<descriptionxml:base="/blog/2025-04-16-anubis-is-a-joke/"><p>Over the past few months, a lot of people have turned to Anubis by Xe Iaso for trying to protect
their sites, primarily Git forges and alternative frontends, against AI scraping.</p>
<p>Anubis is a new PoW captcha "solution" that (allegedly) holds out scrapers by slowing down your
browsing and forcing you to enable JavaScript to pass a challenge to view the site. Once it's wasted
a few seconds of your time and made you reevaluate the worth of whatever you were visiting, the
stupid anime girl (previously AI generated) it shows you give a smile and you're on your way. This
challenge only will work on Chromium and its Google-funded controlled opposition, Firefox. Basilisk
does seem to work, though with broken CSS. It doesn't even work on Safari (allegedly, I don't own an
iToy to test this with) and no other browser (until you read the next section) works on this.</p>
<p>There's one small problem to Anubis though. By default (which no installation I've checked changes),
Anubis will only present a challenge to User-Agents with "Mozilla" and some obvious scraper agents,
at the time of me writing this. You can check this in /data/botPolicies.json.</p>
<p>This means all one of those evil scrapers Anubis is supposed to protect against have to do to bypass
Anubis is not use one of these User-Agents. It also means that you too can completely bypass this as
I know it's been annoying a lot of people lately. You can curl a site using the default config (most
of them), and it won't give an Anubis challenge, it'll just show you the site in its original
form. No special options, no custom User-Agent, just curl http://domain.name and it'll let you
through. This is applicable to your normal browser as well, just give it a user agent that doesn't
contain "Mozilla" or any of the other terms in the file and you won't have any problems.</p>
<p>I was expecting a much more involved workaround to dealing with this piece of shit but no, all you
have to do is give it a UA not containing some keywords.</p>
<descriptionxml:base="/blog/2025-04-13-xhtml-is-good-actually/"><p>About a month or two ago, I finally converted everything I run and currently maintain to XHTML 1.1.
I had been considering it for months and finally decided it was the right decision, and came to the
conclusion that XHTML is far better than HTML.</p>
<h1 id="an-open-web-needs-real-standards">An open web needs real standards</h1>
<p>Unlike the SGML-based HTML, documents in XHTML must be valid. Browsers will let you get away with
some mild errors, but it's far less lenient than normal HTML. While this is one of the most common
things people criticize XHTML for, it's a good thing. Had everyone used XHTML and followed its
standards when it first came out, maybe we wouldn't have the browser monopoly we have today, or at
least not to such a severe extent. The web needs well-formed XML documents, not the sloppily thrown
together garbage HTML allows and borderline encourages. At the start, XHTML was designed with the
intention of fixing this, but many people kept clinging onto their shitty documents. Now so many
pages are still so annoying to parse that only a couple companies actually do it. XHTML could've
helped fix this.</p>
<p>XHTML tags must be properly closed, so it will not let you use <code>&lt;br&gt;</code> instead of <code>&lt;br /&gt;</code>. XHTML
will not let you uppercase your elements and attributes, so you can't <code>&lt;IMG SRC=</code>. XHTML will not
let you mess up nesting (even though some browsers will), so you can't (or at least shouldn't) do
<p>As XHTML is an older standard (the oldest full release being the second edition of XHTML 1.1
in late 2010), it misses out on some newer features HTML5 and others brought in. It doesn't have
<code>&lt;summary&gt;</code> or <code>&lt;details&gt;</code>, it doesn't have semantic elements like <code>&lt;main&gt;</code> (though I don't
really think this matters as much), and it doesn't have inline SVG. I don't think any of these
are really an absolute necessity, but the <code>&lt;summary&gt;</code>/<code>&lt;details</code>&gt; tags would be pretty nice.</p>
<pubDate>Mon, 24 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<author>wanderlost</author>
<link>/blog/2025-03-24-the-internet-sucks/</link>
<guid>/blog/2025-03-24-the-internet-sucks/</guid>
<descriptionxml:base="/blog/2025-03-24-the-internet-sucks/"><p>Over the past few years, I have noticed that the internet is in a state of decay. If you've found my
site, there's a fair chance you think the same too, or have at least heard people say this. The
amount of fun one can really have online is rapidly decreasing. Everything has pretty much been
<p>HTTP, or the Web, is not the only way of creating a "site" for yourself. There are other protocols,
though all of them (or at least all I know about) are far more minimal than what you can create on a
website even with just XHTML and a stylesheet. I don't have a full list of these protocols, but some
are <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)">Gopher</a>,
<a href="https://geminiprotocol.net/">Gemini</a>, and <a href="https://nightfall.city/nex/info/specification.txt">Nex</a>.
