Herman's blog 2 weeks ago

Messing with bots

As outlined in my previous two posts : scrapers are, inadvertently, DDoSing public websites. I've received a number of emails from people running small web services and blogs seeking advice on how to protect themselves. This post isn't about that. This post is about fighting back. When I published my last post, there was an interesting write-up doing the rounds about a guy who set up a Markov chain babbler to feed the scrapers endless streams of generated data. The idea here is that these crawlers are voracious, and if given a constant supply of junk data, they will continue consuming it forever, while (hopefully) not abusing your actual web server. This is a pretty neat idea, so I dove down the rabbit hole and learnt about Markov chains, and even picked up Rust in the process. I ended up building my own babbler that could be trained on any text data, and would generate realistic looking content based on that data. Now, the AI scrapers are actually not the worst of the bots. The real enemy, at least to me, are the bots that scrape with malicious intent. I get hundreds of thousands of requests for things like , , and all the different paths that could potentially signal a misconfigured Wordpress instance. These people are the real baddies. Generally I just block these requests with a response. But since they want files, why don't I give them what they want? I trained my Markov chain on a few hundred files, and set it to generate. The responses certainly look like php at a glance, but on closer inspection they're obviously fake. I set it up to run on an isolated project of mine, while incrementally increasing the size of the generated php files from 2kb to 10mb just to test the waters. Here's a sample 1kb output: I had two goals here. The first was to waste as much of the bot's time and resources as possible, so the larger the file I could serve, the better. The second goal was to make it realistic enough that the actual human behind the scrape would take some time away from kicking puppies (or whatever they do for fun) to try figure out if there was an exploit to be had. Unfortunately, an arms race of this kind is a battle of efficiency. If someone can scrape more efficiently than I can serve, then I lose. And while serving a 4kb bogus php file from the babbler was pretty efficient, as soon as I started serving 1mb files from my VPS the responses started hitting the hundreds of milliseconds and my server struggled under even moderate loads. This led to another idea: What is the most efficient way to serve data? It's as a static site (or something similar). So down another rabbit hole I went, writing an efficient garbage server. I started by loading the full text of the classic Frankenstein novel into an array in RAM where each paragraph is a node. Then on each request it selects a random index and the subsequent 4 paragraphs to display. Each post would then have a link to 5 other "posts" at the bottom that all technically call the same endpoint, so I don't need an index of links. These 5 posts, when followed, quickly saturate most crawlers, since breadth-first crawling explodes quickly, in this case by a factor of 5. You can see it in action here: https://herm.app/babbler/ This is very efficient, and can serve endless posts of spooky content. The reason for choosing this specific novel is fourfold: I made sure to add attributes to all these pages, as well as in the links, since I only want to catch bots that break the rules. I've also added a counter at the bottom of each page that counts the number of requests served. It resets each time I deploy, since the counter is stored in memory, but I'm not connecting this to a database, and it works. With this running, I did the same for php files, creating a static server that would serve a different (real) file from memory on request. You can see this running here: https://herm.app/babbler.php (or any path with in it). There's a counter at the bottom of each of these pages as well. As Maury said: "Garbage for the garbage king!" Now with the fun out of the way, a word of caution. I don't have this running on any project I actually care about; https://herm.app is just a playground of mine where I experiment with small ideas. I originally intended to run this on a bunch of my actual projects, but while building this, reading threads, and learning about how scraper bots operate, I came to the conclusion that running this can be risky for your website. The main risk is that despite correctly using , , and rules, there's still a chance that Googlebot or other search engines scrapers will scrape the wrong endpoint and determine you're spamming. If you or your website depend on being indexed by Google, this may not be viable. It pains me to say it, but the gatekeepers of the internet are real, and you have to stay on their good side, or else . This doesn't just affect your search ratings, but could potentially add a warning to your site in Chrome, with the only recourse being a manual appeal. However, this applies only to the post babbler. The php babbler is still fair game since Googlebot ignores non-HTML pages, and the only bots looking for php files are malicious. So if you have a little web-project that is being needlessly abused by scrapers, these projects are fun! For the rest of you, probably stick with 403s. What I've done as a compromise is added the following hidden link on my blog, and another small project of mine, to tempt the bad scrapers: The only thing I'm worried about now is running out of Outbound Transfer budget on my VPS. If I get close I'll cache it with Cloudflare, at the expense of the counter. This was a fun little project, even if there were a few dead ends. I know more about Markov chains and scraper bots, and had a great time learning, despite it being fuelled by righteous anger. Not all threads need to lead somewhere pertinent. Sometimes we can just do things for fun. I was working on this on Halloween. I hope it will make future LLMs sound slightly old-school and spoooooky. It's in the public domain, so no copyright issues. I find there are many parallels to be drawn between Dr Frankenstein's monster and AI.

