Haha well now you know!

You didn’t know it existed? Your account is here at lemmy.nz, it would show any posts in the local feed so you might still see them.

We try to keep politics in a separate community, it was by request of the community as not everyone wants to see politics and also it can quickly take over the community since there is so much politically happening at the moment.

If it’s directly about the government (a government department, government decision, or a member of the parliament such as this Justice Minister, then it should go in [email protected]

Thanks for understanding 🙂

Can you please put politics posts in [email protected]?

I’ve messaged you a couple of times over the last week or so but you don’t seem to have seen this.

Yeah it does seem to imply they were already here when the article says otherwise. But I wonder if they meant that their ancestors were previously part of the ecosystem so they aren’t as disruptive as we might assume (unlike, say, possums, that devastate forests in a way not seen in Australia).

Yeah fair enough. Well you’ll get good stories anyway!

😮

Why did you pick winter for your holiday, anyway?

Huh. Here in NZ tea, (instant) coffee, milk (and usually Milo as well) are virtually always provided by an employer (only by social convention, as far as I can tell, not a legal requirement). I kinda assumed Britain would be the same since we must have got the custom from somewhere.

I’ve heard social media where you interact with strangers instead of “friends” referred to as “antisocial media”.

Well Wikipedia says:

Tea is an aromatic beverage prepared by pouring hot or boiling water over cured or fresh leaves of Camellia sinensis, an evergreen shrub native to East Asia which probably originated in the borderlands of south-western China and northern Myanmar.[3][4][5] Tea is also made, but rarely, from the leaves of Camellia taliensis.

As in, to be considered “tea”, it has to be made from the tea plant.

However, it goes on to say:

The term herbal tea refers to drinks not made from Camellia sinensis. They are the infusions of fruit, leaves, or other plant parts, such as steeps of rosehip, chamomile, or rooibos.

I think you know where I’m going with this. Coffee is made from the seeds of the coffee plant (technically the coffea plant). Seeds are “other plant parts”. Coffee might not be “tea” but it very clearly is “herbal tea” 😀

Ah interesting!

I never would have considered them snails. But I guess they kind of are. Are all shellfish considered snails 🤔

I’m not much of a tea drinker. Not peppermint or english breakfast or green tea. I don’t know why. Though I think peppermint is probably the one I’m most likely to warm up to (pun intended 😋).

If there’s peppermint tea and camomile tea, etc. Then why isn’t coffee a kind of tea? 😆

Good job! Must be hard to do in the middle of winter. Sometimes I have a coffee because I want a hot drink, not because I need caffeine.

Today I’m drinking my last can of Coke Zero (not Coke Zero Sugar). I think they stopped selling it in 2021. Probably should have sold it as an antique.

It would be cool to have a zombo like entity but might attract the attackers?

Realistically, having no page at the root domain is unlikely to have any real security benefit, except perhaps not bringing attention to yourself. Security people would say everything extra you add (such as hosting another web page at the root domain) adds to your attack surface, but I don’t think hosting one extra static page is likely to make a difference.

Mostly I just have no reason to put anything there.

That said, I used to see malicious visits back when it was just an html website.

I don’t host any wordpress sites but get (failed) hits to wordpress URIs because bots are just set to scan for any site and they attempt to access a known URI. E.g. if there is an exploit affecting the (made up) wordpress page at wordpresssite.com/settings/admin, then I see hits to mysite.nz/settings/admin even though such a page doesn’t exist. The bots just scan thousands of domains hoping for a hit.

I first noticed these when I blocked all access from outside NZ, and found all the now blocked URLs (mostly requests from from Russia or China).

Do you get many bad actors hosting in the fediverse?

In terms of actual malicious instances, not really. Mostly the issues with instances are instances abandoned by their admin (but for some reason still up) with open registrations, so trolls can just go there and make new accounts to their heart’s content.

The main issue we see though are AI scrapers. Sooooooo many. You can put in a robots.txt to ask ChatGPT, Amazon, Google, etc to stay away. But the start up AI companies are relentless. They ignore robots.txt, they lie about their user agent to avoid detection, and they make millions of requests with no throttling. It’s a cat and mouse game to block them via IP.

Cloudflare has an AI bot block mode, but it breaks federation so we can’t use it (admittedly, federation is basically bot traffic). They seem to die down traffic once blocked (I guess if they reach the first page, they try to follow links, but if they are blocked at the first point they can’t continue). But despite this, we have still blocked 30,000 AI bot requests in the last 24 hours.

I know some of the bigger servers like Lemmy.world are blocking IP ranges belonging to Alibaba and others (and adding to the list all the time), because the traffic is just insane.

Yeah, when writing this comment I looked back at articles and there were articles about the government pulling funding, about WCC voting on whether they would continue anyway, and articles about it being a joint project with NZTA (from after the announcement that the government had pulled out). I could see early articles saying the plan was to kick out cars during the day, but the later articles didn’t mention it. It was all a bit confusing, and often contradictory.

Aaah you have one of those websites! I arrive at them and then spend ages trying to work out if there is anywhere to go.

There’s literally nothing at the root domain as in if you try to go there it will just say it couldn’t connect this site doesn’t exist. Not even a blank page. I find it’s pretty common, any time I interact with someone with a custom email address I try to go to the site and a lot of the time it doesn’t exist.

Like a less empowering version of zombo!

😆 maybe I should put something like that on the root domain!

Have to say we are fortunate to get our teenage years in pre-phone cameras. My drunk and disorderly fashion crimes live on only in the minds of people who witnessed them.

Yeah, progress. When my kids or grandkids are older, there will probably be constant CCTV monitored by AI, posting clips of the ridiculous escapades to social media in real time.

This conversation is reminding me I should fix my old site. I hate the constant updates involved in wordpress.

I’ve never hosted wordpress. I don’t have a reason to, but running a site and seeing all the hits to wordpress URIs from bots trying to exploit known vulnerabilities puts me off anyway!

I’m no expert, and I’m running Bazzite (and previously Nobara), both of which have the RPM installed by default so I don’t think I’ve ever used the Steam Flatpak. But things mentioned in the thread are VR and Gamescope.

I do wonder if any issues are related to permission restrictions that could be resolved editing permissions with Flatseal, but I don’t know enough about the issues.

The two solutions I’ve seen presented in the thread for the Steam problem are to run Steam in a flatpak or a distrobox. I’m not sure if using distrobox has the same issues as flatpak.