Technically speaking, I invented vaping.

In high school economics class, we had to invent a fake product, fill out patent applications, do focus groups, make a commercial and print ads, and do all the other stuff you’d normally do if you were a real company (except we submitted paperwork to the teacher, obviously, and not the USPTO).

My group’s product was a weight-loss product called “FlavorAir” (“Anorexia Fast” didn’t test well with our focus groups). It was a spray device that misted flavored air into your mouth to satiate cravings (our product prop was just breath spray). We advertised flavors like gravy, turkey dinner, mint chocolate ice cream, banana mint, and several others.

This was in the early 00’s and predates vaping by many years. I should be rich.

RamNode for all but one of them. They’re not the best, but they’ve been solid for years.

Does the VPS provider that runs part of my self-hosted infrastructure count? I’ve happily paid one of them for almost 14 years now.

I honestly think that’s my last online service other than a couple Patreons for music.

Second this. Everything I have runs on Debian or OpenWRT.

You can also POST AS A GUEST TO THE FEDIVERSE without signing up.

Oh, dear lord. As if we don’t have enough spam and drive-by trolls as it is.

Yeah. On the surface it seems like it would be a positive. But in practice, it shields people from criticism of their behavior.

Yeah, yeah, “use your words” and all that, but some comments are just so brain-dead or trollish that they’re not worth a response, and even a downvote is expending far more effort than the comment is worth. So the person who made it sees 3 upvotes but not the 50 downvotes, so their takeaway is that “wow, 3 people liked my braindead comment” rather than everyone except 3 people hated it.

I get the appeal of disabling downvotes, but if I say something stupid, I wanna know.

I mean, if you’re not shitting your guts out after drinking a glass of tap water, then it’s clean enough.

Pure water tastes like…nothing. The minerals and such give it the good, crisp taste.

That said, my water is so hard it has comparable calcium to a glass of milk.

That’s basically me. Wake me when it’s time to:

• Eat
• Hand out gifts
• Go home

Two in the same vein:

1. Someone once assumed that I used a code prettier by asking for my .prettierrc. Nope. I just write pretty code and was legit offended at that.
2. Multiple times I’ve been called an AI because I (checks notes) write out my thoughts in full sentences.

There’s been worse, but I’m quick to block, and I don’t dwell on things. It’s actually pretty easy when you step back and think about the kind of person who would go online make personal attacks like that. Once you have that mental image, you quickly realize you don’t give a flying fuck what that person has to say about anything.

https://www.autoweek.com/racing/nascar/a1872056/dale-earnhardt-dale-jr-both-opposed-confederate-flag/

In my city, they just keep paving over the old asphalt, so the manhole covers are like 6 inches deep in some places. Hitting one of those in my sedan is not pleasant.

I do!

Kubernetes is a nightmare and overkill for most things we need to run, and Docker Swarm is super easy to setup and maintain.

We only use it for one application, though. The app needs to scale horizontally and scale up and down with demand, so I put together a 6 node swarm cluster just for it. Works great, though the auto scaling required some helper scripting.

When I put the IMEI into OP’s tool, it said I had to go through TMobile to [bootloader] unlock it since it was a retail model.

TMobile said the phone “wasn’t in our system” and couldn’t provide either SIM or bootloader unlock codes.

but I can only find it t-mobile locked. I can carrier unlock it myself

Careful with that assumption. I bought a TMO-locked OP Nord N200 thinking I could do that but even after using it on my account for a year, they say “it’s not in our system” and it remains carrier-locked. Basically when it hit the secondhand market, it was removed from TMO’s system and they have no record of it and cannot carrier-unlock it (or that’s the story that was told to me by 3-4 different people within TMO).

but will I be able to access the boot loader

Depends if you can carrier-unlock it.

https://service.oneplus.com/us/search/search-detail?id=op588

Ban USA politics from this sub please

1080p buffered generously but it worked :) The sweet spot was having it transcode to 720p (yay hardware acceleration). I wasn’t sharing it with anyone at the time, so it was just me watching at work on one phone while using my second phone at home for internet.

Just about anything as long as you don’t need to serve it to hundreds of people simultaneously. Hell, I once hosted Jellyfin over a 3G hotpot and it managed.

Pretty much any web-based app will work fine. Streaming servers (Emby, Plex, Jellyfin, etc) work fine for a few simultaneous people as long as you’re not trying to push 4K or something. 1080p can work fine at 4 Mbps or less (transcoding is your friend here). Chat servers (Matrix, XMPP, etc) are also a good candidate.

I hosted everything I wanted with 30 Mbps upload before I got symmetric fiber.

