I just saved 16GB on my root partition by emptying /var/log/messages.

Having a #Fediverse instance that gives me a notification when someone blocks me is always interesting.

I don't get blocked very often. I try to be respectful of others, and not rude. But, I got a block this morning.

I'd never interacted with the person who blocked me. I didn't follow him; he didn't follow me; I've never seen his posts.

I was curious why he would've blocked me, so I checked out his profile, and I saw some recent posts discussing the whole silliness of this proposed American TikTok ban. I think he blocked me because I made a joke this morning about it, and maybe he happened to see it in his Federated feed, or in a tag search.

But, if that's why he blocked me, he probably didn't get that I was being sarcastic, making a joke.

I'm not offended, or anything. Like I said, I wasn't following him. It's no real loss on my part. But, I do find it weird. Do people really #block others so easily? I rarely block other people. I really only block people who are bigoted, or trolls, or just generally hateful. I wouldn't block someone just because they said something I disagreed with, especially if it was someone I didn't even follow.

I find the whole thing odd.

We're so concerned about #China spying on us through our #TikTok videos, but nobody seems worried about #Russia spying on us through our #ICQ chats.

If you use GitHub with SSH, you may have seen a warning when doing a git fetch this morning.

@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
@    WARNING: REMOTE HOST IDENTIFICATION HAS CHANGED!     @
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
IT IS POSSIBLE THAT SOMEONE IS DOING SOMETHING NASTY!
Someone could be eavesdropping on you right now (man-in-the-middle attack)!
It is also possible that a host key has just been changed.
The fingerprint for the RSA key sent by the remote host is
SHA256:uNiVztksCsDhcc0u9e8BujQXVUpKZIDTMczCvj3tD2s.
Please contact your system administrator.

GitHub explained in a blog post that they replaced their RSA key.

But this part of their explanation really stands out to me:

At approximately 05:00 UTC on March 24, out of an abundance of caution, we replaced our RSA SSH host key used to secure Git operations for GitHub.com.

This week, we discovered that GitHub.com’s RSA SSH private key was briefly exposed in a public GitHub repository.

Replacing an exposed private key is not an "abundance of caution". It is the exact appropriate amount of caution for this sort of situation.

I really wish companies would stop using that phrase, as if they're being super extra careful, when what they're doing is the absolute bare minimum of what any reasonable person would do.

#GitHub #SSH #cryptography #RSA

I'm starting to learn Go. At work we're splitting out some parts of our architecture into a few microservices, and our Chief Architect decided we should write them in Go, instead of our usual PHP.

I've been enjoying learning it. It's been a long time since I've really tried to learn a completely new thing (as opposed to a new framework or whatever).

As a project to get myself into this, I've been thinking about building my own Fediverse server in go. Architecturally, I want it to be a lot like microblogpub, which I currently use. I actually want to be able to have a clear migration from one to the other.

Like microblogpub, my new project (which I'm tentatively calling gopub) will be a single user instance, intended to be easily hosted on your own computer, with a fairly simple sqlite database, and focused on broad ActivityPub and IndieWeb compatibility.

But I've got some ideas for a few features that I haven't seen elsewhere.

For example, I was thinking it might be cool to have alternate handles for a single user, to only follow certain things. E.g., if I'm [email protected], and somebody wants to follow me, but not see any boosts from others, instead of following [email protected], maybe they instead follow [email protected]. Or, if they only want to follow my posts that include a particular hashtag, they can follow [email protected].

Similarly, a single user with multiple handles would be nice. I think Friendica has this, but I'm considering including it in my project as well.

And one thing I really want to add is location check-in. Basically, the Fediverse equivalent of Foursquare. ActivityPub already has the vocabulary for this, but I haven't seen it implemented anywhere.

I'm still at the very, very early stages. Who knows if I'll ever get it in a usable state. And I'm working on it during my extremely limited free time. But I'm excited to start a new project.

#NewProject #Golang #Programming #ActivityPub