I love how the people on here are pretty much always nice.
Yes, there are some *wink AlexDeLarge* who use strong language, some dirty jokes and sometimes there are topics where people don't agree on but I've never seen any honest insults or toxic behaviour (other than the opinion on your shitty client or boss lol).
No annoying trolls (the nearest to a troll I know on here is Jase but he's fun and mostly welcome here).
No spam/ads from users (only maybe recommendations).
And the most unbelievable thing is that devRant itself is free, adfree and based on the community voluntary donating for the server and work costs.

Dude, devRant fucking rules.

"devRant has changed" "I'm so fed up with this site" "Its a bunch of hate and memes, it was so much better before"

A rebuttal.

devRant is approximately the same as it was when it was just a newborn. Remember the days of semicolon jokes being unironically funny?

Look at the top rants of all time, for fucks sake. #2 ever is:

"A different error message! Finally some progress!"

Posted three years ago. That's the second most upvoted rant in history (Remember, this was a "rant" because the joke/meme category didn't exist back then), it made it's way into the app store screenshots, and was a welcome post.

Now imagine that posted today. It would probably go over okay, in fairness, but it's certainly at risk of any number of pretentious pricks complaining about how this is "devRANT not 4chan" or how they had seen the joke before and it's a shitty repost.

And sure, the repost bullshit is fair. I'm not saying that all the reposts are good content. What I'm saying is devRant has always been full of reposts - they just weren't reposts in the early days. The quality of content is the same.

There's also the common misconception that your posts need to be directly related to tech to post on devRant. This is a myth propagated by 0 IQ heathens that don't read any further than the name of the application. Your posts can be anything that isn't prohibited, like porn, spam, and, importantly, politics (commonly overlooked rule)

"All the memes are just too much". Oh you poor fucking baby, let me pour you a healthy serving of pity juice. First of all, you can turn off the memes category, and while they will still find their way to your feed, the concentration will be much lower and it will once again be bearable for your pitiful, weak little soul. Do you seriously get annoyed that severely by shitty posts that you need to leave the app altogether, or do you just want the attention of being a "cool hipster that hates on xyz"?

"This place is just filled with hate! Why can't you just respect xyz technology, it isn't actually that bad!"

This is probably the most stupid fucking thing you could possibly ejaculate from your fingers into whatever device you are using to type. Welcome to devRant, we hate on shit. That's at our core. No, xyz technology ISN'T actually that bad, you're correct. But we're here to tear it apart because it probably has frustrated us in the past. I fucking hate JS because it was my first language and it confused the shit out of me. JS is a great language. But I still talk shit about it, and that's what we're here to do.

Like seriously, I know a lot of people post stuff they're proud of here, and then they're met with "Would be great if you didn't use xyz tech", and that hurts, but holy shit, this is devRant. If you're sensitive to criticism, or even just straight up being made fun of, don't post shit that you're proud of. You won't have a good time. It's just not what we do here.

Quick interlude before the conclusion, "My girlfriend dumped me after I named a class after her. She felt I treated her like an object." is also on the first page of all-time most popular posts.

In conclusion, devRant has not changed. Reposts have been a nuisance since day 0, and just because reposts look different these days doesn't mean the quality of content has decreased in any manner. The two main sources of your frustration are the volume of low-quality posts (Mind you, not the concentration of them, but the volume of them) and your own prejudices about the platform. You're looking back with rose-tinted glasses.

Here are some tips for a more enjoyable experience:

-Make sure you have the "Hide reposts" setting ENABLED in settings. Any posts marked as repost will be hidden in your feed, pulling down the concentration of low-quality posts.
-Keep to the algo sorting method. Obviously, algo is a bot, and there's still gonna be some shit content in there anyways, but if you're in recent, you are absolutely guaranteed to see low-quality posts. It's unfiltered.
-Keep in mind that what you consider a "quality" post is not what others consider a "quality" post. Just because you don't like memes doesn't mean memes are poor content. There are people here who have never seen the bobby tables comic. And they deserve the same experience we got when discovering dev humor.
-Don't be a prick. And if you cannot help yourself, leave. Ironically, you're making the site worse by complaining about how bad the site is. You can always come back if you aren't a prick anymore. And you can leave permanently if you choose as well.
-Downvote and move on. You're not doing anything but making yourself more aggravated by leaving a shitty comment about how shitty the shitty post is.
-Think critically. Obviously optional, and I know not many people like to use their brain when a phone is suspended between their hands, but if you want a better experience, remember to use your head and not to lose it.

Tonight I was getting ready to pay my monthly apartment maintenance bill so I Googled my property management company's name because I always forget the url. It's always the first result, but I noticed Google placed a little "This site may be hacked." line of text on their listing.

Seeing that before and knowing what it means, I went into the source for their index page, and to my suspicion, their WordPress installation was hacked with the standard invisible spam links.

I realize this happens to a lot of WordPress blogs, but this is an NYC property management company that is responsible for a lot of buildings and has millions of dollars in contracts. Normally I would inform them, but having dealt with them in the past I don't like them very much, but more importantly, I don't think they'd understand what I was saying because they are so technically inept. They might even think that because I found this, that I had something to do with it.

So devRant, it is up to you. What should I do?

!(short rant)

Look I understand online privacy is a concern and we should really be very much aware about what data we are giving to whom. But when does it turn from being aware to just being paranoid and a maniac about it.? I mean okay, I know facebook has access to your data including your whatsapp chat (presumably), google listens to your conversations and snoops on your mail and shit, amazon advertises that you must have their spy system (read alexa) install in your homes and numerous other cases. But in the end it really boils down to "everyone wants your data but who do you trust your data with?"

