option to emulate the floppy drive sound. Very nostalgic, but also useful as an indication that something's happening!

Yes, there are two players, and often the bottom one plays and it's a different song than the one we selected, which is loaded in the top one.

Any "HTML emails" get filtered straight into the spam folder here. I think I'm not part of the target audience here.

How do you deal with things like "we sent you a one-time code to confirm your login"? Most of those are HTML-formatted today

I still can check the SPAM folder, if needed.

But most SPAMs are HTML, so you'll have a good default last-stage in-client filtering in place in case some SPAM actually makes it through the other setup on the server (greylisting, DNS based filtering lists, policy-based filtering, etc.) :)

Is that a thing? Is it safer to use plain text emails?

> Is that a thing?

There must be literally dozens of people who do this.

Very much so. While a lot of mail clients block images, they can be used to track you. Hell a lot of HTML can be used to track you if you're smart about it

I run a setup like that on my (outdated) Yosemite machine to provide multiple private TLDs for local deployment/development needs.

I set that up in like 2014? Even back then it was known already that the quick /etc/resolver way was the deprecated way to do things. So I guess they finally killed that feature off?

The proper (more awkward) way is to use scutil directly (which then stores the settings in some binary plist somewhere, I assume).

Maybe try this and see if it still works afterwards?

It would be less hypocritical if that critique of the situation wasn't posted on a website that itself loads unnecessary 3rd party resources (e.g. cloudflare insights).

Luckily I use a proper content blocker (uBlock Origin in hard mode).

Even with ad blocking, it's transferring over 200KB of data, half of which is to load a couple of fonts. Not terrible but the basic HTML is only 17KB.