#jwz — Public Fediverse posts

It occurs to me that it might not be deliberately ignoring the directives in robots.txt, but instead simply be that they can't write correct code to parse robots.txt. That would be extremely on-brand for Apple software. Incompetence, Occam, etc.

Like my final-gen Ipod Touch that can't start playing music when you hit "play", for example, without doing a complicated dance and waiting 30 seconds.

#jwz has documented a ton of such "omg how did you even release this software" issues on his blog over the years. Reading them always seems to invoke the "I tell you the things I do so you don't have to experience them" vibe.

#incompetence #Apple #OnBrand

@hp

Also, the Soviet-inspired artwork that #jwz snuck in. ;)

This is #fun, #informative, maybe an example of some kind of #hacking #left which we should develop socially (in order to confront against an increasingly decadent #capitalism), and also maybe a good entry-point to learn about an interesting person and #history episodes...
https://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/google.html
#google #jwz #xscreensaver #x #screensaver #playstore #store #repos #surveillance #privacy #politics #culture

@dmoonfire

I sincerely hope you put this dishpit in his place.

Mmm, dishpit. Love me some metathesis.

cc: @sotolf, or was it @stoolf? XD

Heck, I'll just leave this here, courtesy of #jwz:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
# Coyprgiht � 2003 Jamie Zawinski <[email protected]>
#scrmable.pl (shortened (removed comments) to fit in a toot)
# https://www.jwz.org/blog/2003/09/scrmable/

require 5;
use diagnostics;
use strict;

my $porgnmae = $0; $porgnmae =~ s@.*/@@g;
my $vresoin = q{ $Revision: 1.4 $ }; $vresoin =~ s/^[^0-9]+([0-9.]+).*$/$1/;

sub scrmable {
  while (<>) {
    foreach (split (/(\w+)/)) {
      if (m/\w/) {
        my @w = split (//);
        my $A = shift @w;
        my $Z = pop @w;
        print $A;
        if (defined ($Z)) {
          my $i = $#w+1;
          while ($i--) {
            my $j = int rand ($i+1);
            @w[$i,$j] = @w[$j,$i];
          }
          foreach (@w) {
            print $_;
          }
          print $Z;
        }
      } else {
        print "$_";
      }
    }
  }
}

sub usgae {
  print STDERR "usage: $porgnmae < text > scrbameld-txet\n";
  exit 1;
}

sub mian {
  usgae if ($#ARGV != -1);
  scrmable();
}

mian;
exit 0;

Thanks for this @jwz

This is just about how I remember raving in the 90s in Germany.

https://youtu.be/dA6eaz8tFYA

#jwz #blade #NewOrder #rave #techno #PumpPanel

@darkuncle

Every web page with a comments section should have a "Herp Derp" button as implemented by @jwz on his blog.

#herp #derp #HerpDerp #comments #jwz #blog

@antiaall3s

#jwz would be right on board with that.

After all these years 'The secret history of the Mozilla logo' by JWZ is still a funny read.

https://www.jwz.org/blog/2016/10/they-live-and-the-secret-history-of-the-mozilla-logo/

#Mozilla #Firefox #JWZ #logo #art #TheyLive

28-year-old #Unix #ScreenSaver

This will blow the #Zoomers away 😁🫰🏼

https://loops.video/v/6zfXLL57Df

#XScreensaver #jwz

@tuban_muzuru

True, but this is a solvable problem without regexes, in any language.

"Now you have two problems." 😜

#regex #RE #jwz

@tamas

It sounds like a close relative of, if not an actual instance of, the CADT open-source development model.

https://www.jwz.org/blog/2003/02/the-cadt-model/

#jwz #CADT

@Catelli

@jwz wrote a piece about this; I agree with him that the "thread" - original message plus comments - needs to be controlled by the original message's author, so that abusers cannot use the "reach" of the original author to spread their B.S.

Worth a read.
https://www.jwz.org/blog/2023/08/mastodons-mastodonts/

#replies #comments #abuse #mastodon #jwz #thread #author

*snicker*

https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html

No comment. No comment.

#JWZ

(Disclaimer: I'm sharing this because it's funny, and an understandable weakness of the FOSS development model, not to poke fun at any one project)

Interesting historical insights into early history of Mozilla / Firefox from one of the people who was involved right there:

https://www.jwz.org/blog/2023/01/mozilla-orgs-25th-anniversary/

Check out the original flyer for the party to celebrate the release of the source code:

http://home.mcom.com/mozilla.org/1998-03-25/party/

#mozilla #netscape #jwz #firefox

You might not be on Mastodon yet, but your blog could get a torrent of traffic from Mastodon, or other Fediverse network if it’s shared there.

If your website is mentioned there, it might be the “victim” of an inadvertent denial of service attack, as hundreds or thousands of servers request the URL in the 60 seconds or so afterwards. That is precisely what JWZ blogged about last month when his site was taken down by Mastodon servers.

Every time I do a new blog post, within a second I have over a thousand simultaneous hits of that URL on my web server from unique IPs. Load goes over 100, and mariadb stops responding.

JWZ on Mastodon Stampede.

JWZ has over 8,000 followers. Every time he shares a post on Mastodon, the instances (servers) where those followers live will send a request to his blog to generate a preview. Actually, two requests will be sent:

• A request for the wp-json embed for the page.
• A request for the page that was shared.

Eventually, he blocked the Mastodon user agent. That stops previews of his website showing up on Mastodon posts, but resolves the problem for his website.

Yesterday morning, I decided to see what effect sharing a link on my Mastodon account would have on my server. My Mastodon account has 1.8K followers. A far cry from the number of followers JWZ has, but still enough to test my server.