For me, facebook and the so-called social media sites are a strict no-no but I use whatsapp as my primary chating application. I like to use google for my searches because yaa it gives me more accurate search results as compared to ddg because it has my search history. I use gmail as my primary as well as work email because it is convinient and an adv here and there doesnt bother me. Their spam filters, the easy accessibility options, the storage they offer everything is much more convinient for me. I use linux for my work related stuff (obviously) but I play my games on windows. Alexa and such type of products are again a big no-no for me but I regularly shop from amazon and unless I am searching for some weird ass shit (which if you want to, do it in some incognito mode) I am fine with coming across some advs about things I searched for. Sometimes it reminds me of things I need to buy which I might have put off and later on forgot. I have an amazon prime account because prime video has some good shows in there. My primary web browser is chrome because I simply love its developer tools and I now have gotten used to it. So unless chrome is very much hogging on my ram, in which case I switch over to firefox for some of my tabs, I am okay with using chrome. I have a motorola phone with stock android which means all google apps pre-installed. I use hangouts, google keep, google map(cannot live without it now), heck even google photos, but I also deny certain accesses to apps which I find fishy like if you are a game, you should not have access to my gps. I live in India where we have aadhar cards(like the social securtiy number in the USA) where the government has our fingerprints and all our data because every damn thing now needs to be linked with your aadhar otherwise your service will be terminated. Like your mobile number, your investment policies, your income tax, heck even your marraige certificates need to be linked with your aadhar card. Here, I dont have any option but to give in because somehow "its in the interest of the nation". Not surprisingly, this thing recently came to light where you can get your hands on anyone's aadhar details including their fingerprints for just ₹50($1). Fuck that shit.

tl;dr
There are and should be always exceptions when it comes to privacy because when you give the other person your data, it sometimes makes your life much easier. On the other hand, people/services asking for your data with the sole purpose of infilterating into your private life and not providing any usefulness should just be boycotted. It all boils down to till what extent you wish to share your data(ranging from literally installing a spying device in your house to them knowing that I want to understand how spring security works) and how much do you trust the service with your data. Example being, I just shared most of my private data in this rant with a group of unknown people and I am okay with it, because I know I can trust dev rant with my posts(unlike facebook).

Welp, time to ditch devRant

I don't mind green dots posting the same things over and over (and let's be honest, everyone had some of those complaints when we started coding), but what's been happening lately with spam and bots is just too much.

Thanks for the ride @dfox, it's been good while it lasted. Too bad I never got a dev duck tho, they were always out of stock :(

Would the web be better off, if there was zero frontend scripting? There would be HTML5 video/audio, but zero client side JS.

Browsers wouldn't understand script tags, they wouldn't have javascript engines, and they wouldn't have to worry about new standards and deprecations.

Browsers would be MUCH more secure, and use way less memory and CPU resources.

What would we really be missing?

If you build less bloated pages, you would not really need ajax calls, page reloads would be cheap. Animated menus do not add anything functionally, and could be done using css as well. Complicated webapps... well maybe those should just be desktop/mobile apps.

Pages would contain less annoying elements, no tracking or crypto mining scripts, no mouse tracking, no exploitative spam alerts.

Why don't we just deprecate JS in the browser, completely?

I think it would be worth it.

I absolutely love the email protocols.

IMAP:
x1 LOGIN user@domain password
x2 LIST "" "*"
x3 SELECT Inbox
x4 LOGOUT

Because a state machine is clearly too hard to implement in server software, clients must instead do the state machine thing and therefore it must be in the IMAP protocol.

SMTP:
I should be careful with this one since there's already more than enough spam on the interwebs, and it's a good thing that the "developers" of these email bombers don't know jack shit about the protocol. But suffice it to say that much like on a real letter, you have an envelope and a letter inside. You know these envelopes with a transparent window so you can print the address information on the letter? Or the "regular" envelopes where you write it on the envelope itself?
Yeah not with SMTP. Both your envelope and your letter have them, and they can be different. That's why you can have an email in your inbox that seemingly came from yourself. The mail server only checks for the envelope headers, and as long as everything checks out domain-wise and such, it will be accepted. Then the mail client checks the headers in the letter itself, the data field as far as the mail server is concerned (and it doesn't look at it). Can be something else, can be nothing at all. Emails can even be sent in the future or the past.

Postfix' main.cf:
You have this property "mynetworks" in /etc/postfix/main.cf where you'd imagine you put your own networks in, right? I dunno, to let Postfix discover what your networks are.. like it says on the tin? Haha, nope. This is a property that defines which networks are allowed no authentication at all to the mail server, and that is exactly what makes an open relay an open relay. If any one of the addresses in your networks (such as a gateway, every network has one) is also where your SMTP traffic flows into the mail server from, congrats the whole internet can now send through your mail server without authentication. And all because it was part of "your networks".

Yeah when it comes to naming things, the protocol designers sure have room for improvement... And fuck email.

Oh, bonus one - STARTTLS:
So SMTP has this thing called STARTTLS where you can.. unlike mynetworks, actually starts a TLS connection like it says on the tin. The problem is that almost every mail server uses self-signed certificates so they're basically meaningless. You don't have a chain of trust. Also not everyone supports it *cough* government *cough*, so if you want to send email to those servers, your TLS policy must be opportunistic, not enforced. And as an icing on the cake, if anything is wrong with the TLS connection (such as an MITM attack), the protocol will actively downgrade to plain. I dunno.. isn't that exactly what the MITM attacker wants? Yeah, great design right there. Are the designers of the email protocols fucking retarded?

Paranoid Developers - It's a long one
Backstory: I was a freelance web developer when I managed to land a place on a cyber security program with who I consider to be the world leaders in the field (details deliberately withheld; who's paranoid now?). Other than the basic security practices of web dev, my experience with Cyber was limited to the OU introduction course, so I was wholly unprepared for the level of, occasionally hysterical, paranoia that my fellow cohort seemed to perpetually live in. The following is a collection of stories from several of these people, because if I only wrote about one they would accuse me of providing too much data allowing an attacker to aggregate and steal their identity. They do use devrant so if you're reading this, know that I love you and that something is wrong with you.

That time when...

He wrote a social media network with end-to-end encryption before it was cool.

He wrote custom 64kb encryption for his academic HDD.

He removed the 3 HDD from his desktop and stored them in a safe, whenever he left the house.