Maybe I should flesh it out into an actual guide. The Nepenthes docs are “meh” at best and completely gloss over integrating it into your stack.

You’ll also need to give it corpus text to generate slop from. I used transcripts from 4 or 5 weird episodes of Voyager (let’s be honest: shit got weird on Voyager lol), mixed with some Jack Handy quotes and a few transcripts of Married…with Children episodes.

https://content.dubvee.org/ is where that bot traffic lands up if you want to see what I’m feeding them.

Thanks!

Mostly there’s three steps involved:

1. Setup Nepenthes to receive the traffic
2. Perform bot detection on inbound requests (I use a regex list and one is provided below)
3. Configure traffic rules in your load balancer / reverse proxy to send the detected bot traffic to Nepenthes instead of the actual backend for the service(s) you run.

Here’s a rough guide I commented a while back: https://dubvee.org/comment/5198738

Here’s the post link at lemmy.world which should have that comment visible: https://lemmy.world/post/40374746

You’ll have to resolve my comment link on your instance since my instance is set to private now, but in case that doesn’t work, here’s the text of it:

So, I set this up recently and agree with all of your points about the actual integration being glossed over.

I already had bot detection setup in my Nginx config, so adding Nepenthes was just changing the behavior of that. Previously, I had just returned either 404 or 444 to those requests but now it redirects them to Nepenthes.

Rather than trying to do rewrites and pretend the Nepenthes content is under my app’s URL namespace, I just do a redirect which the bot crawlers tend to follow just fine.

There’s several parts to this to keep my config sane. Each of those are in include files.

• An include file that looks at the user agent, compares it to a list of bot UA regexes, and sets a variable to either 0 or 1. By itself, that include file doesn’t do anything more than set that variable. This allows me to have it as a global config without having it apply to every virtual host.

• An include file that performs the action if a variable is set to true. This has to be included in the server portion of each virtual host where I want the bot traffic to go to Nepenthes. If this isn’t included in a virtual host’s server block, then bot traffic is allowed.

• A virtual host where the Nepenthes content is presented. I run a subdomain (content.mydomain.xyz). You could also do this as a path off of your protected domain, but this works for me and keeps my already complex config from getting any worse. Plus, it was easier to integrate into my existing bot config. Had I not already had that, I would have run it off of a path (and may go back and do that when I have time to mess with it again).

The map-bot-user-agents.conf is included in the http section of Nginx and applies to all virtual hosts. You can either include this in the main nginx.conf or at the top (above the server section) in your individual virtual host config file(s).

The deny-disallowed.conf is included individually in each virtual hosts’s server section. Even though the bot detection is global, if the virtual host’s server section does not include the action file, then nothing is done.

Files

# Map bot user agents
## Sets the $ua_disallowed variable to 0 or 1 depending on the user agent. Non-bot UAs are 0, bots are 1

