Started working on a pihole alternative a while ago.

I like pihole a lot but one of the features I am missing is to be able to define a list of mass surveillance related domains (Snowden leaks; PRISM program and such) and show statistics based on dns queries containing blacklisted domains, prases/words and surveillance-related domains/words (google/facebook/microsoft/apple etc).

Started working on one based on an existing (php based) dns server which is open source and slowly but surely developed something which worked.
Then, I found out that the php resolving function (dns resolving) uses the system default, which can, of course, be google's dns as well. Changing this would be ideal but while the documentation suggested that it could be done some way, it didn't work for me so I chose a library which can do it with specific dns servers (to use as external dns servers).
This library used a different way of showing the retrieved dns query results and really wasn't in for converting everything by hand so i kinda quit the project a while ago.

A few days ago I thought fuck it and started again.
Now have a working version based on the new dns resolving library and made some other good improvements.

For those who are wondering why I chose PHP for this: why the fuck not?

Happy happy happy.

Dear sir,

I'm NOT giving you the information you want because I can't verify you. You can tell me that we're the only company who does it like this and name all companies which do it differently, you can curse me into the ground or completely lose your shit at me but that won't make a difference:
I'm not giving you the information you want.

Sincerely,

Go fuck yourself.

God damnit, me and mysql joins do NOT work together that well, this shit is like magic to me 😅

Ohai, a few devRanters (including me) have been working on planning a Dutch devRant meetup once again.

Although we're quite late with the "announcement", hereby!

It'll happen upcoming Saturday in Nijmegen (at least one German living person is coming as well and some people wanted to see it anyways so that's why).

Here's a collab edit thingy where you can put your name if you're coming!:
http://collabedit.com/wmj25 (yes, no https, I'm aware, I didn't chose this one but for now it works)

I'll mention some dutchies in the comments :)

Looking forward to upcoming Saturday :D

Happened a few weeks ago but still awesome.

Me and a good friend have a website together but we don't monitor it too much.
He studied with me in the same class but went towards frontend/apps where I chose backend/servers/security. He knows how to do basic Linux stuff but that's about it.

We were at a party when he noticed that our site was offline. Walked over to me (because I manage the server) to notify me so I could look into it said I'd look into it (phone):
*visits site: nothing*
*online dig tool: got the server ip*
*remembered this one didn't have pubkey authentication - after three passwords attempts I'm in*

"service apache2 status"
*service doesn't exist*
*right, migrated this one from Apache to nginx....*
"history"
*ah, an nginx restart probably suffices...*
"service nginx restart"

BAM, site is reachable again.

*god damnit, lets encrypt cert expired...*
"history"
*sees command with certbot and our domain both in one*
"!892"
*20 seconds later: success message*
*service nginx reload*

BAM, site works securely again.

"Yo mate, check the site again"

Mate: 😶 w-w-what? *checks site and his watch* you started less than two minutes ago...?
Me: yeah..?
Mate: 😶 now this is why YOU manage our server and I don't 😐

His face was fucking gold. It wasn't that difficult for me (I do this daily) but to him, I was a God at that moment.

Awesome moment 😊

Fucking awesome. The 'encryption backdoor law' in Australia went through!

Now, whenever served with such warrants, companies which are active in Australia will have to pay hefty fines if they don't give encrypted messages to law enforcement in readable form. No matter whether this means just decrypting it with the keys they have or pushing backdoors/inject code into the messaging apps/services in order to extract the contents.

Now let's see how much the big companies really care about their users! (I'd expect them to pull out of Australia but the chance that this'll happen is as tiny as about nothing)

Celebrated saints Nicolas today with the family. Apparently my sister made a devRant account to follow me around and see how/what I'm about in this platform and get me a present based on that.

She got me this: 😍

In may this year, the new mass surveillance law in the Netherlands went into effect. Loads of people were against it with the arguments that everyone's privacy was not protected well enough, data gathered through dragnet surveillance might not be discarded quickly after the target data was filtered out and the dragnet surveillance wouldn't be that 'targeted'.

They were put into the 'paranoid' corner mostly and to assure enough support/votes, it was promised that:
- dragnet surveillance would be done as targeted as possible.
- target data would be filtered out soon and data of non-targets would be discarded automatically by systems designed for that (which would have to be out in place ASAP).
- data of non-targets would NOT be analyzed as that would be a major privacy breach.
- dragnet surveillance could only be done if enough proof would be delivered and if the urgency could justify the actions.

A month ago it was already revealed that there has been a relatively (in this context) high amount of cases where special measures (dragnet surveillance/non-target hacking to get to targets and so on) were used when/while there wasn't enough proof or the measures did not justify the urgency.
Privacy activists were anything but happy but this could be improved and the guarantees which were given to assure privacy of innocent people were in place according to the politicians... we'll see how this goes..

Today it was revealed that:
-there are no systems in place for automatic data discarding (data of innocent civilians) and there are hardly any protocols for how to handle not-needed or non-target data.
- in real life, the 'as targeted dragnet as possible' isn't really as targeted as possible. There aren't any/much checks in place to assure that the dragnets are aimed as targeted as possible.
- there isn't really any data filtering which filters out non-targers, mostly everything is analyzed.

Dear Dutch government and intelligence agency; not so kindly to fuck yourself.

Hardly any of the promised checks which made that this law could go through are actually in place (yet).

Fuck you.

Co-worker loves macos' features/interface but for him, an operating system being open source is a very important thing.

So important that he ditched his mac for a Linux machine. (regular Ubuntu)

Today we recommended him Elementary OS.

