Hi, I’m owls of the godless internets. I make software for a major university in the US midwest. In my free time, I run an expansive criminal syndicate that fronts as a heavy industrial conglomerate.

I like some games (GW2, DF, PoE, TTRPGs), PHP & Laravel, and fine dining.

You can find me on mastodon at @owls, which is probably a better way to get in touch with me. So if you need some time-sensitive mod/admin stuff, @ me there!

  • 0 Posts
  • 6 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 16th, 2023

help-circle

  • If I’m running a tiny little single-user instance on a potato and my post goes to the mastodon.social federated feed, it would be impolite for them to direct 20,000 requests at my potato all at once. Instead, their servers grabs one copy and serves it to their users. If they’re set up for 20k eyeballs online at once, they’ve got capacity to serve them all the photo.

    Mastodon has a configurable clean-up period for cached media so you don’t use infinite disk. That gives a bad actor an easy way to robustly host images for a couple days: post it, let it federate out, and then take your server down. Everyone else is now doing crimes for you, and cleaning it up is a reactive process by dozens of server admins.





  • Email does rely on IP reputation as a major component in deciding if something is spam. The system has matured to a point where it works fairly well and transparently … but the consequence has been you can’t reliably send from an IP block unless somebody is very actively handling abuse and working with the reputation services to keep their IP space in the internet’s good graces.

    But: I wouldn’t want to allowlist based just on one reputation service. I’ve got some ideas on how to handle spam for my instances involving a few different datapoints. This could be useful as one, if it ends up with enough data.