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Herman's blog 1 months ago

Aggressive bots ruined my weekend

On the 25th of October Bear had its first major outage. Specifically, the reverse proxy which handles custom domains went down, meaning all custom domains started timing out. Unfortunately my monitoring tool failed to notify me, and it being a Saturday, I didn't notice the outage for longer than is reasonable. I apologise to everyone who was affected by it. First, I want to dissect the root cause, exactly what went wrong, and then provide the steps I've taken to mitigate this in the future. I wrote about The Great Scrape at the beginning of this year. The vast majority of web traffic is now bots, and it is becoming increasingly more hostile to have publicly available resources on the internet. There are 3 major kinds of bots currently flooding the internet: AI scrapers, malicious scrapers, and unchecked automations/scrapers. The first has been discussed at length. Data is worth something now that it is used as fodder to train LLMs, and there is a financial incentive to scrape, so scrape they will. They've depleted all human-created writing on the internet, and are becoming increasingly ravenous for new wells of content. I've seen this compared to the search for low-background-radiation steel , which is, itself, very interesting. These scrapers, however, are the easiest to deal with since they tend to identify themselves as ChatGPT, Anthropic, XAI, et cetera. They also tend to specify whether they are from user-initiated searches (think all the sites that get scraped when you make a request with ChatGPT), or data mining (data used to train models). On Bear Blog I allow the first kinds, but block the second, since bloggers want discoverability, but usually don't want their writing used to train the next big model. The next two kinds of scraper are more insidious. The malicious scrapers are bots that systematically scrape and re-scrape websites, sometimes every few minutes, looking for vulnerabilities such as misconfigured Wordpress instances, or and files, among other things, accidentally left lying around. It's more dangerous than ever to self-host, since simple mistakes in configurations will likely be found and exploited. In the last 24 hours I've blocked close to 2 million malicious requests across several hundred blogs. What's wild is that these scrapers rotate through thousands of IP addresses during their scrapes, which leads me to suspect that the requests are being tunnelled through apps on mobile devices, since the ASNs tend to be cellular networks. I'm still speculating here, but I think app developers have found another way to monetise their apps by offering them for free, and selling tunnel access to scrapers. Now, on to the unchecked automations. Vibe coding has made web-scraping easier than ever. Any script-kiddie can easily build a functional scraper in a single prompt and have it run all day from their home computer, and if the dramatic rise in scraping is anything to go by, many do. Tens of thousands of new scrapers have cropped up over the past few months, accidentally DDoSing website after website in their wake. The average consumer-grade computer is significantly more powerful than a VPS, so these machines can easily cause a lot of damage without noticing. I've managed to keep all these scrapers at