I've recently come up with what I expect would be a quite goodanti-robot, anti-crawler tactic, which I will give the snappy labeland summary of "robots don't POST". Simply require a HTTP cookieto see your web pages and then if visitors don't have the cookie,put up an interstitial page with a HTML form that requires them toPOST it to get the cookie. All the form need is a "click me to getyour entrance cookie", because

In some environments, you want to connect programs together withmutual authentication and encryption of their traffic (so each endcan trust the other and the traffic is immune to easy eavesdropping).If the programs are talking to each other over TCP, there's a welldeveloped solution for this in the form of mutual TLS (mTLS) (althoughyou'll probably get to enjoy the fun of running your own privateCertificate Authority). But if you're using UDP, things are lessclear. When this

In a comment on this recent entry ,I was asked if we still consideredUnix logins to be a serious security boundary. This is a sensiblequestion; there are a horde of Linux local privilege escalationvulnerabilities going around right now (and one FreeBSD one forspice), and in general (some) security people have been saying foryears that once an attacker had local code execution, the game wasover. Our answer is that yes, we consider it a serious securityboundary, and if that situation ever changed

One of the divisions in GNU Emacs people is between using Flymake ,which is built into GNU Emacs and is well supported by other standardGNU Emacs packages such as Eglot ,and using Flycheck . I've used Flycheckfor a long time ( cf ) and recently triedusing Flymake , which has given me some pragmaticopinions for my own usage.

(For non GNU Emacs people, Flymake and Flycheck both exist to present(and to some extent detect) 'diagnostics' about your code or whateverfile you're

Suppose, hypothetically, that you want to have a personal copy of thecontent of some website that you feel is important (to you). There areperfectly good reasons to want such a copy; websites go away all thetime on the Internet, and not everyone is online all of the time. It'sgenerally possible to do this (and it's certainly possible to do thiswith Wandering Thoughts ), but there's some things thehypothetical you is going to more or less need to do

For reasons beyond the scope of this entry , I've wound upthinking about how stable or unstable the Unix landscape has been'recently' (which means for more than a decade, and especially ascompared with the 1990s and early 00s). I've written about aspects ofthis before, such as the fading out of multi-architecture Unixenvironments . In thinking about it moreafter my Fediverse post, I've come to feel that the Unix environmenthas still been

I have a long standing personal program to display MIME formattedemail messages in the terminal in a sensible way (it was mentioned in this old entry on my email tools and its comments ). For a long time this was a Python 2program, using the Python 2 version of the email package . Recently, I movedthis program to Python 3 as part of my sudden enthusiasm for Python3 conversions , using the Python 3 version of email and itssub-packages. In the process I have wound up with some

In a comment on my entry on universities, email, and the issues ofrunning things in house , Imentioned that our departmentalemail system has a non-trivial cost in hardware alone to keep going.To better illustrate that, I'll describe all of the servers that ouremail system currently requires (becauseit's more than one). Some of these servers exist for historicalreasons and may go away at some point, but many of them don't.

Currently, we have:

• A server

On the Fediverse, I had a simple sounding wish :

This is my face that I need a simple pagination program for Unix(show a page, pause, hit CR to show the next page) that is Unicodeand emoji aware, so that it knows how long lines with them are. AFAIKless can't be used for this when I don't want it to ever clear thescreen, just to keep printing the next page for however long.

(... because you have to know how