Never forget Aaron Swartz.

The video he apparently got sued for.

And here a follow-up video where he repeats the trick on a freshly delivered lock (cause the company was whining about allegedly foul play).

That sounds good, thank you.

In general, is it worth to make an account to read on this website?

Relevant Doctorow post: The enshittification of tech jobs (27 Apr 2025)

I think the general term for this is “domain sniping” or “catching”. From this, I also found this paid service, catches.io; can’t tell if it or dropcatch is better. They both only charge you when they are successful in catching the domain for you, which is good.

In general, I second the notion that one probably can’t get around paying for a professional, paid service, since one is up against professionalized scoopers (godaddy and the like), who have put a lot of optimization (down to the placing of their servers) into trying to get an edge over legitimate buyers and competing scoopers.

The only thing I disagree with is this:

This continuing saga shows how important regulation and legislation are to protect consumers, whether it’s individuals like us, or companies that are being bullied into complying with some pretty odious demands.

This makes it look like anti-repair lawsuits were something that can natuarlly occur, and that the solution were some form of government intervention. By and large, that’s not true: It’s the existing copyright laws which are the government intervention — what we are calling for is not a restriction of freedoms for the greater good (regulation), but a return of freedoms that were unjustly taken from us.

(Just so no-one misunderstands me: I’m no opponent of regulations, and am wholly aware that, very often, they actually protect freedom in the greater scheme of things. My point is that terms like “regulation” and even “new legislation” do have a bad ring to many people in the Western hemisphere and beyond, and we needlessly cease discursive territory if we neglect the fact that we are victims of overreaching, oligarch-serving regulation, which we seek to abolish.)

If you don’t yet have a USB adapter for using NVMe SSDs over USB-3 ports, I’d suggest to buy such a thing first, since they not just make for a simple yet (decently) fast storage expansion solution, but are very useful in all sorts of situations.

ffmpeg is usually the tool of choice.

An example for batch converting of all AVI videos in a folder:

for i in *.avi; do ffmpeg -i "$i" "${i%.*}.mp4"; done

Source & further reading here on StackOverflow. The comments to the answer provide examples of how to explicitly tweak the quality level. Inverting what this specific comment suggests, conversion from H264 to H265 could be done by something like this, assuming all your videos’ names end on .mkv:

for f in *.mkv; do ffmpeg -i "$f" -map 0 -movflags faststart -c:v libx265 -c:a copy -c:s copy "${f/x264/x265}"; done

I wonder: if one wants to make things run in parallel, would that be as easy as adding " & " before the last semicolon here? I suspect this could work as long as there are only a few handful of files, but lead to troubles once there’s more.

Like I said: it can be gamed to some degree, but what system can’t?

Besides finding better ways to positively recognize bots, we also need to invent ways that make it quicker to realize “false alarm, this user is actually legit”.

For example, users should have an option to pin posts and comments to their profile, and I suggest to provide at least two different ‘tabs’ for this in the public profile: One tab just for the usual “posts and comments you would like the world to see”, but another tab for “some recent, complex interactions between you and other (established) users that in your eyes prove quite well you’re not a bot”. The purpose is simply to save others, worried that you could be a bot, some time of going through your posts in search of signs for humanity. Yes, this can be gamed to some degree (what can’t?). However, at a technical level, the feature is little more than a copy of the “pin” feature that would be very nice to have anyways, so we can get an appreciable improvement in our ability to tell users from bots for very little programming effort.

There is forum software that’s integrated in the fediverse. Most often I’ve heard about NodeBB, which is open source and one can self-host it for free; there is even a YunoHost package.

What hardware do you currently use and what software do you intend to run on the new machine? And what’s your budget situation?

In any case, I would always recommend to buy used or refurbished hardware. Even if it’s not necessary financially, it’s better for the environment.

That’s very cool indeed – although I dread the moment he starts talking to his followers about Lemmy.

Rather than running a Tor relay, running a simple Tor bridge (e.g. via the browser add-on Snowflake as suggested by @[email protected]) is probably the best thing to do with one’s home hardware.

Actual relays must suffice certain requirements, according to the Tor project:

Requirements for Tor relays depend on the type of relay and the bandwidth they provide. ==== Bandwidth and Connections ====

A non-exit relay should be able to handle at least 7000 concurrent connections. This can overwhelm consumer-level routers. If you run the Tor relay from a server (virtual or dedicated) in a data center you will be fine. If you run it behind a consumer-level router at home you will have to try and see if your home router can handle it or if it starts failing. Fast exit relays (>=100 Mbit/s) usually have to handle a lot more concurrent connections (>100k).

It is recommended that a relay have at least 16 Mbit/s (Mbps) upload bandwidth and 16 Mbit/s (Mbps) download bandwidth available for Tor. More is better. The minimum requirements for a relay are 10 Mbit/s (Mbps). If you have less than 10 Mbit/s but at least 1 Mbit/s we recommend you run a [/wiki/doc/PluggableTransports/obfs4proxy bridge with obfs4 support]. If you do not know your bandwidth you can use http://beta.speedtest.net/ to measure it.

As for exit relays aka exit nodes, the obligatory advice is of course to not run them at all unless you know exactly what you are doing both legally and technically, and probably only if you’re a foundation or something.

Love it. Under text editors, would you like to add Helix? It’s much like (n)vim, but among many other aspects it has better discoverability of features (although several key features like plugins and code folding are still missing).

Some local libraries (e.g. in Heidelberg) or ecological initiatives lend devices to measure electricity consumption at the power plug. In particular, this is useful to measure other appliances as well.

Specifically for computers, they probably have some means to tell you their own consumption, but they may not be accurate or complete and will most certainly omit any peripherals, e.g. external hard drives.

In case anyone wonders about the context:

In April, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale got into a brawl with former Coinbase chief technology officer and Network State advocate Balaji Srinivasan. It wasn’t on a prominent stage or even Twitter/X; it happened in a Signal group chat that’s become a virtual gathering place for influential tech figures. Srinivasan wasn’t going along with the tech right’s aggressive anti-China rhetoric, so Lonsdale accused him of “insane CCP thinking.” “Not sure what leaders hang out w you in Singapore but on this you have been taken over by a crazy China mind virus,” he wrote.

TIL about the Gell-Mann amnesia effect. From Wikipedia:

The Gell-Mann amnesia effect is a cognitive bias describing the tendency of individuals to critically assess media reports in a domain they are knowledgeable about, yet continue to trust reporting in other areas despite recognizing similar potential inaccuracies.

Oddly enough, this guy Wolfram Weimer is a die-hard right-winger. So I was quite flabbergasted when I first read the headline, and still am doubting whether he really intends to follow through with this or rather is only floating this idea in order to introduce another bargaining chip in the trade negotiations with Trump.