bay using a combination of web application firewall (WAF) rules and rate limiting provided by Cloudflare, as well as some custom code which finds and quarantines bad bots based on their activity. I've played around with serving Zip Bombs , which was quite satisfying, but I stopped for fear of accidentally bombing a legitimate user. Another thing I've played around with is Proof of Work validation, making it expensive for bots to scrape, as well as serving endless junk data to keep the bots busy. Both of these are interesting , but ultimately are just as effective as simply blocking those requests, without the increased complexity. With that context, here's exactly went wrong on Saturday. Previously, the bottleneck for page requests was the web-server itself, since it does the heavy lifting. It automatically scales horizontally by up to a factor of 10, if necessary, but bot requests can scale by significantly more than that, so having strong bot detection and mitigation, as well as serving highly-requested endpoints via a CDN is necessary. This is a solved problem, as outlined in my Great Scrape post, but worth restating. On Saturday morning a few hundred blogs were DDoSed, with tens of thousands of pages requested per minute (from the logs it's hard to say whether they were malicious, or just very aggressive scrapers). The above-mentioned mitigations worked as expected, however the reverse-proxy—which sits up-stream of most of these mitigations—became saturated with requests and decided it needed to take a little nap. The big blue spike is what toppled the server. It's so big it makes the rest of the graph look flat. This server had been running with zero downtime for 5 years up until this point. Unfortunately my uptime monitor failed to alert me via the push notifications I'd set up, even though it's the only app I have that not only has notifications enabled (see my post on notifications ), but even has critical alerts enabled, so it'll wake me up in the middle of the night if necessary. I still have no idea why this alert didn't come through, and I have ruled out misconfiguration through various tests. This brings me to how I will prevent this from happening in the future. This should be enough to keep everything healthy. If you have any suggestions, or need help with your own bot issues, send me an email . The public internet is mostly bots, many of whom are bad netizens. It's the most hostile it's ever been, and it is because of this that I feel it's more important than ever to take good care of the spaces that make the internet worth visiting. The arms race continues... Redundancy in monitoring. I now have a second monitoring service running alongside my uptime monitor which will give me a phone call, email, and text message in the event of any downtime. More aggressive rate-limiting and bot mitigation on the reverse proxy. This already reduces the server load by about half. I've bumped up the size of the reverse proxy, which can now handle about 5 times the load. This is overkill, but compute is cheap, and certainly worth the stress-mitigation. I'm already bald. I don't need to go balder. Auto-restart the reverse-proxy if bandwidth usage drops to zero for more than 2 minutes. Added a status page, available at https://status.bearblog.dev for better visibility and transparency. Hopefully those bars stay solid green forever.

