Did you know 8.8.8.8 has a TXT Record to xkcd?

I don't use Google/Facebook for privacy reasons (and their sub-services etc). Haven't used them for ages but noticed that google still loads a lot of domains like analytics etc. This goes for facebook as well.

I now blocked a lot of google/facebook domains through my hosts file.

It's funny to see the amount of DNS requests to those fb/google connected domains nearly go to zero and also the fact that I literally can't load google/facebook anymore!

Thanks Google...

Holy fuck, this is starting to work!

Problem: I am highly anti google/facebook/few others and I'd rather null route those DNS requests.
The problem is that the pihole only can blacklist domains or wildcard domains but not words. So if Google would come up with a new name for some of their domains, I'd be fucked because I can't filter out the word Google through the pihole.

Today I fucking found the solution (still a work in progress but a PoC is nearly working):
Compiled a program which can monitor DNS queries/requests and logs them to a file.
Have a php (yes I write most of my cli tools in php) script tailing the log file and gathering the requested domains from it.
Then I can see if the domain contains the substring which I don't like (google as word for example) and echo it to the end of my hosts file with 0.0.0.0 in front of it if that's the case.

Holy fuck this seems to be working! 😍

I get a call: "Hey the site is down. Fix it!"
Worked on my workstation, not on my phone => DNS issue.

Local cache: "All OK"
ISP's DNS: "No record"
Google DNS: "Server error"
MXToolbox: "All OK"
CloudFlare DNS: "Domain? What domain?"

After a day of fucking around with configs and wanting to strangle the customer support guy, I just started pressing buttons, until suddenly, it worked. Turns out I'd accidentally enabled DNSSEC on a domain, that wasn't configured for it.

Lesson learned: There is no official DNS error code for "DNSSEC failed somewhere upstream". If you're lucky, you might get something useful out of the authoritative server, but apparently not on Mondays.

It's funny to see when certain stuff works without realizing it.

I've got multiple vpn servers and whenever I connect to one it sets my DNS to my pihole's one (hosted on one of my dedicated servers).

I keep forgetting to change my search engine to duckduckgo and no matter what I search for, no page is/was loading and manually have/had to go to duckduckgo.

Then I suddenly realized: the pihole has blacklisted Google so I literally can't connect to google.com/nl!

Awesome 😊

It's very satisfying to setup Pi-Hole on a vps, point your dns to it, adding the words Facebook and Google to the wildcard blacklist and seeing that literally any request containing either one of those words gets blocked.

On the other hand, it's funny to see that devRant (devrantron) performs around 1k+ requests to devRant every 15 minutes.

1.1.1.1
OR
8.8.8.8
🤔

Started working on a pihole alternative a while ago.

I like pihole a lot but one of the features I am missing is to be able to define a list of mass surveillance related domains (Snowden leaks; PRISM program and such) and show statistics based on dns queries containing blacklisted domains, prases/words and surveillance-related domains/words (google/facebook/microsoft/apple etc).

Started working on one based on an existing (php based) dns server which is open source and slowly but surely developed something which worked.
Then, I found out that the php resolving function (dns resolving) uses the system default, which can, of course, be google's dns as well. Changing this would be ideal but while the documentation suggested that it could be done some way, it didn't work for me so I chose a library which can do it with specific dns servers (to use as external dns servers).
This library used a different way of showing the retrieved dns query results and really wasn't in for converting everything by hand so i kinda quit the project a while ago.

A few days ago I thought fuck it and started again.
Now have a working version based on the new dns resolving library and made some other good improvements.

For those who are wondering why I chose PHP for this: why the fuck not?

Happy happy happy.

Visual Studio Code.

I've tried you because of hearing a lot of good stuff about you. I'd switch back to netbeans regardless because I love netbeans and I always try to use as little as possible from companies like Google/microsoft/facebook (and others) but what you're pulling right now is un-fucking-believable.

I've disabled ANY AND EVERY form of calling home I could (find) in your settings. Crash reports, automatic updates, metrics, you name it. I've searched all the fucking settings but I can't find any other home calling thing that's enabled and yet:

I'm monitoring every goddamn DNS request (through my own DNS server) and I'm still seeing calls to a Microsoft owned domain. Closed all my browser sessions and you as well and it stopped. Started browser again but not you, nothing.
Started you again: BAM. Calls to that damned Microsoft owned domain again.

If you can't honour my decision for disabling any form of home calls, go fuck yourself.

