Scraps #7

A bunch of scrappy notes from 2025-07-25 to 2025-08-01, posted on Friday 1st of August 2025 at 15:00

Pinch, punch, first of the month.

This week I've had a bit of time off work and am still not up to date on my reading list. I'm starting to think that maybe there's too much cool stuff on the indieweb?

Unfortunately, thanks to some utterly stupid laws that are finding their way in to society, for this edition you are going to have to verify your age. Please submit a 3d face scan to verify that you're between 5-155 years of age. If you fall outside of this age range, would you kindly close your eyes until you've closed this website. If however you're within this age range, or a sentient being of any species other than human, welcome. Enjoy.

Spotlight

It's the 1st of August today, which means it's Blaugust!
It's also HTML Day TOMORROW (Tuesday 2nd August)

Indieweb, Fediverse & Social Media - people stuff

The enshittification of governance continues - laws are being set to serve the government instead of the people. It has been coming for a long time.

Now the internet is reacting to the age verification laws that are being passed with dismay, resignation, and new VPN subscriptions. It's the resignation that will allow these things to pass - things like it have been tried again and again and this time it's not been shot down. That's the secret. Keep trying and eventually you will succeed, whether you're an entrepreneur trying to start a business, or a government trying to implement a privacy-invading slippery-slope law.

Soatok outlines the issues with the age verification and explains that, no, it doesn't need to be a privacy concern... unlike the current state of things in some countries
If you're fed up with online marketplaces (ebay, amazon, etsy, etc) you could try selling the epic stuff from your attic on your own website perhaps?
Sometimes you have some old tech laying around but don't want to sell it or chuck it in the recycling just yet. Annie has repurposed an old ipad for consuming blog and small web stuff
If you're wanting to participate in the small web, you'll probably need to learn HTML! HTMLHobbyist has been shared around this week. If you're interested, check it out!
Manuel has now interviewed 100 bloggers as part of the People and Blogs series, and writes about this experience
LibreOffice developer Mike has had his Microsoft account banned - I'm sure there's two sides to this tale but it sure looks bad on the MS side
David has drawn three panels that reflect the web as it was, the web as it is, and the web as it will (hopefully) be. Let's work to get there!

Infosec, sysadmin & code - tech stuff

This week I had to remotely upgrade a 12r2 hypervisor running a domain controller straight to server 2025 (do not pass go, do not collect $200), running on a single generator (no redundancy). There is a failed disk in the array to boot. Talk about risk! It worked out though. Now I just need the replacement drive to arrive to the site...

Hacking used to be done just because - it was for fun, for curiosity. Make something do something it wasn't intended to do. It is of course still like this - case in point, how about hacking a washing machine?
In the spirit of making something do something it isn't supposed to do, here's a twist on that. Taking software designed to be as fast as feasible, and making it as slow as possible? Why? Why not! Here's Jacob keeping themselves occupied by making Postgres reeeeaaaal slow - love it
Dating app Tea was breached recently. They stored info such as scans of ID and selfies, which has been plucked from the internet and shared around. So many fails here, *facepalm*
Pwn2Own has a $1,000,000 reward for WhatsApp exploits, and have detailed more info about the categories and rewards on the ZDI post
Google's Project Zero team are changing how they announce discoveries - they're adding in a 10 day annoucement that something has been found to their 90+30 days publication delay. Interesting idea!
An attempted bank heist was going to play out like an episode of Mr Robot with their use of a Raspberry Pi and interesting evasion technique

Bonus

The Virtual Moose - gaming related links and blog posts
CopyParty is a new-to-me file server which looks pretty cool actually. I haven't tried it yet as it was just shared on the 32bit.cafe discord earlier today, but going from this new youtube video alone it looks... pretty darn good.