He set up a pfsense virtualbox with a firewall policy to block the port the student monitoring software used (effectively rendering it useless and definitely in breach of the IT policy).

He used only hashes of passwords as passwords (which isn't actually good).

He kept a drill on the desk ready to destroy his HDD at a moments notice.

He started developing a device to drill through his HDD when he pushed a button. May or may not have finished it.

He set up a new email account for each individual online service.

He hosted a website from his own home server so he didn't have to host the files elsewhere (which is just awful for home network security).

He unplugged the home router and began scanning his devices and manually searching through the process list when his music stopped playing on the laptop several times (turns out he had a wobbly spacebar and the shaking washing machine provided enough jittering for a button press).

He brought his own privacy screen to work (remember, this is a security place, with like background checks and all sorts).

He gave his C programming coursework (a simple messaging program) 2048 bit encryption, which was not required.

He wrote a custom encryption for his other C programming coursework as well as writing out the enigma encryption because there was no library, again not required.

He bought a burner phone to visit the capital city.

He bought a burner phone whenever he left his hometown come to think of it.

He bought a smartphone online, wiped it and installed new firmware (it was Chinese; I'm not saying anything about the Chinese, you're the one thinking it).

He bought a smartphone and installed Kali Linux NetHunter so he could test WiFi networks he connected to before using them on his personal device.

(You might be noticing it's all he's. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't).

He ate a sim card.

He brought a balaclava to pentesting training (it was pretty meme).

He printed out his source code as a manual read-only method.

He made a rule on his academic email to block incoming mail from the academic body (to be fair this is a good spam policy).

He withdraws money from a different cashpoint everytime to avoid patterns in his behaviour (the irony).

He reported someone for hacking the centre's network when they built their own website for practice using XAMMP.

I'm going to stop there. I could tell you so many more stories about these guys, some about them being paranoid and some about the stupid antics Cyber Security and Information Assurance students get up to. Well done for making it this far. Hope you enjoyed it.

"Create an account now to watch these courses for free (don't worry, we hate spam as much as you do)"

Well that's a fucking lie. This woman named Christy is abusing MailChimp vigorously.

Fuck off marketing with your disingenuous "community update" mails, "what you missed last week" newsletters and "handpicked crap for you" notifications.

I want to use your platform, I even pay for it, but I don't want to get your useless mail until I found the energy to dig through your config panel looking for some half broken toggle button.

I think I nailed it.

I had an interview on Friday. Never had I ever such a good one. Everything went so smoothly I'm amazed to this moment.

It started pretty much normally. Few questions about me and my CV. Next some soft skills check and few minutes talking in English to make sure I know how to speak.

Next, two funny trick questions. I hope I'll translate them good enough.
1) You've got 6 cups in a row. Three of them, next to each other, are empty. Remaining 3 are full. You've got one movement to make them stand alternately, ie. Full, empty, etc. or Empty, full etc.
2) You've got yourself a cake. Normal, birthday cake in a shape of a cylinder. On three cuts, you have to cut it in 8 equal pieces.

Next was technical interview. The only thing I couldn't answer to was a formula to get angle between camera and two objects on the scene. Something about cos x.

They told me that I was the only recruitee to make project using Hololens SDK. Other people made the images gallery in 2D only.

Also they were VERY impressed that I managed to send them fix that changed a lot of the gallery in an hour. No one was expecting it so fast since the feature wasn't all that simple. Or so they said. Code was written so it wasn't hard to implement this change.

Now I've got to wait at least a week for their response. As you could imagine, I'm nervously checking my email each time I get any spam.

I'd like to thank @fire-phoenix and @Root that were responding to my last posts about this new work tasks and current hardships. I know it's a bit too early to celebrate but I'm just so hyped for how well everything went 😀

Fucking Gmail !!!! I hate you so much !!!

My mail server is fucking perfect, I have all the records in my DNS and even have a 10/10 score on mail-tester.com.
But this fucking Gmail keeps putting me the spam folder ! Why do you hate my so much ?

I've always thought I'm a software developer, but not according to these guys T_T

It's finally happened. I've used my mail servers for about a year to give out different email addresses on my domain to things I sign up for online, and only used my "actual" email address that received all this email for the whole domain but the single one that I used outbound for private communications.

This worked well for a long time as I could see when spam comes in, where it came from by looking at the email address I designated it. Each company's email would be sent not only from an email address that they choose, but also to an email address that I choose. It allowed me to easily determine where there were problems. For example, on Freenode IRC my vhost happened to make my username@host there a valid email address. It eventually got blacklisted due to too much incoming spam as crawlers started detecting it. Another one was "nickname"@my.domain as I posted it a few times here. Got crawled as well. But it allowed me to easily blacklist each.

I'd never thought my actual outbound email address, my real one, to get crawled though. That would require the mail server of a company I explicitly communicated with to get hacked. But today that happened. I wonder whose it is, but I can't tell.

Time to make my outgoing email bound to a designated email address as well. I want to know which companies this happens to, even if they don't disclose it.