Netbeans, I'm back, I've missed you 💜

Yes I believe you’re Google and I will click that link.
I don’t care that IP from that you sent it to me is from some company in India.
Probably Google outsourced it’s email service there.

But wait why is this link pointing to Chinese website?
Ouch you provided some ip under A dns record so let me nmap it...
So there’s bunch of services you have there.
ftp, ssh, msrpc, netbios-ssn, snpp, microsoft-ds, sun-answerbook ...wait what ?
Let me curl that 8888 port.
Oh you have login / password form and it’s pagoda linux panel.
Wait a second I will read about it maybe some default login / password will work...

Ok so maybe I just make a script to brute force it as you wanted to brute force my computer motherfucker.

My devGoals for 2019 are:

- Move DNS blocking from hosts file to a PiHole (or similar) at home

- Implement a full HAL for some smol microcontroller in C

- Create better automation templates for testing, building & deployment for our Angular projects

- Get rid of crippling depression

- Force my boss away from firebase and google tools in general

- Spread the love for CraftCMS

- Spread more love in general (with protection of course) 😄

That moment you realize good guy Google lets you flush their public DNS.

When the junior system administrator enters 9.9.9.9 instead of 8.8.8.8 as the name server

4th grade. My parents left for the night and got a babysitter for me and my younger siblings. The babysitter showed me a game she likes in IE. You could make an account, raise a digital pet, a "neopet," play flash games for points to buy items from other users who listed them in their own stores that had custom css/html, including bg music. This was the first time I had really witnessed what the web could look like. Animated tiled gif bgs really amazed me so I took to google with which I discovered sites where one could copy css and html snippets for themes. I stored each new html tag I discovered via w3cschools.com in a powerpoint where the snippets I found were pasted somewhere randomly in the ppt. From there I learned html, CSS, and a billion other things. To date I've made websites, apps with several langs in win/Linux/osx/Android (but not ios yet). I've managed servers, and databases , and DNS records. I've in even ran website with 100k requests a day.

Alright... how the FUCK is an IP address considered personal data by GDPR????

Fucking boomers don't even know what an IP is. Guess what, every website you've ever been to has your IP! It's in your router, your fucking ISP's registry, and in every DNS server within 1000 miles of you!

Imagine thinking your IP gives up private information, god, just fuck me, I hate all of it, idiotic fools fumbling around with shit they don't understand.

...WKO making every developer's life a living nightmare because fucking GOOGLE FONTS stores a copy of your IP for their stupid analytics. You know what? Just don't use the internet either, that needs your IP too. In fact, don't pay taxes either, the tax office has a copy of your address, that's pretty personal information if you ask me! Just live in the woods and survive with the wolves.

I already know the future 'resolution' to this one - store fonts locally, resolve this dangerous "issue"... "waaaahhh fullStackClown! the site is slower now!!!"

...an infinite circle of clownshipness continues...

tune in next week as the world continues to approach it's circus fate!

Back when I started my career (12 months ago lol), I was in IT support. Having to deal with people who have hard times locating and reading off a sticker, let alone telling me their IP adress, only to realize it's the whole store that's offline, not only their PC (gosh do they ever talk with each other). So I decided to code a small tool that shows your hostname and IP adress, and pings the router, firewall and Google DNS. Aaand just in case the number for the IT hotline. Plan was that we could just tell them to double-click on that one icon on their desktop and read out what it says. We deployed it and I was happily waiting for it's time to shine (still a trainee I was also kinda proud of it), but when the network engineer found out, he wasn't happy about it at all. He was afraid too many people would open that new tool without us telling them to do so and/or forget to close it, producing a number of pings to the router, firewall and google. He went on about Google maybe blocking our IP if we produce too many pings and so on.
In my opinion he was kinda overreacting, but he wasn't that wrong and is a nice guy and responsible for our network, so we recalled the tool and never actually used it.

Oh man setting up postfix and dovecot (plus things like rspamd) is a pain in the ass.
But it's worth it, having your own mail server is just quite a good feeling.
Now I just need to find out how to get it to pass the spam filter of Google, despite the server and the DNS zone being well-configured (better than my school's mail server according to tests, but that one still manages to pass. I have no idea why.)

Has anybody noticed this?

Google is focusing on 8.8.8.8!

So, I'm the engineering leader of a startup. This year, the company hired new directors and with that a new CPO. We've been using Google Workspace and have all our infrastructure on GCP. We never had any trouble with Google products. We also have Google SSO configured in almost every tool out there.

