Not Equal

It took me way too long to figure out why {"PrivateKey": "abcde"} and {"PrivateKey", "abcde"} aren’t equal (hint: the latter one is set, not dictionary and their string representations differ with only one character).

Netia CGNAT

Today I discovered that my ISP, Netia, switched my dynamic public IPv4 address to CGNAT. They did it a week ago or so without any prior notification and today was the first time since then that I tried to connect to the Wireguard server on my router.

Good thing I have Tailscale account and Tailscale doesn’t give a damn about CGNAT or firewall rules which ISP might implement. I like Wireguard more though, because it is simpler, fully self-hosted (sidenote: I’m aware about Headscale) and has nicer logo.

I wish more operators in Poland finally implemented IPv6 and be done with this IPv4 nonsense.

Neovim 0.11 Translations

Neovim 0.11 disabled building translations by default which means that they’re no longer available in published artifacts as well. This caught me by a surprise when I tried to update my neovim-mg DEB package which I build for myself. To me this is accessibility issue for non-English speakers which I resolved by switching to manual building of Neovim:

make \
    CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release \
    CMAKE_EXTRA_FLAGS='-DENABLE_TRANSLATIONS=ON'

Neovim team says that building translations was too time-consuming, but to be honest, I didn’t notice a big slowdown. Maybe it’s different when you build it many times a day on CI.

Fuck AI Scrapers

Today I’m reading way too many posts that people are blocking whole Alibaba Cloud IP ranges (for reference: 47.80.0.0/13, 47.74.0.0/15, 47.76.0.0/14) and I’m thinking: pfff, I already did it a year ago or something. I first wrote about blocking bots in 2020 and situation got worse since then. Scrapers don’t care about robots.txt, they fake user agents, attack from different IPs and generally do anything they can to not be rate limited.

There’s a new nuclear weapon for us, the small web enthusiasts: Anubis which requires browser to do a proof of work. Maybe I’ll test it on the weekend, it looks promising.

It’s not funny though. My thoughts are with Drew, domi, Mikko and many other people who, like me, host bigger or smaller sites and struggle with AI scrapers bullshit. Fuck these scrapers.

Here’s iptables configuration for Alibaba:

-4 -A INPUT -s 47.74.0.0/15 -j DROP
-4 -A INPUT -s 47.76.0.0/14 -j DROP
-4 -A INPUT -s 47.80.0.0/13 -j DROP