I don't hear much about Gopher nor have I got around to setting up a server for it yet but Gemini
has been gaining a lot of popularity from what I've seen lately. Nex is much more obscure but I like
it for how extremely simple it is, literally just plaintext served over TCP on port 1900.</p>
<p>If you're able to, start running nodes/peers for I2P, Tor, and Yggdrasil or any combo of
those. Those networks always could use more peers available to help make things faster and more
reliable for everybody.</p>
<h3 id="do-it-now">Do it NOW</h3>
<p>Stop waiting for the current internet to get worse. If you already host a personal site, start
mirroring it on the darknets! For all of them it's as easy as installing the daemons, editing a few
configs for them, and adding the names to your <code>server_name</code> on nginx or the equivalent for your
webserver of choice.</p>
<hr />
<p>In the future I'll write a more full guide to the overlay networks, but I feel like this has been
long enough of a rant by now.</p>
</description>
</item>
<item>
<title>Server up</title>
<pubDate>Tue, 04 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<author>wanderlost</author>
<link>/blog/2025-02-04-servers-up/</link>
<guid>/blog/2025-02-04-servers-up/</guid>
<descriptionxml:base="/blog/2025-02-04-servers-up/"><p>After waiting way too long, I finally have a server online. Nothing big, just a RPi 5 running
Alpine to provide some services for myself and other. I'm trying to focus on hosting sites
built to be minimal, without the bloat much of the modern web has. It also exclusively serves
on dark/altnets (Yggdrasil and Tor currently, I'll hopefully have I2P stuff running within a
week or so) to promote using that over the clearnet. The service's name is "Midgard", I felt like
that fits the theme of creating a more human web and goes with "Yggdrasil" nicely.</p>
<p>Current services are forums (running Simple Machines Forum) and sites (using Caddy). The forums
still have some work that needs to get done (selfhosting jQuery, fixing resource fetching outside
of Tor) but it should fully work on Tor. You can access it
<a href="http://forum.zyae5rxcjcezkozdbjb6oabzegiu6erx5e3o6mcl73qzzphhu2adu5yd.onion/index.php">here</a>, but I
have it set so accounts require approval as I'm currently a frequent target of spam commonly
including things I very much do not want to be hosting.</p>
<p>I also host personal sites for me and some others.</p>
<li>Array in a Matrix <a href="http://array.zyae5rxcjcezkozdbjb6oabzegiu6erx5e3o6mcl73qzzphhu2adu5yd.onion/">Tor</a>, <a href="http://%5B300:5506:25eb:d0d9:1000:1000:1000:1001%5D/">Yggdrasil</a></li>
<p>Planned services include Vaultwarden (a password manager) and Forgejo (a Git forge). Not sure
if/when they'll come.</p>
<p>If you want a site hosted on Midgard, feel free to reach out to me on <a href="xmpp:zayd@telepath.im">XMPP</a>
with a Git repo link, a brief description, and I might set it up for you if the site isn't too big
and bloated and it isn't something I wouldn't want on my machines (please no pedo/zoo shit, no hate
speech or anything like that, no malware obviously). Also don't rely on me too hard for maintaining
uptime. Things have been going fairly smoothly so far but I'm still pretty new to self hosting so
I can't guarantee much in the way of stability.</p>
</description>
</item>
<item>
<title>Zaydsite now</title>
<pubDate>Fri, 24 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<author>wanderlost</author>
<link>/blog/2025-01-24-new-blog/</link>
<guid>/blog/2025-01-24-new-blog/</guid>
<descriptionxml:base="/blog/2025-01-24-new-blog/"><p>Recently got everything working on the new site, hopefully it doesn't look too boring. I plan to
actually use this thing and not leave it to rot, so subscribe to the Atom feed if you want to get
updates on the shit I say.</p>
<p>Everything other than the blog is managed manually, the blog uses Zola. It's pretty cool and makes
it fairly easy to make custom themes compared to other static site generators. There's no JavaScript
on this site and it's kept fairly light in general. Everything <em>should</em> work in browsers like EWW,
w3m, links, etc. All the fonts here are WOFF2 though, so some browsers like Dillo won't fetch those
properly.</p>
<p>There is a Tor version of this site available <a href="http://dhrglakamniet5jtehkb7rp7zdqhzw6trkum3dieoeenszttgcjle6yd.onion/">here</a>
if you're not already reading this there. I2P and Yggdrasil might also come soon, not sure about those.</p>
<p>There seems to be a bug with importing my Atom feed to RSS Guard making the entries really tall for
some reason, no idea what's causing it, but I'll try to fix that soon.</p>