Yesterday, the new CPO, sent me a request to change "just some dns" on the domain. Those "just some dns" were Microsoft 365 mx, cname and text records.

I asked him if he was planning to switch to MS.

He answered: "yes! The team (a new team of marketing) wants to use PowerPoint and Teams".

I don't know you guys, but I hate MS products. They're just bad.

So, yes, it seems that now I'm gonna waste my time switching and configuring everything with MS just because they don't know other tools that are way better than any MS product!

I tried to convince him, this wasn't a good move, but it seems my opinion equals zero at this company.

I just hate this type of product managers that always wants to reinvent the wheel to let others see that they are doing something important when they're not.

Also hate when managers make decisions without ever consulting the people that will be affected by those decisions... But I guess that's how it works in this world...

A minute of silence for chromebooks

when Verizon fios (now frontier) has dns routing issues and half your websites including slack won't load. so you spend the first 30 minutes of your day researching and finally end up having to manually change your dns servers to Google in your routers admin. fucking mondays man....

Brave Browser.

There’s a reason why brave is generally advised against on privacy subreddits, and even brave wanted it to be removed from privacytools.io to hide negativity.

Brave rewards: There’s many reasons why this is terrible for privacy, a lot dont care since it can be “disabled“ but in reality it isn’t actually disabled:

Despite explicitly opting out of telemetry, every few secs a request to: “variations.brave.com”, “laptop-updates.brave.com” which despite its name isn’t just for updates and fetches affiliates for brave rewards, with pings such as grammarly, softonic, uphold e.g. Despite again explicitly opting out of brave rewards. There’s also “static1.brave.com”

If you’re on Linux curl the static1 link. curl --head
static1.brave.com,
if you want proof of even further telemetry: it lists cloudfare and google, two unnecessary domains, but most importantly telemetry domains.

But say you were to enable it, which most brave users do since it’s the marketing scheme of the browser, it uses uphold:

“To verify your identity, we collect your name, address, phone, email, and other similar information. We may also require you to provide additional Personal Data for verification purposes, including your date of birth, taxpayer or government identification number, or a copy of your government-issued identification
Uphold uses Veriff to verify your identity by determining whether a selfie you take matches the photo in your government-issued identification. Veriff’s facial recognition technology collects information from your photos that may include biometric data, and when you provide your selfie, you will be asked to agree that Veriff may process biometric data and other data (including special categories of data) from the photos you submit and share it with Uphold. Automated processes may be used to make a verification decision.”

Oh sweet telemetry, now I can get rich, by earning a single pound every 2 months, with brave taking a 30 percent cut of all profits, all whilst selling my own data, what a deal.

In addition this request: “brave-core-ext.s3.brave.com” seems to either be some sort of shilling or suspicious behaviour since it fetches 5 extensions and installs them. For all we know this could be a backdoor.

Previously in their privacy policy they shilled for Facebook, they shared data with Facebook, and afterwards they whitelisted Facebook, Twitter, and large company trackers for money in their adblock: Source. Which is quite ironic, since the whole purpose of its adblock is to block.. tracking.

I’d consider the final grain of salt to be its crappy tor implementation imo. Who makes tor but doesn’t change the dns? source It was literally snake oil, all traffic was leaked to your isp, but you were using “tor”. They only realised after backlash as well, which shows how inexperienced some staff were. If they don’t understand something, why implement it as a feature? It causes more harm than good. In fact they still haven’t fixed the extremely unique fingerprint.

There’s many other reasons why a lot of people dislike brave that arent strictly telemetry related. It injecting its own referral links when users purchased cryptocurrency source. Brave promoting what I’d consider a scam on its sponsored backgrounds: etoro where 62% of users lose all their crypto potentially leading to bankruptcy, hence why brave is paid 200 dollars per sign up, because sweet profit. Not only that but it was accused of theft on its bat platform source, but I can’t fully verify this.

In fact there was a fork of brave (without telemetry) a while back, called braver but it was given countless lawsuits by brave, forced to rename, and eventually they gave up out of plain fear. It’s a shame really since open source was designed to encourage the community to participate, not a marketing feature.

Tl;dr: Brave‘s taken the fake privacy approach similar to a lot of other companies (e.g edge), use “privacy“ for marketing but in reality providing a hypocritical service which “blocks tracking” but instead tracks you.

