I see what you've done there!

        int randomNumber = getRandomNumber(1, 808);
        if (randomNumber == 808)
                printGlimmeringText(text, nerdFontText, lastRowColor);

Nice project!

That's an easter egg! Gj! You're the first that has mentioned it.

I found two versions at https://archive.org, there's a PDF manual too.

You are right, there is a a copy with a manual now! It was uploaded 4 months ago and it sure wasn't there all the previous times I've looked.

Unfortunately, the manual doesn't quite match my memories. I recognize a lot of the text and layout so it is clearly something I have seen before, but the technical info isn't really there.

This manual is from May 1989. I read the manual a bit before that, perhaps in 1987, perhaps 1988.

So, does my memory play tricks on me or did they remove all that lovely tech info? All there's left in this version is Chapter 12 "Technical Terms" (which I recognize as something I have read a version of before).

I know I have read about using track reads to catch some of the copy protection tricks (like in the two MartyPC blog posts) and track writes (occasionally even track writes that are aborted at just the right time) to force the data on disk to be just the right kind of wrong.

I double checked that it wasn't in the Copy II PC manuals I could find: the V6 manual from 1990 and the Copy II PC Option Board manual.

Congratulations on the release! If I may ask a question - is it possible to register an account without a phone number on a 3-rd party server?

Thanks!

Yes, it's totally up to a PDS operator to decide how they create user accounts. It's also not required on the Bluesky PDS service any longer, in most cases.

By default the self-hosted PDS requires an invite code, to prevent random people from creating an account. Later other options will exist, including OAuth support which is coming soon.

That's great, thanks!

> It's also not required on the Bluesky service any longer, in most cases.

That's also nice to hear - when last time I tried to register an account (shortly after the free registration launch) the phone number field in the registration form was marked as required, if I am not mistaken.

Yeah, you're right, it was. That was temporary measure during the public launch to prevent spam/abuse. We've made some improvements here recently.

You can also use DNSCloak, which can act as a VPN, and proxy all DNS requests to a trusted DoH server, like AdGuard.

I think wearing such a massive thing on your head is a dead end. It may become a niche product for professionals (as the price and "Pro" in the name suggest), but it's not practical for everyday casual use.

Is it still out of the reach from the current state of art in technology for a thin client, not much heaver than sunglasses - just the visual component and some simple circuit to receive the signal from an iPhone?

I happen to know a few German street photographers, like Siegfried Hansen[1], for example. Now, I wonder, how do they publish their works and organize exhibitions then? Is it possible that there are some exceptions in the law?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siegfried_Hansen_(photographer...

In GDPR there are some kind of exemptions for art and journalism.

I think this kind of warrant canary doesn't bring much value. It takes only one warrant to make this document historical. And then what?

I wish every account had its own warrant canary.

I thought Reddit had a page with a bunch of canaries (pictures of canaries) on it, and their idea was to remove one at a time. Can't find that now so it must have been some other service.

I think an elegant way for rsync to handle this would be to just move the page from ".../canary.txt" to ".../canary-2.txt".

Sends the message that the first canary is dead, but leaves a second one up for the next warrant.

Or they could host in a country where “secret warrants” don’t exist.

I think this can be easily solved using process/app isolation, i.e. KeePassXC doesn't need network connectivity.

ETag (paired with If-None-Match header sent by the browsers) is another caching header to be aware of.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/ET...

Ooh that's kinda evil. A server could give a client a uniquely identifying ETag for a given URL. So whenever the client comes back on the same browser, they're identified.

Fortunately this is probably just as detectable as the Last-Modified abuse in the post.

There are a lot of things like that. Although browsers changed it recently, you also used to be able to use TLS session tickets.

Another one was the favicon cache.

Pretty much any state on the browser can be used to track people.

Films from all around the world. For the past couple of years, I enjoy watching 3-4 films a week in average.

Much like literature and art, quality cinema gradually makes you a better person, and has a profound effect on acquiring good taste, and having a love affair with beauty - you see something, and you immediately know if it's special.

If you don't know where to start, open Wikipedia pages for past film festivals (Cannes, Berlin, Venice, Toronto, etc.), and e.g. select randomly a decade, then a year, then a film from one of the winning positions. In time, you will develop your own taste and opinion about the filmmakers, and the actors, and the countries of origin, and the themes, and the genres, etc.

French, Italian, Swedish, Taiwanese, Japanese, American, or so many other places - there are great filmmakers nearly everywhere around the world, and you can enjoy it.

Many bad things can be said about contemporary society but one of the things I love the most about the 21st century is how we're starting to appreciate cultural things in a global sense. I also want to read more about postcolonial literature, history of all the parts of the world we didn't study in school, and so on. It's starting to get ridiculous how in school we study "history" just about Europe, and "literature" 90% of our language.

About cinema specifically, mainstream Hollywood cinema has become largely repetitive, big franchises, sequels, etc etc, feels culturally sterile to me. It's so refreshing to see that, say, Korean cinema is becoming so popular.