Notices by tao (tao@cursed.technology)

malware authors today don't even include ASCII art of laughing skulls in their viruses. where is their respect for the craft

technologists often fail to understand that they’re creating models of the world and that 1) all
models are imperfect, and 2) how you model something is a highly political decision

security alert:

if you run a vBulletin forum, take it offline now. there's a zero-day vulnerability that gives full shell acess and it's trivial to exploit. confirmed to be in use in the wild. no patch available yet.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/09/24/vbulletin_vbug_zeroday/

so there’s a new search engine for the fediverse: https://search.social.

most people probably don’t expect their public posts to be searchable, especially if they use mastodon, so here’s how to opt out (for mastodon): open your settings and go to Preferences > Other, then check “Opt out of search engine indexing”.

if you’re an instance admin, you can opt your entire instance through robots.txt. you can set this up in nginx: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1090823/how-do-i-configure-nginx-to-redirect-to-a-url-for-robots-txt-sitemap-xml#3746344

people applauded when @darius said that he doesn't have a business model for friend.camp. really seems like everyone is tired of the corporate behemoths that run so much social media; i'm very excited to see the fediverse grow in the coming years!

lol

did you know that your mastodon instance’s local timeline is publicly accessible through the API, even if you’ve disabled the timeline preview? there’s an issue on github to fix this; it might be a good idea to go and 👍 it if you agree this should change: https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/11289