Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated) @joepie91@pixie.town

This is an old project, but by some miracle it's still working and I woke up this morning wanting to celebrate the things I love more.

This Inkplate e-ink screen shows Conway's Game of Life, seeded from tarpits I have on the Internet. The tarpits are programs on my computer that superficially look like insecure Telnet and Remote Desktop services, but actually exist to respond super slowly and make bots scanning the Internet 'get stuck'.

When a bot connects to the tarpit, the data it sends gets squished into a 5x5 grid and 'stamped' onto a Game of Life board. Data from a bot at the IP address 1.1.x.x will get stamped on the top left corner, data from a bot at 254.254.x.x will get stamped on the bottom right corner.

Conway's Game of Life, a set of simple rules that govern whether cells should turn on or off, updates the display once per second. The result is that bot attacks end up appearing as distinct 'creatures', that get bigger and more angry looking over time (as their centre is updated with new data). After the attack finishes, the 'creature' eventually burns itself out.

Despite that description, it's a really chill piece of art that doesn't draw too much attention but I can happily watch for a long time.

Credit for the idea goes to @_mattata, I had been wanting to make a real-life version of XKCD #350 for years before seeing his Botnet Fishbowl project.

#projects #inkplate #esp32 #eink #infosec #tarpit

Proposed resolution:

When Tumblr joins the fediverse by implementing ActivityPub, we should:
- Defederate Tumblr if they inject ads into the federation for our users, and
- Defederate Tumblr if they place federated posts (our posts) alongside ads.

No ads on fedi.

Edit: This is a PROPOSAL. The intent of this is not to dictate terms, but to encourage admins to develop and consider policy before the crisis happens.

#MastoAdmins #mastoadmin #meta

can't help but read this in a british accent

Some background reading that may help to explain why for-profit companies "embracing" Activitypub makes some of us antsy:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish

Me: Bills payed
J: Bills? We have bills?!
Me: Yup
J: This is not the anarchist utopia I was promised

I have not presented to mastodon yet the fact that my cat knows to ring a bell whenever she has an urgent need that I must fulfill! #MagicalMinka

I taught her to do it because her previous way of notifying me was pulling any paper out of my shelves and destroying it. this is much less destructive.

she used to ring for all kinds of things, but ever since she's chosen my roommate over me she only returns to my room to ring when she's hungry or to complain that my roommate's door is closed.

terra server (2022, declassified and colorized)

Christmas decorations are going up! You’ve got the tree, lights, asbestos… Wait, what?

For decades, asbestos was sold as artificial snow. It could be bought in boxes to be sprinkled onto trees, ornaments, nativity scenes, etc. It was so popular, many older ornaments still have traces of asbestos.

It was also used in film. The most famous scene with asbestos snow is in Wizard of Oz (1939), when snow falls on Dorothy and her friends, waking them up.

#histodons @histodons #christmas

Mastodon 4 adds a new endpoint, /api/v1/instance/domain_blocks

This endpoint contains your instance's block list in an easily machine-readable format. As far as I know, the only tool that currently uses this endpoint is the kiwifarms one.

The endpoint does not require any form of authentication, so it's very easy to scrape. I recommend editing your web server configuration to prevent access to the endpoint until there's something legitimate that uses it.

#fediblock #mastoadmin

I wish we could rely on governments or companies or other institutions to be there for us. But increasingly we will not be able to. *We have to do it ourselves.*

Housing, community safety, cyclist/pedestrian infrastructure, local journalism, education, preventing drug overdoses, running social media…It is all up to us. There is no one else.

It's a dizzying realization. It's terrifying…but also incredibly empowering.

Does anyone else feel this way?

🐦