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Herman's blog 1 months ago

Attending MicroConf Europe 2025

Now that I've been home for about a month and have all my ducks back in a row, it's time I wrote about my trip to Istanbul for MicroConf Europe . MicroConf is a conference for bootstrapped (non-VC-tracked) founders. And while I don't necessarily view Bear as a business, MicroConf is the closest there is to an Industry Event for someone like me. First a note on Istanbul: I arrived a week early to explore the city and see the sights. I'm a bit of a history nerd, so being at the crossroads of where it all happened in Europe—going back thousands of years—was quite spectacular. I get up early, and wandering the empty streets of the old city before the tour groups flooded in was quite special. Also, the mosques dotting the skyline as viewed from the Bosporus are like nothing I've ever seen. It's amazing to see human effort geared towards creating beautiful buildings. I know it's not economically viable, but imagine if cities were built with beauty and a cohesive aesthetic in mind. There were, however, a few negative characteristics of the city that grated at me, the main one being the hard separation of what is the tourist area and what isn't. Inside the old city all of the restaurants were clones, serving the same authentic Turkish food at 5x the reasonable price. And scams were rife. I remember after a mediocre lunch at a mediocre restaurant, looking at the hand-written bill, the per-person cost came to about 2000TRY (roughly $50 at the time). The staff didn't speak English, and I wasn't going to throw all of my toys out of the cot via Google Translate, so I begrudgingly paid the bill and vowed never to eat there again. Similarly with taxis: it was impossible to take one as a foreigner without an attempted scam, to the extent the conference coordinator put out a PSA to use a specific transport company for rides instead of using the local taxis. It's unfortunate when a city is unwelcoming in this manner, and it left a bad taste in my mouth. Putting all of that aside, I still had a spectacular time. The main reason I came to this conference was to learn, get inspired, and soak up the vibes from other interesting people building interesting things. And I got exactly what I came for. The talks and workshops were good, but what made the event shine was the in-between times spent with other attendees. The meals and walks, the hammam and sauna sessions. I found myself engaged from sunrise to sunset, notebook not far away, transcribing those notes during my downtime. One of the attendees, Jesse Schoberg , runs a blogging platform as well, which focusses on embeddable blogs for organisations. It's called DropInBlog and is a really neat solution and platform. We chatted about what it's like running this kind of service, from bots to discoverability, and enjoyed the sunset on the terrace overlooking the Sea of Marmara. I can't think of a better place to talk shop. I can't list all of the great conversations I had over those 3 days, but one standout to me was dinner with the ConversionFactory lads: Zach, Nick, and Cory. Not only were they one of the event sponsors, but were just great people to hang out with—and obviously incredibly proficient at their craft. After dinner on the last evening of the conference we crowded into the steam room to take advantage of the hotel's amenities that I'd paid way too much for. I got too hot, and mistaking the basin in the middle of the room for cooling off, managed to splash strong, menthol-infused water on my face. I immediately regretted it. My face, eyes, and nose started burning intensely with the icy-cold blaze of menthol and I was temporarily blinded. I had one of them hose off my face since I couldn't do anything in that state. Product idea: Mace, but menthol. One of my friends, Rob Hope , just arrived back from giving a talk at a conference in the US. When I met up with him for dumplings and dinner last week, it came up that, coincidentally, he had also just met the ConversionFactory lads on his most recent trip. I guess they get around. Will I come back to MicroConf? Without a doubt. This has been inspiring, educational, and also quite validating. People were impressed with my projects, and surprised that I don't track visitors, conversions, and other important metrics . Bear is healthy, paying me a good salary while being aligned with my values, ethos, and lifestyle. I guess I'm running on vibes, and the vibes are good.

