The Brave Browser – And BAT's all she wrote

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.

Microsoft Teams for Linux won't open on Ubuntu 18.04

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.

Self-hosting email in 2020 – Joe Nobody vs. World

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.

How to configure Hugo as a Tor hidden service

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.

Kerberos added to Slackware-current

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.

A start job is running for /dev/disk/by-uuid

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.

.ICU TLD spammers move to the .XYZ TLD

After noticing that the majority of the .ICU spam campaigns were drying up, I headed over to Namecheap to find out which gTLD was the next likely target for abuse. Well, what do you know, Namecheap was throwing out .XYZ domains for 1$ a pop.

Dead Onions Rising

About half a year ago, I decided to turn off my old Gentoo instance and end my run with WordPress. My current cloud instance is running Ubuntu, and I’ve migrated (most of) my content from the old WordPress installation to Hugo.

.BEST TLD - Spam Like the Best

I’ve made the decision to go ahead and block another one of those pesky new gTLDs that are seemingly exclusively used by malicious actors. Email delivery from .best domains will no longer get past any spam filter under my control.

The Brave Browser - A lion in sheep's clothing?

The Brave Browser is on a mission to fix the web and has been gathering a lot of praise and attention from tech and crypto enthusiasts alike. Brave will diligently protect your privacy by removing intrusive ads and trackers from websites while offering you to view ads delivered through their advertising platform instead.

Enterprise support for Slackware

As a managed service provider (MSP) we’re using an off the shelf remote monitoring and management (RMM) platform. Recently, and just for curiosity’s sake, I decided to take a closer look at the Linux agent offered by this platform. I’ll admit to being somewhat shell-shocked when I discovered that the installer had Slackware Linux on the list of supported distributions.

The joys of cloud computing

Yesterday, my Scaleway hosted VPS was scheduled for migration to another physical server. According to Scaleway, the expected downtime was only a few minutes. The maintenance was scheduled to begin at 10:00 UTC, so I was expecting the server to be available when I tried to connect over SSH at 11:30 UTC. Unfortunately, there was no sign of life to be found.

Blogger.com powered cryptocurrency scam

Over the last several months, I’ve seen a steady flow of spam emails containing only a single line of text encouraging recipients to visit a blogspot.com address. Should the recipient choose to follow the link, they would soon find themselves on a cryptocurrency scam site with amazing propositions.

.ICU TLD - I See You Spammer

ICANN’s decision to cash in and allow an unlimited number of new gTLDs has provided us with several new TLDs used predominantly for criminal purposes by malicious actors. My inbound mail servers have been flooded with spam from thousands of .icu domains for the better part of 2019.