I don’t understand why Cloudflare gets bashed so much over this… EVERY CDN out there does exactly the same thing. It’s how CDN’s work. Whether it’s Akamai, AWS, Google Cloud CDN, Fastly, Microsoft Azure CDN, or some other provider, they all do the same thing. In order to operate properly they need access to unencrypted content so that they can determine how to cache it properly and serve it from those caches instead of always going back to your origin server.

My employer uses both Akamai and AWS, and we’re well aware of this fact and what it means.

Speaking of slot machines, every slot machine, electronic poker machine, etc. are just state machines that operate based on a stream of random numbers fed into them by another device.

The random number generators (RNG’s) used for gaming are highly regulated (at least here in the US) and only a small handful of companies make them. They have to be certified for use by organizations like The Nevada Gaming Control Board. RNGs have to be secured so only NGC officials and other key people can access them. If they are opened unexpectedly or otherwise tampered with then they need to go into lockdown and stop generating numbers until an official resets it.

The RNGs also need to be able to replay sequences of numbers on demand. If the same sequence of numbers are fed into a game and the user plays the same way then the result of the game should be 100% identical each time.

I learned COBOL programming on that system. COBOL’s sequential file data type was all about space-delimited text files. Part of a program would define the various input & output files. For example a numerical userid might take up columns 1-8 then the first initial would be in column 10 then the last name in columns 12-20 and so on…

I have no idea if this is true or not but I was told it harkens back to very early multi-user operating systems where user credentials were stored unencrypted in plaintext files that used white space as delimiters.

I tend to believe this might be accurate because I learned programming back in the 1980’s on an Onyx Systems microcomputer. There was a bug that some of us learned about in its rudimentary email program that would dump you into its otherwise-protected system directory. In that directory was a file containing both usernames & passwords in clear text. I don’t recall if it used white space as a delimiter, but given everything was in clear text and not encrypted I think that might have been the case.

Reminds me of The Password Game…

Warning: you have been warned!

robots.txt is 100% honor based. Well known bots like Googlebot, Bingbot, etc. definitely honor them. But there are also plenty of bots that completely ignore them.

I would hope the bots used to collect LLM training data honors them, but there’s no way to know for certain. And all it really takes is one bot ignoring it for the content of your website to end up in a random set of training data…

Try using “curl -A” to specify a User-Agent string that matches Chrome or Firefox.

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I hope you realize that virtually every CDN provider does the exact same thing in similar ways. Sites that use Akamai, AWS, Google cloud, Fastly, etc. all give those companies access to unencrypted content. It’s just how CDNs work…

Getting rear ended on the highway by a drunk driver. Had all of about 1 second of warning when she slammed on her brakes and started skidding.

My favorite when debugging some code for a memory manager, written in the days of DOS extended memory, was shit_cookie_corrupt.

The original author called blocks of memory “cookies”. If too many cookies were corrupted then eventually the function ohShitOhShitOhShit was called, which shut everything down.

Some CDNs like Akamai and Cloudflare have options to optimize images. We use the Akamai one where I work. It means our creative teams, customers, etc. don’t need to worry too much about whether an image is properly optimized when they upload it. Akamai will, behind the scenes optimize the quality, color palette, and image type (jpg, web, png, etc) and create a number of different versions of the images. Then when a client requests the image Akamai looks at the client device (mobile vs desktop, screen resolution, browser version, etc) and serves the copy of the image that’s best optimized for that device.

So even if the URL ends with .jpg you might be sent a .webp. If you use the browsers developer tool to inspect the response headers you’ll likely see the Content-Type header says it’s .webp as well.

You died every week (from diabetes)?

I got royally screwed by the federal government personnel data breach that happened a number of years ago. As a result I have free identity theft monitoring with a really good company for the foreseeable future.

A well thought out and implemented backup system, along with a good security setup is how you deal with malware. If backups won’t protect you from malware then you’re doing backups wrong. A proper backup implementation keeps a series of full backups plus incremental backups based on those full ones. So say your data doesn’t change very often, then you might do a full backup once a month and incremental ones twice a week. You keep 6 months of the combinations of full & incrementals, you don’t just overwrite the backups with new ones.

If you’re doing backups like that and you suffer a malware attack then you have the ability to recover data as far as 6 months ago. The chances you don’t discover malware encrypting your data for 6+ months is tiny. If you’re really paranoid then you also test recovering files from random backups on a regular basis.

My employer has detected and blocked multiple malware attacks using a combination of the above practices plus device management software that can detect unusual NAS activity and block suspect devices on our networks. Each time our security team was able to identify the encrypted files and restore over 99% from backups.

Suppose you’re hit by a ransomware attack and all the data on your NAS gets encrypted. Your RAID “backup” is just as inaccessible as everything else. So it’s not a backup. A true backup would let you recover from the ransomware attack once you have identified and removed the malware that allowed the attack.

As far as BitTorrent itself goes, your optimal speed is also going to depend a bit on your client and the number of peers in the swarm.

Suppose you’re seeding a file to 3 peers. It’s not very efficient if your client uploads part 1 of your file to each peer, then uploads part 2 to each peer, etc. A more optimized upload would upload part 1 to peer A, part 2 to peer B, part 3 to peer C, etc. Then the peers can share each of those parts with each other. This way you are effectively only uploading the file one time before other nodes start seeding as well.

The thing is, this sort of seeding only works well in specific situations, including when there’s only one seeder, etc. And not all clients support this. Take a look at qbittorrent’s super seeding option for an example of one client that does.

I think this is what I used: https://pimylifeup.com/cloudflare-tunnel-on-home-assistant/

I use home assistant and found some instructions on how to set up a free-tier cloudflare reverse proxy to access it from outside my home. Works like a charm.

It was pure c code that was used to print reports, and included the date in a header. Whoever wrote it miscalculated the size of the buffer for the header by one byte. When the date was the longest month & day spelled out plus a two digit day of the month then it would overflow the buffer, resulting in the program crashing.