map $http_user_agent $ua_disallowed {
    default 		0;
    "~PerplexityBot"	1;
    "~PetalBot"		1;
    "~applebot"		1;
    "~compatible; zot"	1;
    "~Meta"		1;
    "~SurdotlyBot"	1;
    "~zgrab"		1;
    "~OAI-SearchBot"	1;
    "~Protopage"	1;
    "~Google-Test"	1;
    "~BacklinksExtendedBot" 1;
    "~microsoft-for-startups" 1;
    "~CCBot"		1;
    "~ClaudeBot"	1;
    "~VelenPublicWebCrawler"	1;
    "~WellKnownBot"	1;
    #"~python-requests"	1;
    "~bitdiscovery"	1;
    "~bingbot"		1;
    "~SemrushBot" 	1;
    "~Bytespider" 	1;
    "~AhrefsBot" 	1;
    "~AwarioBot"	1;
#    "~Poduptime" 	1;
    "~GPTBot" 		1;
    "~DotBot"	 	1;
    "~ImagesiftBot"	1;
    "~Amazonbot"	1;
    "~GuzzleHttp" 	1;
    "~DataForSeoBot" 	1;
    "~StractBot"	1;
    "~Googlebot"	1;
    "~Barkrowler"	1;
    "~SeznamBot"	1;
    "~FriendlyCrawler"	1;
    "~facebookexternalhit" 1;
    "~*(?i)(80legs|360Spider|Aboundex|Abonti|Acunetix|^AIBOT|^Alexibot|Alligator|AllSubmitter|Apexoo|^asterias|^attach|^BackDoorBot|^BackStreet|^BackWeb|Badass|Bandit|Baid|Baiduspider|^BatchFTP|^Bigfoot|^Black.Hole|^BlackWidow|BlackWidow|^BlowFish|Blow|^BotALot|Buddy|^BuiltBotTough|
^Bullseye|^BunnySlippers|BBBike|^Cegbfeieh|^CheeseBot|^CherryPicker|^ChinaClaw|^Cogentbot|CPython|Collector|cognitiveseo|Copier|^CopyRightCheck|^cosmos|^Crescent|CSHttp|^Custo|^Demon|^Devil|^DISCo|^DIIbot|discobot|^DittoSpyder|Download.Demon|Download.Devil|Download.Wonder|^dragonfl
y|^Drip|^eCatch|^EasyDL|^ebingbong|^EirGrabber|^EmailCollector|^EmailSiphon|^EmailWolf|^EroCrawler|^Exabot|^Express|Extractor|^EyeNetIE|FHscan|^FHscan|^flunky|^Foobot|^FrontPage|GalaxyBot|^gotit|Grabber|^GrabNet|^Grafula|^Harvest|^HEADMasterSEO|^hloader|^HMView|^HTTrack|httrack|HTT
rack|htmlparser|^humanlinks|^IlseBot|Image.Stripper|Image.Sucker|imagefetch|^InfoNaviRobot|^InfoTekies|^Intelliseek|^InterGET|^Iria|^Jakarta|^JennyBot|^JetCar|JikeSpider|^JOC|^JustView|^Jyxobot|^Kenjin.Spider|^Keyword.Density|libwww|^larbin|LeechFTP|LeechGet|^LexiBot|^lftp|^libWeb|
^likse|^LinkextractorPro|^LinkScan|^LNSpiderguy|^LinkWalker|msnbot|MSIECrawler|MJ12bot|MegaIndex|^Magnet|^Mag-Net|^MarkWatch|Mass.Downloader|masscan|^Mata.Hari|^Memo|^MIIxpc|^NAMEPROTECT|^Navroad|^NearSite|^NetAnts|^Netcraft|^NetMechanic|^NetSpider|^NetZIP|^NextGenSearchBot|^NICErs
PRO|^niki-bot|^NimbleCrawler|^Nimbostratus-Bot|^Ninja|^Nmap|nmap|^NPbot|Offline.Explorer|Offline.Navigator|OpenLinkProfiler|^Octopus|^Openfind|^OutfoxBot|Pixray|probethenet|proximic|^PageGrabber|^pavuk|^pcBrowser|^Pockey|^ProPowerBot|^ProWebWalker|^psbot|^Pump|python-requests\/|^Qu
eryN.Metasearch|^RealDownload|Reaper|^Reaper|^Ripper|Ripper|Recorder|^ReGet|^RepoMonkey|^RMA|scanbot|SEOkicks-Robot|seoscanners|^Stripper|^Sucker|Siphon|Siteimprove|^SiteSnagger|SiteSucker|^SlySearch|^SmartDownload|^Snake|^Snapbot|^Snoopy|Sosospider|^sogou|spbot|^SpaceBison|^spanne
r|^SpankBot|Spinn4r|^Sqworm|Sqworm|Stripper|Sucker|^SuperBot|SuperHTTP|^SuperHTTP|^Surfbot|^suzuran|^Szukacz|^tAkeOut|^Teleport|^Telesoft|^TurnitinBot|^The.Intraformant|^TheNomad|^TightTwatBot|^Titan|^True_Robot|^turingos|^TurnitinBot|^URLy.Warning|^Vacuum|^VCI|VidibleScraper|^Void
EYE|^WebAuto|^WebBandit|^WebCopier|^WebEnhancer|^WebFetch|^Web.Image.Collector|^WebLeacher|^WebmasterWorldForumBot|WebPix|^WebReaper|^WebSauger|Website.eXtractor|^Webster|WebShag|^WebStripper|WebSucker|^WebWhacker|^WebZIP|Whack|Whacker|^Widow|Widow|WinHTTrack|^WISENutbot|WWWOFFLE|^
WWWOFFLE|^WWW-Collector-E|^Xaldon|^Xenu|^Zade|^Zeus|ZmEu|^Zyborg|SemrushBot|^WebFuck|^MJ12bot|^majestic12|^WallpapersHD)" 1;

}

# Deny disallowed user agents
if ($ua_disallowed) { 
    # This redirects them to the Nepenthes domain. So far, pretty much all the bot crawlers have been happy to accept the redirect and crawl the tarpit continuously 
	return 301 https://content.mydomain.xyz/;
}

I was blocking them but decided to shunt their traffic to Nepenthes instead. There’s usually 3-4 different bots thrashing around in there at any given time.

If you have the resources, I highly recommend it.