Manawatia a Matariki everyone!
this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2025
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Aotearoa / New Zealand
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Manawatia a Matariki ki a koe hoki!
suprisingly, we have more posts this week 👀
Two weeks ago I installed dual boot EndeavourOS and OpenMandriva on my potato Mini PC (Celeron 1007U, 8GB RAM, 500 GB HDD), but I haven't gotten around to fiddling with it yet. 🙄
Nice! What are you planning on using it for? I'm assuming it's not your daily driver if you haven't got around to using it.
I'm not sure what I'm going to do with it. Perhaps I will use it as network storage. it has an external SATA port, so I can add another storage.
At first I just wanted to learn arch-based Linux. But I found it easier to learn OMV, as it has a similar learning curve to Debian and Ubuntu-based distros.
I haven't used an arch based distro before, I've always used Ubuntu based for servers and Fedora based for daily driving. I'm not even sure why, it's just how it worked out.
I hate how so many domain registrars park domains. Like no one wants this domain there have been 0 offers and no one has ever used it but you sit on it and arbitrarily set the value at $200 a year. So stupid.
I guess somewhere along the way someone worked out that if a domain is registered then it is probably something someone might want (as opposed to a completely random selection of characters).
So they decided when a domain expires they would register it for the wholesale price then bump the price up to some amount people would pay if they really wanted it. So their $10USD investment in a .com could give them $200USD, and it only needs to work out in one out of every 20 cases to break even.
The numbers might stack up even more in their favour. The .com I wanted, it's $1000 per month or $30k to own. It used to be owned by an old man who used it for his personal page and there are almost no commercial entity named that. So weird.
If I was thinking about how to automatically assign value, one way might be to bump the price depending on how long it was registered for. If the same person had it registered for 20 years, it probably also has SEO reputation that could be valuable.
That makes sense I guess. From the old layout it looked like it had been there at least that long. As far as I can tell from googling, there's only one other entity apart from me that is likely to ever want it, though.
Go for a .nz. More expensive but I even managed to find a two character one!
.nz is really cute. I have a .co.nz already though but I wanted the .com because that way if someone goes there by accident it still works.
Ah yes, that makes sense. I guess if they are expecting $30k for it then they will just keep it indefinitely since it only costs them $10 a year.
I think they will too, unless the other entity trademarks it and goes after them for domain squatting.
On the other hand one of the perks of being this old is I have always owned my lastname .com so I feel like a bit of a spoilt brat being indignant I can't have this other thing as well! 😅
On the one hand I'm sad because my name is so common I'll never be able to own it as a domain, but on the other hand employers googling me have no chance of finding my escapades 😅
That's a good point! I actually got mine so I could "win" google. Kind of want to know what your escapades are now!
Just checked with duckduckgo and I seem to have lost SEO to an inactive profile on blogspot of all places, which is super weird!
Kind of want to know what your escapades are now!
Nothing that would stand out in a crowd of teenage escapades, and luckily prior to smart phone cameras. To my knowledge there isn't anything online that an employer might worry about, but it's nice to know they couldn't find it even if they wanted to.
I guess the next thing to worry about is if someone with the same name commits a horrible crime.
Just checked with duckduckgo and I seem to have lost SEO to an inactive profile on blogspot of all places, which is super weird!
I guess blogspot's ranking may give a boost to the blogs they host. For my private stuff (i.e. everything except lemmy stuff), I don't even have anything at the root domain. Everything is on a subdomain, because I'm not trying to drive traffic to it an in fact want the opposite.
Aaah you have one of those websites! I arrive at them and then spend ages trying to work out if there is anywhere to go. Like a less empowering version of zombo!
Have to say we are fortunate to get our teenage years in pre-phone cameras. My drunk and disorderly fashion crimes live on only in the minds of people who witnessed them.
This conversation is reminding me I should fix my old site. I hate the constant updates involved in wordpress.
Aaah you have one of those websites! I arrive at them and then spend ages trying to work out if there is anywhere to go.
There's literally nothing at the root domain as in if you try to go there it will just say it couldn't connect this site doesn't exist. Not even a blank page. I find it's pretty common, any time I interact with someone with a custom email address I try to go to the site and a lot of the time it doesn't exist.
Like a less empowering version of zombo!
😆 maybe I should put something like that on the root domain!
Have to say we are fortunate to get our teenage years in pre-phone cameras. My drunk and disorderly fashion crimes live on only in the minds of people who witnessed them.
Yeah, progress. When my kids or grandkids are older, there will probably be constant CCTV monitored by AI, posting clips of the ridiculous escapades to social media in real time.
This conversation is reminding me I should fix my old site. I hate the constant updates involved in wordpress.
I've never hosted wordpress. I don't have a reason to, but running a site and seeing all the hits to wordpress URIs from bots trying to exploit known vulnerabilities puts me off anyway!
Oh I get you now, I've met email addresses like that too. Some people though you google them and a blank page with one or two sentences appears, those are the ones that frustrate me.
It would be cool to have a zombo like entity but might attract the attackers?
constant CCTV monitored by AI, posting clips of the ridiculous escapades to social media
Thanks I hate it. Mainly because you're probably right - it will be like those "border control" and "disaster" reality shows only automated. Something to look forward to!😅
seeing all the hits to wordpress URIs from bots trying to exploit known vulnerabilities
Yeah it's really yucky, it feels like an arms race with endless bots, updates, stuff breaking, but when I decided to use a CMS it just seemed way easier than Joomla or Drupal which were the other main options back then. That said, I used to see malicious visits back when it was just an html website.
Do you get many bad actors hosting in the fediverse?
It would be cool to have a zombo like entity but might attract the attackers?
Realistically, having no page at the root domain is unlikely to have any real security benefit, except perhaps not bringing attention to yourself. Security people would say everything extra you add (such as hosting another web page at the root domain) adds to your attack surface, but I don't think hosting one extra static page is likely to make a difference.
Mostly I just have no reason to put anything there.
That said, I used to see malicious visits back when it was just an html website.
I don't host any wordpress sites but get (failed) hits to wordpress URIs because bots are just set to scan for any site and they attempt to access a known URI. E.g. if there is an exploit affecting the (made up) wordpress page at wordpresssite.com/settings/admin, then I see hits to mysite.nz/settings/admin even though such a page doesn't exist. The bots just scan thousands of domains hoping for a hit.
I first noticed these when I blocked all access from outside NZ, and found all the now blocked URLs (mostly requests from from Russia or China).
Do you get many bad actors hosting in the fediverse?
In terms of actual malicious instances, not really. Mostly the issues with instances are instances abandoned by their admin (but for some reason still up) with open registrations, so trolls can just go there and make new accounts to their heart's content.
The main issue we see though are AI scrapers. Sooooooo many. You can put in a robots.txt to ask ChatGPT, Amazon, Google, etc to stay away. But the start up AI companies are relentless. They ignore robots.txt, they lie about their user agent to avoid detection, and they make millions of requests with no throttling. It's a cat and mouse game to block them via IP.
Cloudflare has an AI bot block mode, but it breaks federation so we can't use it (admittedly, federation is basically bot traffic). They seem to die down traffic once blocked (I guess if they reach the first page, they try to follow links, but if they are blocked at the first point they can't continue). But despite this, we have still blocked 30,000 AI bot requests in the last 24 hours.
I know some of the bigger servers like Lemmy.world are blocking IP ranges belonging to Alibaba and others (and adding to the list all the time), because the traffic is just insane.
Me too, there should be a rule against it.