Would totally send all the information 10/10

Alright, this my fucking rant right here. Distraction? This whole company is a distraction! Boss decided to throw us all in an open work environment doing jobs that require careful concentration. Straight outta college I'm getting handed vague ideas, (make a desktop app that helps our customers put data on the internet, make an iPhone app) with out so much as an inkling of what technologies to use, just make it work.
Ok I will but when you hit a roadblock with very little resources to draw in it's hard to stay focused.
On top of that since I worked in support for a year I'm our senior support person! But sometimes support just doesn't use their brains and I'm using my time to solve very basic problems.
That brings me to my next point, the goddamn piece of shit that is our telephone. Fuck that thing when it rings it's never good. Moreover, since I don't want to get roasted for not being responsive I have the motherfucker forward to my personal cell. So I answer every fucking call and I get so many spam calls!
Not to mention I'm mainly running the hardware show around here. Shits broke I'm the one fixing it. Need new shit I'm putting the order together.
Tried to get a new guy to be the sys admin, ordered a 6th gen board with a 7th gen proc, had to pull 3 machines apart to get that sorted. Then he left bc family issues, and has been gone for weeks.
The other devs are also slam up busy, and the main product is about 15 people's piss on a plate of garb age spaghetti. (I got a lot of shit going on but at least I'm the only one pissing in my spaghetti) it's a constant run around if who does what with a code first plan later mentality causing confusion and delay.
Nobody wants to help anybody because they are also annoyed with this setup and are getting bitched at by customers or management.
Sales is mostly composed of a bunch of crackhead yes men and women who just want a commission and only half know the shit we sell and have sold 15 new features that had not been discussed. But management always says make it happen. In what priority? It's all a priority they say! Wtf.
So yea, then it brings me to me, dealing with this much chaos at work makes it seem like a high amount of chaos in my life is normal. I'm just now learning to control this.
I've had to do a lot of growing up as a person and as a developer. I've went from being the most junior to about the 3rd most seniors and I've no doubt my efforts have contributed to the growth of the company.
I'm a big believer in coding flow, and that it takes at least 15 mins to get in that flow and about 5 seconds to break it. There is no do not disturb on the company chat, everything always on fire it seems.
So fuck a lot of this, but I've done the research and where I'm at is the best opportunity in a 100 mile radius. So I am thankful for this job. Plus I usually win the horror story contest.

So TL;DR the biggest distraction is every fucking thing in this god forsaken place.

So... I’m sitting here doing pretty much nothing, just reading through some rants when all of a sudden I get a wave of emails.

Pinterest!
We noticed a login from a new device or location and want to make sure it’s you.
Device: Firefox, Windows 8
Where: New Jersey, United States (Approximate)

OhhhhhKay then... so there’s a couple of problems with this, 1 I didn’t even know I had a Pinterest account, 2 I don’t have Pinterest in my password manager either.

So I follow the link and fair enough it’s actually pintest, so I attempt to login, to no avail, oh maybe it’s a social login..., ok let’s try google, nope that wasn’t it, deletes account, logins with Facebook, oh here we go, checks logins, 1 random jersey player, deletes account, swaps to Facebook, changes password (this fucker was already 100+ characters) and adds 2FA and contains no new logins 🤔

Ok... so what the fuck, either someone managed to get through a long ass password or something phishy is going on, the email for FB logins is seldomly used (maybe a handful of services at best) as I have another for all the junk and spam bullshit I expect from today’s “marketing”

Would totally send all the information 10/10 - Part II
Why is money god so kind to me recently ? 🤔

Often I hear that one should block spam email based on content match rather than IP match. Sometimes even that blocking Chinese ranges in particular is prejudiced and racist. Allow me to debunk that after I've been looking at traffic on port 25 with tcpdump for several weeks now, and got rid of most of my incoming spam too.

There are these spamhausen that communicate with my mail server as much as every minute.
- biz-smtp.com
- mailing-expert.com
- smtp-shop.com

All of them are Chinese. They make up - rough guess - around 90% of the traffic that hits my edge nodes, if not more.

The network ranges I've blocked are apparently as follows:
- 193.106.175.0/24 (Russia)
- 49.64.0.0/11 (China)
- 181.39.88.172 (Ecuador)
- 188.130.160.216 (Russia)
- 106.75.144.0/20 (China)
- 183.227.0.0/16 (China)
- 106.75.32.0/19 (China)
.. apparently I blocked that one twice, heh
- 116.16.0.0/12 (China)
- 123.58.160.0/19 (China)

It's not all China but holy hell, a lot of spam sure comes from there, given how Golden Shield supposedly blocks internet access to the Chinese citizens. A friend of mine who lives in China (how he got past the firewall is beyond me, and he won't tell me either) told me that while incoming information is "regulated", they don't give half a shit about outgoing traffic to foreign countries. Hence all those shitty filter bag suppliers and whatnot. The Chinese government doesn't care.

So what is the alternative like, that would block based on content? Well there are a few solutions out there, namely SpamAssassin, ClamAV and Amavis among others. The problem is that they're all very memory intensive (especially compared to e.g. Postfix and Dovecot themselves) and that they must scan every email, and keep up with evasion techniques (such as putting the content in an image, or using characters from different character sets t̾h̾a̾t̾ ̾l̾o̾o̾k̾ ̾s̾i̾m̾i̾l̾a̾r̾).

But the thing is, all of that traffic comes from a certain few offending IP ranges, and an iptables rule that covers a whole range is very cheap. China (or any country for that matter) has too many IP ranges to block all of them. But the certain few offending IP ranges? I'll take a cheap IP-based filter over expensive content-based filters any day. And I don't want to be shamed for that.

Wow! They are incredible!

I keep creating new email filters every week or so, and they keep finding new ways to send me spam!

The best part is - these emails are sent from our internal infra. Judging by the sender it looks like they have created a bot collecting various events and sending them to... everyone.

Much smart. Many useful.
Much working

I swear upon the gods of the internet! Any time I am trying to read an article/blog post/anything and the site puts a god damn pop-up form asking me to sign up for something, I leave the site. ESPECIALLY ON MOBILE WHEN YOU CANT CLOSE THE DAMN WINDOW WITHOUT GIVING UP YOUR INFO.

And every time a client asks me to do this I nicely explain how much people hate pop-ups, 99% of the time I've closed the window or tab before I even read what the box is asking for, I don't care.

If the user is trying to read something, then they are trying to read something, and they don't want to be bothered with your ridiculous attempts for information gathering so you can spam them later.

These postings on angel.co

I swear to God it's like I've uncovered a conspiracy theory.

I had been searching for a side project now that holidays are coming and I really don't wanna get bored.

Applied to a few companies. About 5 of them "responded" with an acceptance. I write them my interview timings and all that's required.

Nothing. Nothing for like a solid week and a half.

Meanwhile I applied to more companies and still the same thing.

I decided to manually mail their companies regarding the process, so that I can, preferably, move on to other ones if they have rejected the application (which they obviously hadn't)

I get mails from almost all the companies with some or the other variant of "We were waiting for your reply to proceed"

I tell them I had replied over the conversations and they said they never got a message.