Ugh... Spent the last hour figuring out why my Python script wouldn't send an email. Turns out my computer used a DNS cache that pointed to the wrong name server, but BT (shitty UK ISP) takes fucking forever to update their DNS. And obviously you can't edit the modem's DNS to the Google DNS, because fuck you that's why.

I want Richard's decentralised Internet right now.

GOOGLE, I WANT TO FUCK YOUR ASS, WHY THE HELL THE NEWER VERSIONS OF ANDROID ARE NO LONGER ABLE TO OPEN THE FUCKING WEB APPS ON LOCAL NETWORKS, THE SAME APP IS ACCESSIBLE FROM IOS AND FUCKING ANDROID CAN’T FIGURE OUT THE CORRECT DNS OF THE LOCAL IP ADDRESS BECAUSE YOU DROPPED IPV4 SUPPORT YOU ASSHOLES.

I think I finally, really, comprehend why secret societies have historically been created... I mean the potentially logical ones. This train of thought is logically terrifying.

I want a logic check.

I've been jokingly mentioning some of my totally true, practically useless in most scenarios, skills/specific fields of knowledge/ability under a moniker of 'extremely useful, assuming apocalyptic event' for years. Things like advanced knowledge of Coefficients of glass expansion, Fortran, various things that have caused friends to refer to me as MacGyver after the reboot came out.

In recent years, I've personally encountered several varieties of the ones defined by helplessness, self-victimisation, some version of a real disability... that theyve expounded into a personified personal nemesis-- to flashily battle yet never overcome, etc... the vast majority perplexing me as to why that's a valid form of life to them... it's not that they never consider some other way; the ball is just quickly dropped and never picked back up.

College?(not that I'm a big fan) they wish they could but so expensive... aide? The form was hard/confusing/past-due...

Lookup/learn something more indepth than a tiktok? *some self-deprecating bs*

Yet it's "I always wanted to do/be/learn X"

Shows like 'How It's Made' fascinate, but don't inspire enough for a 5min google query.

In the dev world its a clear, inverted pyramid-- one of the first posts I saw when I rejoined here was ostream's rant on Apple sucking because after they stop support/updates you "can't" load a different OS... ofc you can. But several comments down... no mention of that... i think it was @LensFlare who was the only one in ~15 respondents to point out the core logical fallacy.

Basic shit is totally forgotten... try asking some random adults what plastic is made from... or pay attention to how many people declare they have a gluten "allergy".

I get people frequently telling me that things im pointing out as differences don't matter because "it's just semantics"... semantics is literally the epitome of "significance", with roots in 'meaning' and 'truth'

Back to the main issue... We are in a world where DIY is typically something you pay more to do as a catered experience than actually learning anything, people destroy their own arguments hopes of validity unwittingly often by stating the arguement, get 'offended' or 'triggered' by factual statements, propagate misinformation and bastardise words until MW needs money enough to print a new version, likely adding the misuse as an actual definition and basic knowledge and the thought to actually learn is vetoed by the existence of google translate, the wisdom of tiktok and the pure brillance of troubleshooting every random linux issue you have from not knowing basic CLI and thinking linux makes you cool, with chmod 777 because so many other dumbasses on forums keep propagating misinformation. Ask them what 777 means, most have no clue... as they didnt consider googling that one before putting it in a terminal several times.
The number of humans that actually know the basic shit that the infrastructure of the world is built on keeps decreasing... and we aren't even keeping a running tally.

The structure of the internet has the right idea... dns- 13 active master root servers, with multiple redundancies if they start dropping... hell ICANN is like a secret society but publicly known/obfuscated... the modern internet hasnt had a global meltdown... aside from the lack of censorship and global availability changing the social definition of a valid use of braincells to essentially propagating spam as if it's factual and educational.

So many 'devs' so few understanding what a driver is, much less how to write one... irl network techs that don't know what dhcp is or that their equiptment has logs... professionals in deducated fields like Autism research/coping... no clue why it was called "autism", obesity and malnutrition simultaneously existing in the same humans... it's like we need to prepare a subterranean life-supporting vault and stock it like Noah's ark... just including the basic knowledge of things that used to be common/obvious. I've literally had 2 different, early 20s, female, certified medical assistants taking my medical history legitimately ask if not having a uterus made it harder to get pregnant...i wish i was joking.