Guess who's completely in love!

😁

My first self written framework 😅

Damn that was a pile of ****, I still write my own stuff (frameworks etc) but I've learned a lot and those are way better compared to that first one.

Everything was static, loads of defines (way too fucking many) and so on.

Dus.....

Got a question for the linuxers.

I'm a linuxer myself (no shit) but I don't really tweak a lot. Whenever I see those awesome arch setups with tiling wm's etc (https://devrant.com/rants/1902395/ for example), I would love to set that up myself but one thing:

Any idea on how I'd be able to run this well with 6 screens? I've got genuinely no clue.

Working on a funny/new api/service (will be a public one) and I'm only now realizing how important good security is but especially:

The amount of time that goes into securing an api/application is too goddamn high, I'm spending about 90 percent of my time on writing security checks 😅

Very much fun but the damn.

Running from my job to my bus stop while having my phone in my hands trying to fend off a cyber attack while my hands are nearly freezing and its raining like hell.

Sometimes my job is just fucking awesome.

When you login to a server through ssh for the first time with a specific domain or up address, you get a prompt asking to verify a signature with yes or no (on Linux at least).

That often goes well but sometimes when I already did that....:

ssh user@server
*types yes automatically and presses enter...........*
Neeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaammmmmmmmmmmm:
yes
yes
yes
yes
yes
yes
yes
yes
yes
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user@server: ~$
user@server: ~$ ^C
user@server: ~$ ^C
user@server: ~$ ^C
user@server: ~$ ^C
user@server: ~$ ^C

Nooooo not again 😅

Can't get into details but today took probably like 10 years of my life in the form of stress. On top of that I'm currently the on call Linux engineer so I can't drink much 😥

God fucking damnit.

Just had to get that out.

Just needed to

START FUCKING USING GIT.

😅

Currently working on my first real REST api and I've arrived at the authentication part.

I'm not sure how to do this one, the client will have to login using username/password but then, what's the most conventional way of authentication logged in users through a REST api? (no oauth (yet))

This should be usable for anything like ajax requests to calls from the backend to curl requests.

Looking forward to ideas!

Fuck yeah!

6 monitors are success-fucking-fully running on my setup.

Fun detail is that WITH the official AMD driver, one screen wasn't turning on and one had a weird resolution but WITHOUT it, it works completely fine!

Yes, it runs completely fine on Linux (Kubuntu).

Finally have my dream setup.

That moment that the need for a certain service rises and the domain name you want isn't available so you randomly think of another genius one which you can also do a fun 'joke' with and you start building an api around that idea.

This is gonna be fun 😆

Getting closer and closer to my dream setup!

What I want: powerful enough computer for some general gaming + IDE + shitloads of terminals with 6 screens running a Linux distro.

What I have: powerful enough computer which can run quite some games and handle my IDE + shitloads of terminals. Runs Linux already but still have to order 3 screens.

Nearly there 💜

That first world problems moment when your desk can hardly handle handle the load of your monitor arm after you've put up a new monitor and you realize that three more monitors will be mounted soon.

😬😧😅

I have multiple but one of my biggest ones:

Build an entire suite of services which can replace the popular Google/microsoft/facebook (etc) services.

Of course: privacy respecting, preferrably everything possible end-to-end encrypted.

Because fuck mass surveillance and those companies and if I can do anything to fuck them (quite literally) and help people getting to user friendly alternatives, I'll do the best I can.

150K, fucking finally!

And no, it's not 'just about the upvotes' for me, I already explained that one numerous times.

Yay!

I love and hate at the same time how the dependencies of some projects can turn into projects themselves.

Working on a quite big project right now and need notifications in the form of smartphone notifications/signal messages/emails right now for that which is nearly all working but now I'm realizing that it'd be ten times more useful to write a general messaging gateway/API wich can be called through a url which handles any type of messaging/notifications I need to send out.

Love it because those kinda projects are useful and awesome imo but that'd be YET ANOTHER project 😅😥

Rekked/insulted a client so hard today in a way which was obvious for me/colleagues but not for the client that the colleague sitting next to me completely fucking lost it. (client did not detect/notice it)

That's entirely fine as he was not too loud but his laughter is so fucking contagious that he went outside to make sure that I wouldn't catch it any worse while on the phone.

God damn it took some serious self control to not completely lose my shit xD (it only partly worked 😅)

Was thinking of a name for my currently biggest project and thought of a funny one, took the first letter of each word and started to use that to refer to the project, was thinking about domain names and such already etc.

Just wrote it down and I suddenly noticed:

ONE OF THE LETTERS IN THE SHORTCUT ISN'T CORRECT.

How the fuck did I miss that for fucking weeks?! It's not like it's a difficult sentence/set of words or anything.

I'm so fucking glad I didn't register domains or shit yet.

How. In. The. Living. Hell.

Check out Gotify! (if you want, of course)

I'm not involved in the project but it's pretty much a self hosted and fully open source pushover alternative which is NOT dependent on Google services.

Going to try it out tonight :D

Dear tiger, I love you but I HAVE A LINUX PENGUIN NOW 😍❤

Thanks @trogus!

I just discovered Glances.

I just came.

This shit is 😍

(https://nicolargo.github.io/glances...)

Was running tests on a big project I'm doing which still contains a fair amount of bugs but I was sure that all thresholds would succeed and the test wouldn't fire an alert.

Ran the test: alert received any fucking way.

FUCK.

*checks rule*
*waaaait a second, I've set the threshold differently by accident...*

HOLY SHIT THIS MEANS IT WORKS 😵

*pats project* - "good project 😊"