Now feeling that this might be angel.co at fault. I wrote a request to look into the issue. Meanwhile I tested the system using a friend's account as a recruiter and testing myself.

Unsurprisingly it was working flawlessly.

Narrowing it down to the companies then.

I sent a document with my findings to each of the companies and pretty much 50% of them stopped with replying.

The rest confirmed that they hadn't received any mails regarding the same and they saw no mail resembling the one I tested with my friend.

Kinda confusing but I asked them to look into it.

Meanwhile mail from Angel returns saying that their system is working perfectly fine even around my region. So idk what was the problem

I got a mail 3 weeks after the first mail to the company. They had been using a utility to auto-accept/reject profile applications. This util sent a lot of mails, even for rejections, to their mailboxes, filling them.

So they decided to remove these emails automatically by marking them spam. Apparently, the interview confirmation messages also count as these emails and were automatically archived. Thus removing my responses to those companies.

Idk if this is widespread issue because only one company has responded to me yet.

I'm still livid with this shit.

A few days ago Aruba Cloud terminated my VPS's without notice (shortly after my previous rant about email spam). The reason behind it is rather mundane - while slightly tipsy I wanted to send some traffic back to those Chinese smtp-shop assholes.

Around half an hour later I found that e1.nixmagic.com had lost its network link. I logged into the admin panel at Aruba and connected to the recovery console. In the kernel log there was a mention of the main network link being unresponsive. Apparently Aruba Cloud's automated systems had cut it off.

Shortly afterwards I got an email about the suspension, requested that I get back to them within 72 hours.. despite the email being from a noreply address. Big brain right there.

Now one server wasn't yet a reason to consider this a major outage. I did have 3 edge nodes, all of which had equal duties and importance in the network. However an hour later I found that Aruba had also shut down the other 2 instances, despite those doing nothing wrong. Another hour later I found my account limited, unable to login to the admin panel. Oh and did I mention that for anything in that admin panel, you have to login to the customer area first? And that the account ID used to login there is more secure than the password? Yeah their password security is that good. Normally my passwords would be 64 random characters.. not there.

So with all my servers now gone, I immediately considered it an emergency. Aruba's employees had already left the office, and wouldn't get back to me until the next day (on-call be damned I guess?). So I had to immediately pull an all-nighter and deploy new servers elsewhere and move my DNS records to those ASAP. For that I chose Hetzner.

Now at Hetzner I was actually very pleasantly surprised at just how clean the interface was, how it puts the project front and center in everything, and just tells you "this is what this is and what it does", nothing else. Despite being a sysadmin myself, I find the hosting part of it insignificant. The project - the application that is to be hosted - that's what's important. Administration of a datacenter on the other hand is background stuff. Aruba's interface is very cluttered, on Hetzner it's super clean. Night and day difference.

Oh and the specs are better for the same price, the password security is actually decent, and the servers are already up despite me not having paid for anything yet. That's incredible if you ask me.. they actually trust a new customer to pay the bills afterwards. How about you Aruba Cloud? Oh yeah.. too much to ask for right. Even the network isn't something you can trust a long-time customer of yours with.

So everything has been set up again now, and there are some things I would like to stress about hosting providers.

You don't own the hardware. While you do have root access, you don't have hardware access at all. Remember that therefore you can't store anything on it that you can't afford to lose, have stolen, or otherwise compromised. This is something I kept in mind when I made my servers. The edge nodes do nothing but reverse proxying the services from my LXC containers at home. Therefore the edge nodes could go down, while the worker nodes still kept running. All that was necessary was a new set of reverse proxies. On the other hand, if e.g. my Gitea server were to be hosted directly on those VPS's, losing that would've been devastating. All my configs, projects, mirrors and shit are hosted there.

Also remember that your hosting provider can terminate you at any time, for any reason. Server redundancy is not enough. If you can afford multiple redundant servers, get them at different hosting providers. I've looked at Aruba Cloud's Terms of Use and this is indeed something they were legally allowed to do. Any reason, any time, no notice. They covered all their bases. Make sure you do too, and hope that you'll never need it.

Oh, right - this is a rant - Aruba Cloud you are a bunch of assholes. Kindly take a 1Gbps DDoS attack up your ass in exchange for that termination without notice, will you?

So, someone is trying to catfish me in some social media.
And I can make a few guesses about who it might be. Or maybe I'm being paranoid and all the accounts contacting me randomly, are just spam bots.

But this isn't the first time. From a hateful ex, to someone I turned down because I had zero feelings for, to even random stalkers who found me online and thought that I was the best choice for obsessing over, I've seen different types of online ghosts.

Like... why is it that it takes so much for some people to be decent? Why can't you just say it to my face (aka directly), get your answer, and then fuck off? And if you're actually obsessing, it is not my problem. See a fucking therapist.

Anywho, aside from the wish to be able to occasionally deliver an online slap, and occasionally wishing that everyone on the internet had an ID to be found IRL, I would like for internet to be a less hateful/harassing/terrorizing/bullying/discriminating place. I like internet. I have so many awesome friends on the internet.

I just needed to rant about it so it doesn't weigh on my mind. Now I'm gonna go back to ignoring them and living my own life peacefully. I hope y'all have a good day. 🙂

Here's an advice to you guys:

Ever look at your mailbox and think it's so full of junk?

Archive all your current emails.

Then next time you get any spam emails take the time to unsubscribe or block the sender.

Trust me, life is so much better after you've got rid of those craps. And it's not that hard like it seems. In a week you'll probably get rid if 90% of those.

<feature-request>

What if we could 'share' a rant with another ranter (friend)? Then they would get a notif.

I could of course tag that person but that would create so much spam on a rant.

</feature-request>

!dev
Fuck you google!!
Let me send a mail to my shitty internet service provider with abusive words as much as possible.

Fucking gmail rejecting my message as spam by content filtering.

I don't get much spam, but when I do, I rant about how badly those mails are crafted.