Any ideas better than a subterranean human vault system? It's not like we can simply store detailed explanations, guides, media... unless we find a way to make them into obfuscated tiktok videos apparently on nonsense or makeup tutorials.

rant && what do you think?

so one of our ISP (Orange Slovakia) had troubles with service for like two days. Their DNS servers translated domains to IPs reaaally slow or not at all. So when i saw the dns error in chrome (yes i use chrome and not quantum) I changed my dns to google dns and ignored it.

Two days later when the service was back up and running, this ISP went to the local media and made a statement "we had a DDOS attack, no user data were harmed, blabla" that was when my BS radar went bananas... so somebody DDOSd your DNS server ... for two fucking days straight... this is probably a lie or they have really noob engineers (or both).

I'm not an expert on network services or routing, or servers but, how about turning off this server, IP and setting up a backup on a different IP ? Possibly anyone here with experience how to handle DDOS? Whats the chance of this happening? i'm really curious

So I've been a developer at my current job for about 12 years. I am the most senior level developer at my job. Let me state that I am a backend developer although I did frontend development off and on as well for the first 5 years of my career. However I have done no major frontend development for around 7 years now.

Effectively our frontend developer of 6/7 years just left.

We had an existing project in the queue and my boss expected me to do frontend development for this project which I did just to help out, but I am not getting any extra pay for this and I absolutely hate doing it. The only thing I was paid for was I overtime for completing the project quicker. With that being said I feel like I should be paid substantially more since I am doing double work and since they are not paying for a frontend developer. I'm literally doing her job and doing a better job than she did mistake wise doing her job.

Additionally many things have changed over the past 6/7 years and they have it in their minds since I did it in the past it should be the same now which isn't the case. So there are things in my project queue right now for future projects that they think I know how to do and I don't. It isn't that I couldn't eventually figure it out. It is just that I have zero desire to learn it .I just absolutely hate styling websites.

I'm ok with doing minor frontend things for projects but not entire websites

I literally develop the backend off all the sites we build setup Google tag manger tags/triggers, Google analytics, search console, Google looker studio, dns, site updates, manage all out Linux servers, do seo for content and sites. I can't handle something else on my plate. I'm currently having to rewrite a ton of code as well due to upgrades for our sites.

How do I respectfully tell my boss I refuse to do frontend work going forward or pay me substantially more on another project and that he needs to hire someone else without damaging our relationship?

I like my boss and my coworkers as people a lot outside of work, but I feel like I'm being taken advantage of financially and I'm honestly tired of it. As a developer for 12 years I'm honestly ready to just go elsewhere.

TLDR
Apparently if you delete your google account as an only admin of a workplace by just clicking remove account on expired subscription screen when you are on document page you not only loose access to google workplace but also you can create new workplace google account using same domain and email immediately and it’s fresh google domain account without domain verification and with everything wiped off from your old account. So you don’t have access to anything but on the other side there is possibility to use gmail as spam hub if google fucked ip something in their dns verification and once verified and after that expired domain gets bought again it stays verified.

Well I luckily migrated my gmail to other provider 3 years ago and I lost nothing important there but lol.

You can easily lock out yourself from your domain.

I opened ticket using some questionnaire and by adding another dns txt record to my domain to claim access to workplace admin page and let’s see what they do.

If they ever respond to that ticket and how long it will take to get it resolved.

This is good test to see if google is still a people’s company or an evil corporation.

I was using workplace as long as it was free from days of google app engine and begging of cloud revolution. I remember at best times I could chat with google support employee about spam I got from domain registered on google servers and he was processing ticket for me.

What is everyone's opinion on companies/organisations 'too big to fail'...?

I was just pondering on how 'just Google it' has become so 'natural' as a way of saying search the Internet. The more I think about it, the less I like it.

I know the chances of them failing/crumbling are neary zero (hence the name) but if an org, Ie Alphabet, made some shit decisions and bankrupted their company, what would happen then? Any ideas? I don't mean in terms of social fallout, economic etc.

I mean in terms of network infrastructure, them being such a central part of 'the web', all their Dns services, their backbone links, Google drive, Google fiber etc. What would happen to all user data? Just be destroyed?

I've never 'seen' a large tech company collapse, but just wander as to how that process would work for such a huge organisation, and the literal mountains of data they have which will need destroying or relocating.

Inb4 watch Mr robot hurrr

My internet connection is so messed up. Again certain websites are not loading on my Mac but they are loading on my phone using WiFi. I tried clearing cookies, flushing DNS cache and changing DNS servers to OpenDNS or Google DNS.

Why tha fck is the Google DNS Server on a Printer????