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The proper way to cheat is to not leave a trace on the tracker where a tracker staff may or may not make correct judgement. It's called "ghost leeching." Basically you directly connect to known peers' IPs (e.g. from some heavy seedbox users) and never even report anything back to the tracker.

Of course, those peers where you ghost leech of then would correctly report the upload they generate (making THEM look suspicious of cheating by "over-reporting" upload.) It's impossible for any tracker staff to properly detect and attribute proper cheating in such cases, unless they can detect a pattern. The tracker staff objectively can only catch people that do really stupid things.

That's just the way BitTorrent and private tracker economics work. A "private" tracker is more like a social contract between its users to do the honourable thing, but you'll always have some idiots that do not get that, of course.


The limitation with ghost leeching is that it won't help raise your ratio. It's a way to avoid decreasing it (by never reporting download). If your ratio is bad and for reasons you want to increase it, you will have to generate upload one way or another. You can ghost leech and then seed the torrent you downloaded, but it can also look weird that you are now seeding a torrent that you never downloaded. But due to the nature of torrent, it is also possible.

But that's what I find fascinating. BitTorrent is a very cool tech, and not that hard to understand. It uses a lot of simple idea that works very well together. It's really fun to hack on it. And I add an obsession with findings 'cheating' methods a few years back. Overall, as you said, it's more of a social contract. None cared unless it was stupidly obvious.


You mean that if I experience a call of nature with AROS I have to stop, dismount, and go behind a tree? :)

(BTW, I had uptimes of many hundred days with a regularly used Amiga machine. So crashes were possible, but if you run only quality software eventually (you'll eventually get to the point after a few years) it could be really, really stable. Eventually memory fragmentation would hit you though.)


"cross-platform" and Rust, as advertised in the current title/link label, is incompatible for sure. Can't get that to run on my older OS X machine nor my Amiga. :)


Yup, I have private forks where I've had Claude/Codex rip out Rust for that reason.


feel free to fork MartyPC to build it for your Amiga


So I guess ram disks are deprecated too? (AFAIR hdiutil was the only way to create them)


This is one of the things the new `diskutil image` subcommand mentioned in the article supports: `diskutil image attach ram://${size}m`.


RAM itself is deprecated. All the new systems have about one fourth of the RAM they had two years ago.

Something about some insider B2B deals for data centers, blah blah blah.

I expect a flood of cheap RAM, SSDs, and GPUs to hit the scene within about two years, after the AI boom goes bust.


Isn't the general separation between species that they no longer can cleanly interbreed (generate fertile offsprings)? I'm no biology expert though, but I always thought this is how to separate things.

Humans of all kinds can breed and make new humans easily. Same for dogs... easily can breed with each other and increase diversity. So in both cases same species. But humans and chimpanzees? Probably not (albeit there are rumours? :) ), so different species.


Yes, but the difference also has to do with geography/preference. Brown and Polar bears can and do produce viable offspring, but because they're generally geographically separated we consider them separate species. Same for birds; many could mate but they choose not to (different mating calls, etc), and for that reason combined with different looks we classify them as separate species. Neanderthal, who are accepted as being a different species of human, interbred with humans before going extinct.

It's my opinion that if aliens visited earth 30k years ago and used our definition of the word, they would classify us as different species. To be clear I'm not advocating that we should refer to humans as different species, just that because we're capable of such advanced thought we should abide by different rules than we hold other animals to.


Would it have been different, if they had everyone take the cargo entrance?


Yes. It's about discrimination and dehumanizing everyday cruelty.


I'm emotionally aligned with you, but the dehumanisation is the default state (e.g. the able are standing and the wheelchair user is below eye level), and all accommodations are a result of society dedicating resources to moving the needle away from that.

It may not be sufficient, and we should criticise when it isn't sufficient, but we must in practical terms also accept tradeoffs in a scarcity economy. In the worst case, some of those tradeoffs accommodate one disability over another disability.

If the dean had a swanky office and the wheelchair kid must roll past the bins, then the school made the wrong choice. But if it's a ramp at the front or textbooks, then we must think a bit harder.


I can't get past the Cloud<bleep> check. I guess the site/information is for G(r)eek elites only too.


Usually I'm with you but it let me in this time without any XHRs or frames off-domain (my standard µMatrix settings).


No. No luck here with any form of settings (I generally use uBlock origin in hard mode by default).

It always loads the 'Just a quick check -- We’re checking your connection to prevent automated abuse' page. Depending on my settings I may or may not load the actual Cloudflare checkbox.

