Web browsers have a huge attack surface, and are most people’s main exposure to potential exploits. Without javascript, 99% of the attack surface disappears, becuase the attacker no longer has a way to run arbitrary code.

A lot of terminal-based browsers don’t do javascript.

If I want to scrape a page, this makes it a pain for both parties. I’m not an AI company, so I can afford the hash tax, but it’s still a pain to spin up Firefox from a from cron job instead of wget. And I’m still doing it, Anubis doesn’t stop small time scrapers like me who aren’t running AI training, and only scrape like one page per day. So now the server has to serve the original page, plus all the Anubis stuff each time my crown job goes off.

It sucks that you can’t browse anywhere without javascript anymore. It used to be that all the open source sites, most news sites, forums running phpbb, even YouTube aside from the actual <video> element all worked without javascript, and as a bonus there would be no ads.

Now, you can’t browse anywhere without these challenges. At least this one is noninvasive, but the Cloudflare one and the Google Recaptcha do a ton of fingerprinting to choose whether to let you in.

USPS has a home-rolled one that requires web assembly enabled, or it silently fails with a blank page. There’s no non-malicious excuse for that.

If this is the future of web browsing, hopefully more sites use systems like Anubis. But I also hope at least static pages can be viewable as plain html.

There are things I miss from Windows 95, 98, NT, and XP. There’s nothing I miss from Windows 7, 10, or 11. Everything I cared about had been deleted by the time of Windows 7.

Unless you count everything Google as malware, in that case yes

Yes, but more urgently, Facebook.

If Motorola is willing to have a non-shitty operating system, why can’t they just put a non-shitty operating system on at the factory? All the stock Android OS I’ve seen lately, including Motorola’s, are crappy, have privacy settings disabled, and in many cases are full of unremovable malware.

My main issue is the lack of xdotool support. It can’t ever be supported because of the way Wayland isolates processes from each other.

See https://gist.github.com/probonopd/9feb7c20257af5dd915e3a9f2d1f2277

The usual way for me is to give certbot write access to a directory in the HTTP root, so the server can keep running.

For internal stuff, it may be easier to set up your own CA.

Try to get as much as possible off Windows. You can transfer the remaining Windows-only programs to a virtual machine in snapshot mode, or if necessary, a real machine with a backed up image, that you can reimage regularly.

Not everyone can get off Windows. But get as much as you can. Isolate what’s left.

Thanks, that looks a little better, but still missing things like sending keystrokes to non-active windows. (Also, I’m on Mate desktop on most my computers.)

I just need xdotool. ydotool is missing almost everything. I don’t need programs sandboxed from each other. I don’t need that multi-DPI stuff (200% scaling works fine in X). Wayland doesn’t provide any features I’m missing.

I have self hosted my email since 2006. I gave up on self hosting outgoing mail in 2021, but I still keep the server up for incoming mail, and still set up throwaway accounts on there.

The hard part of hosting email is getting Google and Microsoft to accept outgoing mail. Tons of businesses that do not have visibly outlook .com or gmail .com addresses are still hosted by those servers.

I had SPF, DKIM, and a static datacenter IP address with no reputation problems. I still couldn’t get through to Microsoft, not even in people’s junk mail directory, until they manually whitelisted my address. Microsoft didn’t allow them to whitelist a whole domain. Google was a little easier, but they added new demands monthly.

In 2025, I can’t get reliable delivery to gmail .com addresses even sending from a hotmail .com address in the outlook .com web interface.

I got GOG Galaxy working in Steam, through Proton, as an “Add a non-Steam Game”. I’ll have to try Heroic Launcher.

Not sure how much you’re paying for your VPN, but a virtual private server can be had for about $5 per month. You’ll get a real IPv4 address just for you, so you won’t have to use non-standard port numbers. (You can also use the VPS as a self-hosted VPN or proxy.)

$5 per month doesn’t get you much processing power, but it gets you plenty of bandwidth. You could self-host your server on your home computer, and reverse-proxy through your NAT using the VPS.

Cloudflare has IP banned me before for no reason (no proxy, no VPN, residential ISP with no bot traffic). They’ve switched their captcha system a few times, and some years it’s easy, some years it’s impossible.

killall -u 1001

I think top has a way to do it interactively.

Aluminum foil works. At least, I can’t receive calls or texts through it last I tried.

Get the heavy duty kind. It’s not any more conductive, but is more durable against tearing.

Note that a gap in your phone’s tracking data can look suspicious at times. Sometimes it’s less suspicious to leave your phone at home.

How do you add a custom service to systemd? Let’s say /usr/local/sbin/foobar . I can never seem to get it to work, but can do it easily in sysvinit.

sgt-puzzles. Simon Tatham’s Portable Puzzle collection.

Contains a bunch of simple puzzles, of the minesweeper and sudoku style. Loopy is my favorite.

Available for Linux, Windows, MacOS, Android, and anything with a web browser and a mouse. Packaged in Debian and F-droid, and probably many other places.

I like it for time wasting in lines at the DMV, for a low-stakes game when anxious, and for falling asleep.

Unfortunately, I think most platforms for novels allow AI, so they end up full of AI trash.

Instead of using a platform, try looking up authors you’ve read before and liked. Then see where they publish. Or try and find a fandom for the genre you like, and ask humans for recommendations