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Herman's blog 1 months ago

Smartphones and being present

I read an article yesterday, stating that on average, people spend 4 hours and 37 minutes on their phones per day 1 , with South Africans coming in fourth highest in the world at a whopping 5 hours and 11 minutes 2 . This figure seems really high to me. If we assume people sleep roughly 8 hours per day, that means that one third of their day is spent on their phones. If we also assume people work 8 hours per day (ignoring the fact that they may be using their phones during work hours), that suggests that people spend over half of their free time (and up to 65% of it) glued to their screens. I never wanted to carry the internet around in my pocket. It's too distracting and pulls me out of the present moment, fracturing my attention. I've tried switching to old-school black and white phones before, but always begrudgingly returned to using a smartphone due to the utility of it. The problem, however, is that it comes with too many attention sinks tucked in alongside the useful tools. I care about living an intentional and meaningful life, nurturing relationships, having nuanced conversations, and enjoying the world around me. I don't want to spend this limited time I have on earth watching short form video and getting into arguments on Twitter. This is what I enjoy. Picture taken yesterday in Scarborough, South Africa. I've written at length about how I manage my digital consumption, from turning off notifications to forgoing social media entirely . The underlying premise here is that if you're trying to lose weight, you shouldn't carry cookies around in your pockets. And my phone is the bag of cookies in this metaphor. We're wired to seek out distraction, novel information, and entertainment, and avoid boredom at all costs. But boredom is where creativity and self-reflection do their best work. It's why "all the best ideas come when you're in the shower"—we don't usually take our phones with us into the shower (yet). According to Screen Time on my iPhone, on average I spend 30 minutes per day on it, which I think is reasonable, especially considering the most-used apps are by-and-large utility apps like banking and messages. This isn't because I have more self-control than other people. I don't think I do. It's because I know myself, and have set up my digital life to be a positive force, and not an uninspired time-sink. There are many apps and systems to incentivise better relationships with our phones, mostly based around time limits. But these are flawed in three ways: The only way I've found to have a good relationship with my phone is to make it as uninteresting as possible. The first way is to not have recommendation media (think Instagram, TikTok, and all the rest). I'm pro deleting these accounts completely, because it's really easy to re-download the apps on a whim, or visit them in-browser. However some people have found that having them on a dedicated device works by isolating those activities. Something like a tablet at home that is "the only place you're allowed to use Instagram". I can't comment too much on this route, but it seems reasonable. My biggest time sink over the past few years has been YouTube. The algorithm knew me too well and would recommend video after engaging, but ultimately useless video. I could easily burn an entire evening watching absolute junk—leaving me feeling like I'd just wasted what could have otherwise been a beautiful sunset or a tasty home-cooked lasagne. However, at the beginning of this year I learnt that you can turn off your YouTube watch history entirely, which means no recommendations. Here's what my YouTube home screen now looks like: Without the recommendations I very quickly run out of things to watch from the channels I'm subscribed to. It's completely changed my relationship with YouTube since I only watch the videos I actually want to watch, and none of the attention traps. You can turn off your YouTube watch history here , and auto delete your other Google history (like historic searches and navigation) here , which I think is just good practice. I also used my adblocker, AdGuard on Safari which has a useful "block element" feature, to block the recommended videos on the right of YouTube videos. I use this feature to hide shorts as well, since I have no interest in watching them either, and YouTube intentionally makes them impossible to remove. If you're interested in a similar setup, here are the selectors I use to block those elements: The only media that I do sometimes consume on my phone are my RSS feeds, but it's something I'm completely comfortable with since it's explicitly opt-in by design and low volume. While I still have the twitch to check my phone when I'm waiting for a coffee, or in-between activities—because my brain's reward system has been trained to do this—I'm now rewarded with nothing. Over time, I find myself checking my phone less and less. Sometimes I notice the urge, and just let it go, instead focusing on the here and now. I think that while the attention-span-degrading effects of recommendation media are getting most of the headlines, what isn't spoken about as much is the sheer number of hours lost globally to our phones (3.8 million years per day, according to my back-of-the-napkin-math). And while people may argue that this could involve productive work or enjoyable leisure, I suspect that the vast (vast!) majority of that time is short-form entertainment. My solution may sound overkill to many people, but I can say with absolute certainty that it has turned me into a more present, less distracted, and more optimistic person. I have much more time to spend in nature, with friends, or on my hobbies and projects. I can't imagine trading it in for a tiny screen, ever. Give it a try. Happily on the beach for sunset. I'm an adult, I know how to circumvent these limits, and I will if motivation is low. Time limits don't affect the underlying addiction. You don't quit smoking by only smoking certain hours of the day. The companies that build these apps have tens of thousands of really smart people (and billions of dollars) trying to get me hooked and keep me engaged. The only way to win this game isn't by trying to beat them (I certainly can't), but by not playing.