I wanted to test several scenarios:

• Caching the post before sharing.
• Changing Apache configuration.
• Sharing without caching on my server.

My server is at Linode. I pay an average of $24/month to run this site and my photoblog is on it too where I share a daily photo + link on Mastodon. It’s not a heavy-duty server that can withstand a huge amount of traffic.

If you’d like to skip the details, my server coped fine with sharing a URL from here to Mastodon. The load average went up for about 20 seconds, topping out at the max for about 5 seconds before things calmed down. It was responsive the whole time. Install a full-page caching plugin like WP Super Cache, Jetpack Boost and WP Rest Cache and your site will probably be fine. The Jetpack Image Accelerator will also help serve your images, reducing the impact on your server when human visitors arrive.

The first test resulted in:

• 261 requests for the page embed.
• 359 requests for the page itself.
• 1 minute load average topped out at 1.34 for 5 seconds.

The page was cached by WP Super Cache, but I had set the garbage collection TTL to 60 seconds and I believe it expired halfway through the test, so it had to generate the cache again. Once I adjusted that, and set the TTL to 600 seconds, the second test performed better. The page remained cached throughout:

• 273 requests for the page embed.
• 289 requests for the page itself.
• 1 minute load average topped out at 0.71 for 5 seconds.

The main points of my Apache configuration:

• Keep alives are disabled.
• 5 start servers
• Minimum 10 spare servers

When I reduced the start and minimum spare servers to 1, the next test took longer to complete, and the load average rose to 1.24, even on a fully cached page. This was expected as the server didn’t have the spare capacity to deal with the sudden traffic.

After reverting the changes to Apache, I disabled caching on my blog and shared another URL. The load average only rose to 1.12 for a very short time. I was pleased with that. While caching does help, my server could cope with that traffic.

I suspected that there was one hit per Mastodon instance on my site. I checked my logs and was proved right. For all the accounts that follow me on mastodon.social, only one request was made. That does mean the onslaught of requests isn’t as bad as it might be. Instead of 1,800 requests for a page, there were far fewer. I did notice that a Friendica instance requested one of my test URLs several times.

Mastodon and other Fediverse servers will start requesting a preview within a second of you sharing your post on the network. It helps if your server is running some sort of caching.

If you have many Mastodon followers or if you’re worried about a DDoS from Mastodon, the following will help:

• Make sure Apache/Nginx has the spare capacity to grow quickly and respond to a sudden torrent of requests.
• Install a caching plugin like WP Super Cache and Jetpack Boost.
• Use “expert caching” in WP Super Cache which serves the cached page using mod_rewrite. That will mean your blog post is served almost as fast as requesting a text file from the server. No PHP is executed at all.
• Install WP Rest Cache as it will soon cache the embed page request.
• Install Jetpack and enable the Image Accelerator.

This problem has existed for a long time. Popular blogs had the same issue when they published new content and people following their blogs (through RSS feed readers, remember them?) hit the server looking for the new post. At least with Mastodon, you can load the post in a private browser window and cache it before sharing it. I want to write a WP Super Cache add-on plugin that allows the site owner to preload a new post as it’s published. That will ensure the new content is ready for sharing. I haven’t started work on that yet, so don’t ask when it’ll be done. Maybe someone else will beat me to it and claim all the credit!

#fediverse #jwz #mastodon #wordpress

https://odd.blog/2023/01/02/the-mastodon-onslaught-on-your-blog/

@alanz OK, so it turns out that it is probably Onyx who have fuxnored this one:

https://github.com/AntennaPod/AntennaPod/issues/6244#issuecomment-1356846312

I've dropped them a couple of lengthy notes on this and some related UI/UX churn which has become annoying.

@jwz has a few excellent commentaries on the value of GUIs, how much improvement is possible through changing them (little if any), and the importance of consistent and common interfaces, rather than domain-specific specialisation. See especially:

"Unity of Interface" (1998)

Short of being cross-platform (which deserves a document of its own) Mozilla's greatest strength is that it manages to provide a unified interface to a number of useful services and protocols.

It is more interesting to support a concept than to support a particular implementation of it.

https://www.jwz.org/doc/unity-of-interface.html

"Why I use Safari instead of Firefox"

The Firefox UI is a moving target. It is under constant "improvement", which means "change" which means every few months I'm forced to upgrade it and shit has moved around and I need to re-learn how to do a task that I was happily doing before. This does not often happen with Safari. Their UI has been remarkably stable for many, many years. ...

Maybe the Firefox team is right, and you can develop a better UI that way. Well, they haven't yet proved this, because Apple's UI is better.

Look, in the case of all other software, I believe strongly in "release early, release often". Hell, I damned near invented it. But I think history has proven that UI is different than software.

https://www.jwz.org/blog/2012/04/why-i-use-safari-instead-of-firefox/

@joeyh

#Onyx #Boox #UIUX #DontFuckWithTheInterface #jwz #Mozilla #Safari

Oh my, #jwz (of Mozilla fame) has opinions about #mastodon and the #fediverse

He compares two models: Federated Feed Reader, and Private Walled Gardens; and looks at how well the federated model works for these.

Spoiler: “Taking something like Mastodon, whose core concept is federation, and then not federating, or limiting federation, is kind of like buying an iPhone and not putting a SIM card in it.”

Go and read it.

https://www.jwz.org/blog/2022/11/mastodon-and-federation/

#Netscape #Mozilla #dmoz #JWZ

Found the 'ol jwc.org site again thanx to a 'custom URL shortcut' in Firefox Klar from F-Droid.
Check out the still beautiful site
https://jwz.org
#jwz #Facebook #rootkit #google #elisp #blog