I mean, yeah, for non-devs or typical old people, those badly made Google fake mails (that use the old Google logo, the logo in Times New Roman or something) or ISP / phone company mails with malicious attachments may look good enough.

But, seriously, if I were a dev paid to create spam mails, they would look like the real deal, if I may say so myself, as I would actually put some effort in them.

What do you think? Wouldn't spam made by real developers like us be "better"?

Maybe send some examples from inside your junk box 🤔

I am so fucking lost.

I literally have zero expectations from life for now and future.

There was a time when I had so much clarity in my life. Rather, I was known for it.
Folks used to reach me out for guidance and my approaches even worked for others.

I was goal oriented and biased towards action. Failing and learning from it, I used to make things happen and with constant feedback kept progressing.

While none of that has changed, I still feel lost and numb. No, I am not depressed or suffering through any mental illness. I am physical active and able to feel the happiness.

But the recent incident with a narcissistic, left me emotionally handicap. I can no longer feel any kind of love or affection. I overcame the damage done and healed myself.

But now, I am done. Even if I engage with anyone for a relationship it would be mostly for sex. I can care for people around me and be affectionate towards them but when it comes to an intimate relationship, I feel it's not something I can do in this lifetime. I tried multiple times but failed.

These days, all I am doing is putting my heads down and working like crazy. Never in my life I worked more than 10 hours in an entire week. Now, I work 10+ hours everyday. During that time, I am highly productive.

And in my free time, I am busy housekeeping different life problems. Either paying bills, figuring out an insurance, planning some investment, or making some kind of life decision.

It's draining me. I feel as if I am losing sanity. But that's the only thing I am able to do.

Maybe it's the lockdown effect. Maybe some damage is yet to be healed.

But I got nothing better to do. I have some good ideas. Not those hipster-ish disruptive Million dollar ideas, but decent enough to solve a problem for a strong use case.

However, all of this is becoming overwhelming these days. Because decision making is complex and difficult task. It can make or break the future.

As of now I am confused how should I go about pursuing two of the important projects that I want to accomplish.

1. Migrating out of Google ecosystem. Is it even practically possible for my use case? What are the alternatives? Planning to opt in for a paid cloud storage so have to factor in that aspect as well.

I want to keep this new setup only for official use like bank and government stuff. Maybe family and close friends. Then have current ids for public logins and sharing it with retards whom I can block or ignore if they harass me. The research is overwhelming but having a structured setup gives insane amount of efficiency when life is spam free.

2. Migrating my Pihole and OpenVPN setup out of Digital Ocean to GCP. Primarily because $5 is a lot of amount for my computational requirements and Google has used my data enough, for me to use the free tier.
However, there isn't a simple script for a tech noob like me, to go ahead and setup something. I did find a Github repository but the documentation is kind of outdated so RTFM failed for me.

I don't know whether to pursue my start-up or let it go and focus on moving to Europe.

It's just so fucking stupid to even exist. And let's not forget taxes. Bloody taxes.

FUCKING @GREGOZOR2121 STOP FUCKING UPVOTING ME THIS MUCH... THIS IS SPAM AND COMPLETELY FUCKING ANNOYING. FUCKING IDIOT.

thanks

I am here on devRant now for a while. Althought, reading amy of your stories and taking care of websites is not what I usualy tend to do, I started doing it as a favour for a friend of a friend.
Baaad bad decission :-(

"pls, dis is urgnt! uplood dis pics asap on page"
*mail notification*
*face palm 1* because who sends pictures by mail these days ... I like my 50MiB Inbox, dont spam it with garbage!
*opening mail - lists attachments: 1 file, ~900KiB* ok whats happening now?
*facepalm 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9* (10 if there still would be a face to palm on)

the person seriously send me the pictures in an attachment, within a pdf document that was created with MS Word.
No - Just NO!

I should have known better ... sooo much better :(

If I could I just wouldn't support email in any way shape anymore.

It's just too much hassle with all the spam filters and people just don't understand how email works.

Nobody fucking reads it anyway.... but everyone wants like a bazillion variations on stupid emails that go out that nobody will read.

They don't get that email is often instant ... but is actually async.

They don't understand that just because they got an email sent to their own distribution list ... and someone took them off the list... that doesn't mean that WE an outside group emailing that list stopped sending them messages.

Nobody actually looks at their spam filters until I tell them to do it for the 3rd time. And as if by magic folks at the same company don't 'have spam filter problems all the time'.

I had a company 'security' filter that straight up followed all the links in an email (that's fine ... we're good, I get that).... and then their stupid bot or whatever would actually click options on a form and fucking submit the fucking form!!!!!

I mean I get that maybe some sites have folks submit some shit and then deliver malware but that's gonna have consequences submitting shit none the less because I don't know it's just your fucking bot...

So they'd get various offers from our customers and bitch when they went to find it was already gone.

WHAT. THE. FUCK.

Fucking UCEPROTECT blacklist, who the hell blacklists a whole fucking ASN when they detect even a large amount of spam coming from it? For all they know, it could be just a couple of IPs. But nooooo, instead of blacklisting IPs, they blacklist the whole ASN, so now, even some of our machines are on the list, without us ever doing anything. Just because the IP is from the DigitalOcean prefix. UGH.

Fucking spam
Useless pieces of shit
Targeting my dad, fools, he has me 🤡
I'm gonna flood you with fake emails and passwords
So much that you will stop spamming and then I'll continue a little bit, just to be safe
Fucking bastards

Listen, i really understand you want to know how much a certain resource is downloaded/viewed and so on. But what gets on my nerves is to sign up my email address every fucking time i want to see your semi-tech-but-actually-selling-you-a-pile-of-sperm-fermented-shit whitepaper . yes i know there is something called disposable email adresses and such... But if stuff is 'free' as you say you have, then make it available free!

Every time i think 'hey, this is actually relevant to my interests, let me read up more on that...' i hit the fucking 'insert your email for a free download'

Fuck off! Put your fucking form in the pits of hell and seal it in a fucking fucking dome next to fucking research subject akira with 99 fucking layers of fucking nuclear blast proof wall domes! I dont want you to fucking send me your fucking spam mails about every ideafart your sales dept has fired becausz they were high on computer cleaner spray tubes and thought 'let's trick those stupid people into our marketing scheme', go and fucking jump into a barrel of highly concentrated radioactive waste!

