As you say, lots of spicy food options. Our National Dish is actually a curry - chicken masala and Phall, the hottest curry, was invented in Birmingham.

Also - in the picture are baked beans. They’re invented in the USA. We adopted them, but they’re not ours.

What’s really insane is that sometimes the second identical test actually works.

It even has the approval of my wife.

He is the chosen one! Hail him!

Never say never - unless you’re writing clickbait.

The point people are making is that communication and discipline, both things that require time and skill, would be a better, less invasive approach.

Perhaps that’s being done as well?

But even if it is, that approach doesn’t work with all people, no matter how skillful or how much time is put into it.

True - although just because you are paranoid, that doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you…

And hopefully will continue to be asked, because one day it may not be poor OPSEC.

In my experience, /most/ people don’t care and further, they don’t want to care.

Even those that do care have to exist on a sliding scale of compromise in order to function.

since the plain text isnt stored

I’m not sure I’d accept a bet on that assumption.

In my experience, the AI bots are absolutely not honoring robots.txt - and there are literally hundreds of unique ones. Everyone and their dog has unleashed AI/LLM harvesters over the past year without much thought to the impact to low bandwidth sites.

Many of them aren’t even identifying themselves as AI bots, but faking human user-agents.

robots.txt does not work. I don’t think it ever has - it’s an honour system with no penalty for ignoring it.

I have a few low traffic sites hosted at home, and when a crawler takes an interest they can totally flood my connection. I’m using cloudflare and being incredibly aggressive with my filtering but so many bots are ignoring robots.txt as well as lying about who they are with humanesque UAs that it’s having a real impact on my ability to provide the sites for humans.

Over the past year it’s got around ten times worse. I woke up this morning to find my connection at a crawl and on checking the logs, AmazonBot has been hitting one site 12000 times an hour, and that’s one of the more well-behaved bots. But there’s thousands and thousands of them.

If cookie prompts annoy you (and why wouldn’t they? Complicated and time wasting prompts caused by terrible and compromised legislation that’s led to far more intrusion instead of enforcing use of browser settings) and you don’t care about cookies, then the browser extension “I don’t care about cookies” suppresses the vast majority.

But UK laws do, which share a lot of commonality - like the GDPR

I think this type of scheme is illegal under the GDPR, which is in effect in the UK just as it is in the EU.

It’s been a while since I worked with the GDPR, but from memory the wording is such that:

The data holder needs to allow people to opt out of data collection. The subject can request to be forgotten. The data holder explicitly cannot charge for this.

But changes move slow, and The Mirror is probably banking on nobody caring enough to complain, and Trading Standards being too underfunded and swamped with other work to investigate otherwise (which they are). If they’re challenged, they’ll just change tack, go “oops” and are unlikely to hit big fines unless they dig in.

Cookie laws are a horrible mess and always have done - the resulting consent banners are far more intrusive than anyone wanted.

We recently researched these for work.

They tick a lot of boxes - lots of space, reasonable speed, great cold storage figures. Reasonably priced tapes. Agree, they’re the best thing. The slow read speed isn’t quite as bad as expected (They can go extremely fast in seek mode), but definitely something to consider. We were okay with that for our needs.

But damn, the price of the hardware was horrendous - we got priced (I think) close to £20k for a suitable drive that met our needs. Completely killed the project. And remember that if you’re doing site replication for DR, you’ll need at least two of them. Sadly, it looks like we’ll be using external HDD’s for a while longer…

(This is as much an answer to some of the comments already raised, as to the article - which like most such personal pieces has pros and cons.)

As part of a previous job I used to host email for a small business - this was about 15 years ago. I ended up spending several hours to a day a week working on it; apologising to users, tracing and diagnosing missing sent email and the endless, ENDLESS arms war against incoming spam (phishing was much less of a problem then). The trust from the company in our email operation was very poor and you’d regularly hear someone apologising to a customer because we hadn’t contacted them, or answered their email. The truth is much was going astray and staff were relying more on the phone than email because they knew it worked. You might guess from this that I’m terrible at running an email system but I don’t think I am. I started moving email back in the late 80s when Fidonet was the thing, so I have some miles travelled. Tools have improved a bit since then, but so have those used by the bad guys.

I still consider one of the best things I did for that company was move our company email onto Gmail Business (which was free for us as a charity) Every single one of those problems went away immediately and suddenly I had a lot more time to do more important stuff. I would never self-host email again despite running several personal servers.

Plenty of people say they self-host just fine, and great for you if that’s so. But the truth is you won’t always know if your outbound mail silently gets dropped and you have a far higher chance of it arriving if it comes from a reputable source. There are a huge number of variables outside of your control. (ISP, your country, your region, your software, even the latency of your MX or DKIM responses factor into your reputation)

You take the decision on whether any perceieved risks of privacy through using a third party outweighs the deliverability and filtering issues of self hosting, but please don’t say it’s simple or reliable for everyone. If it’s simple for you, you’re either incredibly lucky or just not appreciating the problem.

You’re spot on, and even smaller ISPs routinely get blocked by larger hosters (anyone who doubts this, please look around for the many stories along the lines of “gmail silently drops my email”)

Residential IP blocks are scored much higher and given a negative trust from the start - not surprising since that’s where much of the world’s spam comes from through compromised computers, routers etc.

I think you have to be exceptionally strong to resist this sort of thing. You can justify sponsorship in a hundred ways - not least to yourself. But in every case, it changes everything. That, of course, is why companies spend money influencing the influencers.

Buyer beware, as always.

Well, that’s this afternoon planned then.

A non technical answer: Don’t interact with other players and don’t give out any personal information.

Use a unique and non-memorable username in steam and in game. Don’t use any of the social functions in steam.

It’s often overlooked that the biggest risk to personal information is the person themselves.

(Obviously you need to give some information to Steam for purchasing, and others have shown other methods to limit what information is sold about you as much as you an. It also depends where you reside - the EU has better protections than most)