Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🔤SpellBinding: ABIORTV Wordo: AMIGO

  • LQ’s account of the end

    We are nearly there to side A of this series. At this rate, I will finish sides this Thursday.

• Politics and World Events

  • Gatekeeping the definition of Shared Ownership

    Anyone active in UK leasehold will have come across people who gatekeep Shared Ownership.

    Their main concern is to derail any conversation where Shared Ownership is treated as overlapping with leasehold. Thisn't People's Front of Judea stuff. It's dog-on-a-string-brigade stuff. They don't want to be seen as part of the broader group; it inevitably follows that they don't want the whole group working together for its own interests. It's Separatism.

    "Shared Ownership" is a UK scheme whereby one pays gradually for a home, owning a proportion of it and paying rent on the other portion; generally there is an option to "staircase" to increase the proportion so owned, often to 100%.

    It can be implemented in relation to a freehold or leasehold title to the home, with a "shared ownership trust" (SOT) or "shared ownership lease" (SOL). I have just invented these two abbreviations, but the phrases themselves are used in the tax and landlord tenant laws.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Leaving lobster-bucket tech behind

    A lot of the smolnet innovations, actual or proposed, get attacked on the grounds that they're too "technical" in some sense: that because some people won't have the technical chops to use them, that might limit their appeal or exclude people (who ex hypothesi wouldn't be interested in them).

    It's wrong to say of this, This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things. But it's why some of us can't have have some things we consider nice.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Scraper bots can suck a duck...

      I've been fighting with AI scrapers hitting my web server relentlessly for over a week now. It started just before the end of March, when I found out I was near my 1 /Terabyte/ bandwidth limit. Checking the logs, my hidden story archive blog was getting hit by hundreds upon hundreds of requests every hour. Rate limiting helped for about a minute, but then it started getting worse.

      I then found a way to send back /444/ errors (no response) by user agent, and implemented that. It's been a /massive/ help on its own, especially when Fail2Ban can't keep up, but it's still not perfect. I'm still getting malware bots trying to get in based on recent vulnerabilities in WordPress and Lavarel, a number of git credential scanners, and "cybersecurity research" scanners that I didn't exactly give permission to hit my VPS.

    • Thirteen: Trap

      In February, I wrote and published a Zine. For the first time [1] I am making it available on the worldwide web.