The only thing you manage to do for me like that is to fucking close the tab i had a slight interest in and never look back again!

Am i the only one getting angry about this?

I absolutely hate it when companies use this or that medium for communications despite me asking them time and time again for another.

I have a mail server for more professional communications. The phone, only for stuff that won't matter if I inevitably end up forgetting about it (even more so now that Google made call recording more or less impossible, laws be damned). I will forget about a phone call no doubt. I've got better shit to do than to remember your manglement decisions, thank you very much. On mail, that's all nicely on my mail server for retrieval in several years even.

So I ask them to use the email address I gave them, a dedicated one for their company too (catch-all go brrr). Can't do that with phone numbers. Managing all those SIM cards aside, our government has now limited the amount of SIM cards one can have to 10. And texts and phone calls are not a long-term medium! And I can't share my phone number with just about anyone because people will inevitably spam the shit out of it, AND it's hard to replace! It's not a good medium! So with all due respect, companies - I couldn't care less what medium you prefer to use for your customers. You don't care about what your customer wants you to use - explicitly so! - and you lose a customer. It's as simple as that. Dealing with manglement is one thing, but dealing with manglement using the wrong media is something I'd really rather not do.

But hey I guess that virtue signalling is more "in" than actually listening to your goddamn customers nowadays? Let's replace another master/slave reference. You know, arguing that if we did that 2 years ago, George Floyd would've totally survived. Not by fixing the US police brutality, oh no no no. That's not the right way. Changing nomenclature and hashtags however, and not giving half a shit about your customers, yeah that's the way to go!

My boss' solution to whatever problem comes from a plugin:

spam emails to the plugin creator until they dont desperately give up and either block you or they solve your problem, 2 emails a day should do for first day, then increment every day.

I mean, if I ever get to make a good plugin and my boss will ever download it and can't make it work, I much rather remove the plugin from Earth than solve the issue of a spammer

!dev
I hate being a dick as much as the next guy, but damnit I hate spam even more!

And I can't think of a worse kind of spam than religious propaganda sent by your own family members when they already know you ain't religious, heck they even tried to kick me out of the house when I lived with them.

"...send this to 8 more people you wish a day full of blessings"
"YouTube - 10 ways to meditate with Jesus"
"How Stephen Hawkins proves God"

I've had enough, WhatsApp isn't for people to evangelize or send 3000+ characters of copy pasted, mass produced, soul-less "good wishes"; that's why from now on I'm bringing the fight to them, for every spammy text/video/image I get I'll double down and send 10 opposing spam videos or messages.

I just replied a "The most beautiful thoughts, talking to God" video with the monologue of George Carlin on religion and God.

Am I being a dick? kinda
Could I just ask them to stop? I find this more amusing and spares me the "you don't want me to 'talk' to you" shit

wait,
if there are 3.4 Billions FaceBook fake users, that means than there are also at least 3.4 Billions fake email accounts around. Jeez.

And the spam traffic estimates are at 260Billions email per day or 260B/3.4B=76 emails sent by each fake email accounts per day. Much less as probably fake email accounts are more.

So, only 76 spam emails sent per account per day. I think there is still room for a big improvement

TL;DR still don't know who 1:11 is...
It looks like my script took screenshots until about 2:50, but there was no activity on the desktop... That means they have to be on A days. I can try to run the script again next Wednesday OR I can use this thing I built to wait until 1:11 and spam the desktop with screenshots claiming to be the NSA... I'm a little too chicken for that lol. Anyways yeah couldn't find out who it was yet and I don't have much time to find out...

I think I finally, really, comprehend why secret societies have historically been created... I mean the potentially logical ones. This train of thought is logically terrifying.

I want a logic check.

I've been jokingly mentioning some of my totally true, practically useless in most scenarios, skills/specific fields of knowledge/ability under a moniker of 'extremely useful, assuming apocalyptic event' for years. Things like advanced knowledge of Coefficients of glass expansion, Fortran, various things that have caused friends to refer to me as MacGyver after the reboot came out.

In recent years, I've personally encountered several varieties of the ones defined by helplessness, self-victimisation, some version of a real disability... that theyve expounded into a personified personal nemesis-- to flashily battle yet never overcome, etc... the vast majority perplexing me as to why that's a valid form of life to them... it's not that they never consider some other way; the ball is just quickly dropped and never picked back up.

College?(not that I'm a big fan) they wish they could but so expensive... aide? The form was hard/confusing/past-due...

Lookup/learn something more indepth than a tiktok? *some self-deprecating bs*

Yet it's "I always wanted to do/be/learn X"

Shows like 'How It's Made' fascinate, but don't inspire enough for a 5min google query.

In the dev world its a clear, inverted pyramid-- one of the first posts I saw when I rejoined here was ostream's rant on Apple sucking because after they stop support/updates you "can't" load a different OS... ofc you can. But several comments down... no mention of that... i think it was @LensFlare who was the only one in ~15 respondents to point out the core logical fallacy.

Basic shit is totally forgotten... try asking some random adults what plastic is made from... or pay attention to how many people declare they have a gluten "allergy".

I get people frequently telling me that things im pointing out as differences don't matter because "it's just semantics"... semantics is literally the epitome of "significance", with roots in 'meaning' and 'truth'

Back to the main issue... We are in a world where DIY is typically something you pay more to do as a catered experience than actually learning anything, people destroy their own arguments hopes of validity unwittingly often by stating the arguement, get 'offended' or 'triggered' by factual statements, propagate misinformation and bastardise words until MW needs money enough to print a new version, likely adding the misuse as an actual definition and basic knowledge and the thought to actually learn is vetoed by the existence of google translate, the wisdom of tiktok and the pure brillance of troubleshooting every random linux issue you have from not knowing basic CLI and thinking linux makes you cool, with chmod 777 because so many other dumbasses on forums keep propagating misinformation. Ask them what 777 means, most have no clue... as they didnt consider googling that one before putting it in a terminal several times.
The number of humans that actually know the basic shit that the infrastructure of the world is built on keeps decreasing... and we aren't even keeping a running tally.

