It’s nice to be able to call your parents when you’re bleeding out in the school atrium.

Latest version of Anubis has a JavaScript-free verification system. It isn’t as accurate, so I allow js-free visits only if the site isn’t being hammered. Which, tbf, prior to Anubis no one was getting in, JS or no JS.

Yay! I won’t edit my comment (so your comment will make sense) but I checked and they also list they/them on their github profile

I’ll say the developer is also very responsive. They’re (ambiguous ‘they’, not sure of pronouns) active in a libraries-fighting-bots slack channel I’m on. Libraries have been hit hard by the bots: we have hoards of tasty archives and we don’t have money to throw resources at the problem.

Yes, it’s a þorn.

I was on my Gentoo linux laptop trying to find an open WiFi network on a sidewalk when someone came out of the nearby bank to shoo me away because she was told I was “trying to hack the bank”.

I was just trying SSH into my school account to send an email using PINE to let my parents know my train was 5 hours delayed. This would have been 2005 or so.

Y’all have some good points. What I’m hearing is “install it on a fresh hard drive, play around, then move on to something more stable.”

Well, I was thinking of moving to Linux full-time anyway now that my Windows install is obsolete. Any reason to avoid this distro? Past experience is with Ubuntu, Gentoo, and SuSE. I mostly game.

You’d think that, but I’ve had the command “get a tan for God’s sake you’re transparent” used as an insult against me. You can be too white for white supremacists.

My library, you have to check out books on reserve from the circulation desk. They’re for in-library use only, 3 or 6 hours at a time, and if you take it into a study room and scan the whole thing with your phone we saw nothing.

We don’t like the constant churn of textbooks, either. They eat into our budget. We really appreciate when a professor lends us their personal copies of a textbook for us to keep on reserve. We also try and steer instructions to Open Educational Resources (OER), which are available for free.

Wealth disparity sucks and shouldn’t result in different access to education.

I did that during the height of COVID, when my household was only going to the store once a month. Imperfect Foods was how I got fresh produce in between those trips.

It’s a public servants thing–the public wants to know what they’re paying for, so public servant salary records are public.

Various websites compile this information from the various state and federal sources. It’s wicked easy to find information on, say, every public servant with the title “librarian” in Fake County, Kentucky.

Knowing their full name, you can look up their home ownership records in the county real estate or tax databases and ta-da, you know where they live. You also know if they work part-time at a different public library, so that’s convenient for stalking purposes.

Edit: not that I think it’s a good thing. It’s creepy as all get out. If we have to post salaries, I’d much rather they be anonymized like on Glassdoor.

Edit2: and these lists do get used for political ickiness. There’s an anti-union group that mails out helpful tips on how to save money–leave your union. They even provide a “I want to leave” postcard addressed to your union leadership for you to sign, pre-filled-in with your info.

I’m a librarian. I also work with members of the public, some of whom do not share my understanding of reality. My information is still public because I’m a government employee.

Same. Feeling pretty good about using Anubis instead of Cloudflare for our dinky systems.

I wonder if I can get Facebook to give me some of that sweet, sweet cash for the inconvenience of telling them to bugger off…

That’s hardly anything. Facebook has a bot accessing my server’s robots.txt multiple times a second. (My robots.txt used to say “Facebook bot go away” but now I just respond 404 to any requests from the Facebook bot. Pretend I said that all technical and stuff, it’s 2 am and I ought to go to sleep.)

Give Hey Japan a look. I’m a noob, but it seems friendly.

I’d say it depends on how much the license costs vs how the service costs.

The analogy that comes to mind is old cemeteries (YMMV, this is from a New England perspective). People buy a grave and expect to occupy it forever. This is a problem for cemeteries because a cemetery will eventually run out of graves to sell. The sales of graves goes towards the upkeep of the cemetery. Once there’s no more space, there’s no more sales, and there’s no more income for upkeep.

Some cemeteries get around this by reusing graves. You rent a grave for, say, 20 years and after 20 years of occupancy your next of kin is asked if they’d like to renew your subscription.

Other places charge a much higher upfront fee and invest it, using the interest to pay for ongoing maintenance.

Other places just abandon the cemetery and let it grow over with weeds.

And the Wii can be Linuxed, if you get creative enough. Source: former roommate did it

Bots lie about who they are, ignore robots.txt, and come from a gazillion different IPs.