And at that point I just don't want to bother with that site anymore really. Obviously I must be some 11th world country on some random sanctioned list (aka Germany). :-)


Why did they put it under "dev/basic"?


No idea, it should be under dev/lang where other lisps are, but Stefan Haubenthal is an accomplished software packager so perhaps there's a good reason.


Maybe lisp is considered a basic language. :)


PNG supports both, palette based (for 8 bit and less), and just straight direct/true color (RGB or ARGB).

(still different from JPEG's method, of course)


On average about 100 (TCP) requests hit my home router per minute doing various probing and scanning. Lots of checking for the telnet port obviously. Sometimes you can see a swarm of entirely different IPs scanning the full port range (probing the ports one-by-one).

You'll see a lot of deepfield, censys-scanner, visionheight.com, shadowserver.io, etc., but also the usual suspects of Chinese or Russian IPs.

With OpenWRT I use something like this: `tcpdump -i pppoe-wan 'inbound and tcp[tcpflags] & (tcp-syn|tcp-ack) == tcp-syn'`, or alternatively `tcpdump -i pppoe-wan 'inbound and tcp[tcpflags] & (tcp-syn|tcp-ack) == tcp-syn and not port 44000'`, if we have some torrent client running (e.g. here at port 44000) which would mess up the result. I'm not sure it's the best way to handle this, but it's definitely enlightening what bounces off on the router.


The easiest way to deal with the usual suspects is to just block the entire countries network range(s). There really is no reason they should be connecting to your home router anyway, and you lose nothing from blocking them.

Sure their packets will still hit your router, but if they are dropped immediately at least you're not wasting a syn-ack on them.


> The easiest way to deal with the usual suspects is to just block the entire countries network range(s).

Keep in mind that this should be paired with an ASN blacklist - MaxMind also has an ASN mmdb for convenience - because IP address to country maps are almost entirely self-declared[0].

For example, Tencent (AS132203), which you almost certainly want to block, has ranges in 73 different countries per [1].

[0]: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8805

[1]: https://bgp.tools/as/132203#prefixes


I, temporarly, banned some ip range. I didn't find a source for pinpointing countries; though I am interested. Could you point me to some sources which, deterministically, resolve to some countries? To my knowledge you can not reliably identify countries by ip since this would be dependent on DNS servers. Though I am just a application programmer!

Thanks in advance.


Your router doesn't care about their DNS settings. IP addresses are very easy to tie back to countries. The reason they say it's not reliable is because it's trivial to spoof the country, but even so, a lot of attackers don't even bother. It's sort of like the Nigerian prince scam calls: if you're wise enough to block Russia, you're not worth their time.

Your firewall vendor should supply you with country lists, just select the known bad ones and drop their traffic. If you have a consumer grade router, you will probably have to configure the blocklists manually.


> The reason they say it's not reliable is because it's trivial to spoof the country

ISPs sometimes do trade IPv4 blocks and countries to which it belongs do change occasionally. That can become a problem if you were like literally Netflix and someone few nation states over started an ISP.


I wonder if adding the US is now sensible.


Unless you're serving something, you should probably drop all incoming requests. If you are serving something, the US is a pretty big market to lock yourself out of.


FWIW, I blocked the US for a while.

Eventually, my lets encrypt cert expired and it turns out certbot is run from USA, so the auto renewal failed me.


Almost all spam traffic comes from the US, it's not even close. But for many people so does much of their human traffic.


Getting it directly from IANA is always the best approach.

Here is a "simplified" version in various formats.

https://github.com/HotCakeX/Official-IANA-IP-blocks


Gross - you're going to block countries just because the US government doesn't like those countries?


I'm happy to unblock China from accessing my website, once China does something about the millions of daily hack attempts originating from that country.


But you pointed to a list of OFAC sanctioned countries, not China.


Do you think you get excluded from mass scans for disagreeing with your government?


Routers got such a thing build in nowadays, just gotta enable it (not the ones from your ISP of course)


> just block the entire countries network range(s)

Why not just block all the inbound connections you don't need? Is there a particular reason your firewall policy needs to be xenophobic?


I have ubiquity UniFi for this reason (amongst others). OpenWRT is a good choice as well. Most home router software is such junk, might as well leave the door open..


I can corroborate visionheight and shadowserver from my firewall logs.


This is one reason I don’t mind that I’m behind CGNAT.


That's the only advantage of CGNAT I can think of. :D

(You still could get poked from the other users' hosts behind the ISP's NAT, of course.)


an angry skid in a game can't (D)DoS your router might be one. I'd still prefer to not have CGNAT


Depends if the ISP has client isolation of one method or another enabled.


fail2ban?


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