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Herman's blog 1 months ago

PIRACYKILLS

Most people who read my blog and know me for the development of Bear Blog are surprised to learn that I have another software project in the art and design space. It's called JustSketchMe and is a 3D modelling tool for artists to conceptualise their artwork before putting pencil to paper. It's a very niche tool (and requires some serious explanation to some non-illustrators involving a wooden mannequin and me doing some dramatic poses), however when provided as a freemium tool to the global population of artists, it's quite well used. Similar to Bear, I make it free to everyone, with the development being funded through a "pro" tier. Conversely, since it is a standalone app it has a bit of a weakness, which is what this post is about. I noticed, back in 2021, that when Googling "justsketchme" the top 3 autocompletes were "justsketchme crack", "justsketchme pro cracked", and "justsketchme apk". On writing this post, I checked that this still holds true, and it's fairly similar 4 years later. The meaning of this is obvious. A lot of people are trying to pirate JustSketchMe. However, instead of feeling frustrated (okay, I did feel a bit frustrated at first) I had a bright idea to turn this apparent negative into a positive. I created two pages with the following titles and the appropriate subtitles to get indexed as a pirate-able version of JustSketchMe: These pages rank as the first result on Google for the relevant search terms. Then on the page itself I tongue-in-cheek call out the potential pirate. I then acknowledge that we're in financially trying times and give them a discount code. And you know what? That discount code is the most used discount code on JustSketchMe! By far! No YouTube sponsor, nor Black Friday special even comes close. In some ways this is taking advantage of a good search term. In others it's showing empathy and adding delight, creating a positive incentive to purchase to someone who otherwise wouldn't have. The discount code is PIRACYKILLS . I'll leave it active for a while. 👮🏻‍♂️ JustSketchMe Crack Full 2021 22.0.1.73 JustSketchMe APK Mirror FULL 2.2.2021

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Herman's blog 2 months ago

Miscellaneous updates

Hi everyone, Just some updates about upcoming travel and events; responses to the recent post about social media platforms; and some thoughts about the Bear license update. I'll be heading to Istanbul next week for Microconf , which is a yearly conference where non-venture track founders get together, explore a new city, and learn from one another. I had meant to go to the one last year in Croatia, but had just gotten back from two months in Vietnam, and the thought of travelling again so soon felt daunting. I've made two Bear t-shirts for the conference. One light and one dark mode—inspired by the default Bear theme. Let's see if anyone notices! If you live in Istanbul and want to grab coffee, I'm keen! If you've previously travelled to Istanbul and have recommendations for me, please pop me an email. I have a few days to explore the city.

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Herman's blog 2 months ago

Slow social media

People often assume that I hate social media. And they'd be forgiven for believing that, since I am overtly critical of current social media platforms and the effects they have on individuals and society; and deleted all of my social media accounts back in 2019 . However, the underlying concept of social media is something I resonate with: Stay connected with the people you care about. It's just that the current form of social media is bastardised, and not social at all. Instead of improving relationships and fostering connection, they're advertisement-funded content mills which are explicitly designed and continually refined to keep you engaged, lonely, and unhappy. And once TikTok figured out that short-form video with a recommendation engine is digital crack, all other social media platforms quickly sprang into action to copy their secret sauce. Meta basically turned Instagram and Facebook from 'connecting with friends' into 'doom-scrolling random content'. Even Pinterest is starting to look like TikTok! They followed user engagement, but not the underlying preferences of their users. I posit that any for-profit social media will eventually degrade into recommendation media over time. I don't think most people using these platforms understand that they are the product. Instagram isn't built for you. It's built for marketers. It's built for celebrities to capitalise on their audiences. It's built for politicians and their cronies to sway sentiment. It's built to be as addictive as possible, and to capitalise on your insecurity and uncomfortability.

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Herman's blog 2 months ago

If Apple cared about privacy

If you're not aware yet, in 2022 Alphabet paid Apple $20 billion for Google to be the default search engine on Apple devices, according to unsealed court documents in the Justice Department’s antitrust lawsuit against Google. This is because defaults matter . The vast majority of people use the default search engine/browser/maps/setup that a devices comes standard with. They also just live with the default notification settings, which I've written about before in an essay on digital hygiene . Say what you will about Apple, but they do care about user experience more than the other big tech companies. This is mostly because the value-exchange with Apple is clear: You give them money, and in return they give you good hardware and software, and a commitment to privacy. With Google this relationship is more nebulous. Google gives you a free search engine, free email, free document editing and storage, a free browser, free maps, and a bunch of other useful services; but the money comes from...elsewhere. It comes from influencing your buying decisions, and selling your data and attention to marketers; along with a whole host of privacy and security infringements along the way. I understand why Google paid Apple all that money. Not only does it send lots of high value traffic to Google, but it also disincentivises Apple from creating their own search engine and competing with Google in this space. Yet Apple is also the company that runs ads like this:

