For the last few weeks, my feeds and federated timelines have been filled with absolutely brilliant marketing campaigns for Plausible Analytics, the new open-source privacy-focused website analytics tool. Plausible Analytics has enjoyed exponential growth and is frequently recommended by privacy-conscious voices in the FOSS community.

If you’re a geek like me then you probably enjoy spending your time hardening and optimizing your servers to support modern security standards and policies. If so, I’d like to share my favorite online resources and encourage you to take up the challenge of beating paranoidpenguin.net.

Recently, I was trying to respond to an email delivered to me from an outlook.com sender address. Unfortunately, my response immediately bounced back, and I was informed that my mail server’s IP address had been added to outlook.com’s internal blocklist.

Last month we had an issue with a multitude of unwanted connections against our mail servers from a specific netblock in Argentina. In my experience, coordinated attacks from IP addresses originating from the same netblock usually indicates an issue on the ISP side.

The amount of services offering (or even demanding) two-factor authentication (2FA) is ever-increasing. This has encouraged me to find a more resilient strategy for how I store, manage, and backup my secret keys. My old approach relied solely on using time-based one-time password (TOTP) applications capable of exporting and importing 2FA accounts.

Earlier this week I discovered an interesting Outlook.com phishing mail that had been caught by the anti-spam measures we deploy for our e-mail customers. Well, to be fair, the phishing attack itself was not anything new or sophisticated, but the choice of hosting provider was rather interesting.

On occasion, I’ve noticed the following HTTP referer when going through my server logs: http://www.bing.com/search?q=your+search&go=Search (notice the HTTP part). I thought it would be interesting to see if this HTTP referer was sent from Microsoft’s search engine as a result of someone performing a search over an unencrypted HTTP connection.

I was not planning to add support for MTA-STS for my domain as I’ve previously deployed DANE for SMTP transport security. MTA-STS is an alternative solution that does not require DNSSEC for authentication but instead relies on certification authorities.

I figured there are already too many mediocre tech blogs on the Internet, so from here on out I’ll embrace my true passion instead. Well, anime blogging is over-saturated as well, so my niche will be the sick and depraved side of anime. Thankfully, there are plenty of riches to choose from.

Content warning: The following post contains violent imagery and descriptions and absolutely no mention of Fruits Basket.

My interest in the Brave browser originated from my affection for cryptocurrencies, but I also believed in the Basic Attention Token’s potential as a digital payment platform. Lately, my experiences with the Brave browser and, by proxy, Brave Software, have changed my mind.

After installing and running Microsoft Teams for Linux on Ubuntu 18.04 for a couple of days, the application suddenly stopped working. Starting Microsoft Teams would load the application menu in the top bar, but it was not possible to get the actual application window to load. Clicking “Open” from the application context menu would do nothing at all.

I recently moved my self-hosted email service from Scaleway to DigitalOcean. After receiving a new IP address for my mail server, I’m effectively once again the new kid on the block. Let’s find out if the big kids are willing to talk with me if I play nice and put on my best behavior.

After migrating my blog from WordPress to Hugo, I wanted to find a simple solution that allowed me to mirror my blog content effortlessly to my hidden services. As Hugo is a static content generator, I didn’t have the opportunity to dynamically rewrite content on the fly by pulling the HTTP host from the current request.

Back in 2018, Patrick Volkerding mentioned that he was testing PAM and Kerberos to provide proper support for Active Directory and NFS on Slackware Linux. It seems like Mr. Volkerding has finally reached a decision.

As I was booting up my Arch Linux box, systemd informed me of a start job running for /dev/disk/by-uuid. 90 seconds later, the job timed-out and some fashionable colored messages flashed by with the speed of light.