The structure of the internet has the right idea... dns- 13 active master root servers, with multiple redundancies if they start dropping... hell ICANN is like a secret society but publicly known/obfuscated... the modern internet hasnt had a global meltdown... aside from the lack of censorship and global availability changing the social definition of a valid use of braincells to essentially propagating spam as if it's factual and educational.

So many 'devs' so few understanding what a driver is, much less how to write one... irl network techs that don't know what dhcp is or that their equiptment has logs... professionals in deducated fields like Autism research/coping... no clue why it was called "autism", obesity and malnutrition simultaneously existing in the same humans... it's like we need to prepare a subterranean life-supporting vault and stock it like Noah's ark... just including the basic knowledge of things that used to be common/obvious. I've literally had 2 different, early 20s, female, certified medical assistants taking my medical history legitimately ask if not having a uterus made it harder to get pregnant...i wish i was joking.

Any ideas better than a subterranean human vault system? It's not like we can simply store detailed explanations, guides, media... unless we find a way to make them into obfuscated tiktok videos apparently on nonsense or makeup tutorials.

Randomly generated CSS class names make customization of sites much more difficult.

Randomized gibberish CSS class names like "r-acJ79b" are used by some sites like the new Reddit and the new Twitter web apps, which makes it impossible to customize the appearance of the site and to hide "trending" spam. The only way hide annoying and spammy page elements is through user scripts which scan the page for it every second and then hide it. But until then, it appears on screen for a short period.

I once thought this is caused by react JS, but the react JS front end of the video platform "Odysee" does not have randomized CSS class names.

My current task involves processing the commoncrawl web archive, and it's like a box of junk you buy at a flea market. You find so much useless stuff, broken stuff, stuff that makes you question people...

My latest find makes me wonder what lies out there if what I found was in plain sight. I found tens of thousands of websites that look like someone used markov chains to generate pron ads. Those websites exist in 10+ languages, use the same url-scheme, read like a dyslexic camgirl reading alphabet soup and are hosted on the same three ip-adresses. There is no javascript involved and some pages link to a variety of twitter accounts.

I queried a few commoncrawl files and amassed 4GB of this spam. Every time I look at it it gets weirder. There is an italian article about malware in there too.

Here's a text sample:
"Not from her bedroom, she her stream view and meet new experience. In hd india, because swimsuit still laws exist no interaction or frigthened and."

Pharmacy... Preorder-mail got stuck in spam due to weird receiver passphrases so they didn't actually order it (it was "banana" followed by an steadily incrementing number). You wouldn't believe their faces after they saw my mail.

It took the pharmacy exactly ONE HOUR to get that medicine after I went up getting them to know that they missed an order. They express ordered it after I guess I signaled the urgency...
That's one of the pretty great things in Germany. If you need medicine and if you're in a medium populated area, you could get it within hours, or at least in 1/2 day if they not express the order and you order over their website.

But this is attacked due to European trade deals. Online pharmacy shops (the ones without local pharmacies) simply trade in from cheaper areas in Europe and can sell much cheaper. Also because they aren't committed to cross finance local hospital medicine delivery which then let's the health insurance raise their prices.
But due to the law for the minimum wage and therefore steadily decreasing wages the online-only pharmacies get more and more of the market cap....
Such problems aren't easy to fix...

I pretty much had my spam under control for quite a while, receiving only a few spam mails per week. However, in the last month or so the volume has picked up significantly, and now I just saw 16 new spam mails in the last two hours! Fookin shyte…

Of course I suppose they don't realize that at least Gmail is quite effective in filtering that crap right into the Spam folder so I don't have to deal with it. Come on, I know e-mail is cheap but mails that are never read might as well not have been sent in the first place…

!dev
I've finally been so agitated at G+ I need somewhere to just vent.
So for context. What I'm talking about is Google+, or more specifically, the Android app. The website is bad in its own way, but that's not here nor there. No opinions on the iOS version, as I simply REFUSE to touch iOS.

So anyways. The platform itself honestly is not bad. With competent developers behind it, and them actually listening to their dwindling fucking userbase, they could easily turn it into something successful, but the issue is that they just aren't
You see, it's almost like they change dev staff every 6 or so months. Why do I believe this? Because the GUI changes about that fucking often. They also have a history of forcing updates, but allowing you to use an older version, just horrifically slapping on a new and unwelcome skin. This isn't an isolated practice by any means, but it's by far the most prevalent here.

So, now a list of some of the issues the current version has:
-After about a week, the app becomes unstably slow, to the point of it taking about a minute to refresh your home feed, or an individual page.
-Searching is never good, always being slow and rarely giving you who you asked for.
-Transparency is non fucking existent. There isn't a development roadmap to speak of, and when something happens we get it second hand from staff in a "G+ help" community.

There is a solution for the first one, going and clearing the data/cache, but really, the end user shouldn't have to regularly do that. Not to mention the storage space Google apps IN GENERAL fucking take up. Why does Google Play Services regularly use 250MB? (For most people, this really isn't much. But when you only get to fucking use 4 GB of internal storage it's a giant fuck you.)

Bah, back to the topic at hand.
There isn't a good solution to searching, or for transparency at the moment.
The spam filter is awful as well. REGULARLY letting obvious spam pass, regularly blocking and filtering genuine users. It's real annoying that the Android app itself doesn't have support for seeing these flags outside of rooting through the settings a bit, but still. The web and iOS versions have this already.

Oh, it also completely lacks a dark mode like most Google apps for some fuckin reason.

That concludes my random 1:30 AM rant about something I have no ability to change, except hope in vain that someone who has the ability to change this forwards this to the developers of G+.

I need a better sleep schedule.

Ever started to like a company so much that you wanna subscribe to their spams because it was so simple to unsubscribe from their spam?