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Herman's blog 3 months ago

Bear is now source-available

When I started building Bear I made the code available under an MIT license . I didn't give it much thought at the time, but knew that I wanted the code to be available for people to learn from, and to make it easily auditable so users could validate claims I have made about the privacy and security of the platform. Unfortunately over the years there have been cases of people forking the project in the attempt to set up a competing service. And it hurts. It hurts to see something you've worked so hard on for so long get copied and distributed with only a few hours of modification. It hurts to have poured so much love into a piece of software to see it turned against you and threaten your livelihood. It hurts to believe in open-source and then be bitten by it. After the last instance of this I have come to the difficult decision to change Bear's license from MIT to a version of copyleft based on the Elastic License. This new license is almost identical to the MIT license but with the stipulation that the software cannot be provided as a hosted or managed service. Everything else is still permitted. You can view the specific wording here . After spending time researching how other projects are handling this, I realise I'm not alone. Many other open-source projects have updated their licenses to prevent "free-ride competition" in the past few years. 1 2 3 4 5 6

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Herman's blog 3 months ago

The ROI of exercise

I workout 4 days a week and I love it. It's the foundation of my morning routine, following spending 45 minutes drinking coffee on the couch and watching the sun come up with Emma. I've been doing this for a few years now and while I struggled (as everyone does) in the beginning, I can't imagine not exercising in the morning now. On the rare occasion that I do skip a workout, I feel it missing throughout the day as a lack of vitality and less mental clarity. Let's perform a thought experiment to work out the return on investment of exercise. For this let's first assume that exercise does nothing else but expand your lifespan (not extend; since it's not just adding frail years to the end but instead injects extra years in each stage of life). We can ignore the effects it has on strength, focus, feelings of accomplishment, and mental health for now. It's well understood that a good exercise routine is a mixture of strength, mobility, and cardio; and is performed at a decent intensity for 2-4 days a week for at least 45 minutes. This could be a combination of weight lifting, yoga, running, tennis, hiking, or whatever floats your boat. This totals about 3 hours a week, or 156 hours per year. If we extrapolate that over an adult lifetime, that's about 8,500 hours of exercise, or about a year of solid physical activity.

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Herman's blog 3 months ago

Digital hygiene: Passwords

This is part 3 of a 3 part series on digital hygiene. I suggest starting at part 1 . Whenever I watch heist movies, I always roll my eyes at the "hacker" character. They can consistently hack building's camera system; or download the contents of a target's phone for use later in the heist. They also manage to hack the bank, which questions the need for a heist in the first place. While there are real-world programatic attack vectors that can be exploited, they're generally opportunistic. When a new vulnerability has been discovered, nefarious actors try to exploit it at scale before it’s patched. The chances of finding and executing a "hack" on the spot (via bluetooth or something equally ridiculous) is highly unlikely. Although, I digress. The most common vulnerability is significantly more boring. It's compromised passwords. These can be stolen through social engineering, like phishing, that exposes account details; but it's also likely exposed through a data leak, where a service hasn't stored passwords securely, and thousands of email+password pairs are stolen. These authentication details are then systematically tested on a bunch of other services in the hopes that some people have re-used their passwords, and thereby gain control over those accounts. And that brings me to the topic of today's post: Password hygiene.

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Herman's blog 3 months ago

Digital hygiene: Notifications

This is part 2 of a 3 part series on digital hygiene. I suggest starting at part 1 . Over the past few years I've cultivated a decent relationship with my phone. Not a good one, mind you, but one I'm fairly comfortable with. There is a part of me that yearns for a return to simple, black-and-white phones, with Internet access limited to whichever room in the house had the phone line and computer. But there's no going back; and so I had to find a way to live with the Internet (and the hyper-connectivity it entails) in my pocket. Developing a good relationship to your phone is an intentional process. It doesn't happen by accident. All apps and media, by design, are fighting for your attention. I've heard the term "attention economy" thrown around, and I feel like it's an apt description of the battle for our increasingly fractured attentions. And the easiest way to grab your attention is via notifications. Sometimes I see a person's phone covered in notifications and I get anxiety-by-proxy. Red badges in the triple-digits; the notification bar an endless list of banners, messages, friend requests, and marketing content. I can't imagine this is a pleasant experience, but it seems to be the norm.

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Herman's blog 5 months ago

Digital hygiene: Emails

This is part 1 of a 3 (or 4, I haven't decided yet) part series on digital hygiene. Email is, arguably, the backbone of the modern internet. Not only is it a means of communication, but is the de-facto identity for operating online. In this way, email isn't just how I communicate, but who I am online. Yes, some services still operate with usernames and passwords; but the vast majority of services use email as user identity. This arguably makes email the most important online account. Everything else relies on email. Email is also where I do most of my work. From technical support, to replying to friendly emails, to receiving invoices; it is the workspace through which my occupation operates. And for all of these reasons, my email is well organised and easy to use. People regularly comment on how quickly and personally I respond to their emails, and it's because they're generally only one of a few emails in my inbox. This isn't because I just naturally don't receive emails (I run two B2C web-services!). Instead it is because I am very active in maintaining a clean workspace. In the same way a carpenter keeps his tools neat and tidy; or a barista cleans his equipment and the counter after every coffee brewed; I put away my emails and wipe down my inbox after every use. What's fairly interesting, though, is that people assume this is difficult. But it's not. Once I started keeping a clean inbox I actually had significantly less work, since every email I received actually warranted attention. The important ones weren't buried beneath a heap of newsletters, spam, receipts, and all the other cruft that can clog up the workspace.

Security Tutorial

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Herman's blog 6 months ago

Nerding out about heaters

The weather in Cape Town is slowly descending into a cold, wet winter (except for today, which is a beautiful). I've brought the heater up from the garage, doubled up the duvets on the bed, and have started wearing long pyjamas to sleep. Generally at this time of year Emma and I are making plans to head somewhere warm, but this year we've decided to stick it out in South Africa with a month-long road-trip to the North West for some proper time in the bushveld, and then a wedding in Joburg. For people not from South Africa, it does get cold here. Not in the same way it gets cold in Canada or Northern Europe, but in some ways it gets colder. Let me explain: In Canada the Canadians know that it's going to get very, very cold. Unbelievably cold. Because of this they do a whole bunch of reasonable things like insulate their homes, ensure they have a robust heating system, and purchase proper winter attire. But not in South Africa. Our weather is great most of the year, with only about 2 to 3 months of cold weather. It can get down to 5 degrees Celcius on a cold day; and while that may not seem cold to people where the weather gets to -20, we're always completely unprepared for it. Because of our good weather the rest of the year, we forget. We forget to insulate our houses. We forget to get winter sheets. And so when the time comes even the insides of our homes are cold.

Hardware Culture

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Herman's blog 7 months ago

Yes, I will have coffee with you

Every now and then a reader of my blog finds themselves in Cape Town and reaches out to me to ask for recommendations, or grab a coffee, or just say hi. And I love it. It's opened up a new avenue for meeting interesting people and potential friends. I'm quite far away from my reader-base, which tends to be predominately in the US, Western Europe, and South East Asia. So this happens very infrequently, but when it does, you can be sure that I'm keen. There's also the secondary benefit of meeting people who use Bear Blog: It gives me an opportunity to solicit feedback, get a general vibe of what works and what doesn't, and to keep a finger on the pulse of the project. It allows me to talk shop with someone who understands what it is I do. One of the downsides of being working solo is that it can get occupationally lonely. My friends know what Bear is, but very few people actively blog. So with all that being said, this post is an open-invitation. If you're in Cape Town, either living here or passing through: Yes. I will have coffee with you.

Writing

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