60M total but divided among 40 counties makes 1.5M variations per county and the capital city (which is its own county, like Berlin) went over that.

I looked it up and Bucharest actually has only a 1.7M population so… I think it’s understandable that nobody expected an almost 1:1 person-to-car ratio. Exactly why and how they reached that crazy ratio I have no idea. 😆

Told you it’s a crazy rabbit hole.

polito.it may not be the best example because its A records point at private IPs (192.168.x.x). Such records are often filtered by ISP DNS servers because they are used in certain kinds of attacks.

Double check your results using DNSChecker.

Edit: also, using just dig will not resolve all possible records related to a domain. I use a script that asks dig explicitly for a variety of record types:

#!/bin/bash
echo "SOA NS A AAAA MX CNAME TXT SRV DNSKEY"|\
xargs -n1 dig +noall +answer +nocrypto "$@"|\
sort -u -k4

What do the Unbound logs say?

What upstream servers are you using?

not depend on Google/Adblock/Whatever upstream DNS server

I mean, you’re gonna have to get your DNS information somewhere. You can choose and pick your upstream but you still need one. You can cache the DNS info but you will still need to refresh it eventually. You can use a DoT or DoH upstream server so your ISP cannot spy on your DNS traffic but, again, you still need an upstream.

Yeah this is pretty much non-news at this point. The last unencumbered versions of JDK and JRE from Oracle went out in 2019, that’s 5 years ago, and they’re still allowing a grace period of another 6 months.

I mean don’t get me wrong, Oracle sucks and the way they go about licensing is shit, but at this point come on. If a company hasn’t bothered to get rid of Oracle’s version of Java for the last 6 years maybe they want to get shafted? I don’t kink-shame.

What do you mean? It’s very easy to find the download page for OpenJDK, and Adoptium’s Temurin seems to be equally easy to find.

The more I’ve watched GoT the more I wish they’d have adapted Kharkanas instead. I know the third book isn’t out yet but that didn’t seem to stop GoT.

Pretty much.

Speaking of car plates, the Wikipedia pages for “Vehicle license plates of [insert country here]” are a rabbit hole.

I was just reading the page for Romania the other day, speaking of uniqueness, and they had this issue apparently where the combinations overall were enough for the whole country but not enough for their capital city, so they had to hack an extra digit into the plates for the capital.

I’m just explaining why Google can’t put YouTube behind a paywall. It’s fine as long as it’s an open platform. If it becomes a paid product it raises the bar.

Direct debit transactions are done by companies not by the customer. They’re used for allowing utility companies to pull the monthly bill automatically from the subscriber’s account.

With cgroups, it’s a standard kernel feature. You can limit RAM, CPU, network access, lots of things. It’s used in Docker, LXC, Kubernetes and lots of container solutions.

Lol. Yeah it’s all fresh or properly sourced material.

Go search for any music video. You should be finding exactly one (1) official entry. In some cases there are legit live recordings + montage that should also be only one of.

Instead there are dozens or hundreds, and most of them are not transformative enough to qualify for fair use. Google knows which ones are there illegaly because they are clearly able to identify and demonetize them.

But why not straight out delete them, or tell the uploader to delete them or else? Because they want to have lots of content regardless if it’s legit, and they want to show ads, just as long as it goes to the right people.

They can put ads on questionable content that’s free to watch as long as they’re ready to remove it if and when asked, but they can’t sell a product based on questionable content. It comes too close to what piracy websites are doing.

the phone shop must arrange that with a bank and does not have the option of taking on risk

That’s correct, any and all loans go through a bank. But please note that the bank won’t advise if it’s a bad loan, for example a ridiculously overpriced phone and/or phone plan. They just check if you can afford the monthly payment.

I heard SWIFT/IBAN transfers were permanent

These were card payments not transfers. Any payment done with a card, whether online or at a POS machine, can be reversed. And yes it was done for free in both cases.

There’s some hardcore conflation going on that assumes that people with technical skills will tend to be good at everything, or that they’ll gravitate towards the uber-geeky stuff.

In my experience it’s a very wide spectrum. Lots of programmers are strictly focused on the language they use and don’t care to know anything about the OS, or networking, even computers. They are definitely not jacks of all trades.

There are people who can do programming as well as system administration and build a PC and build some book shelves and so on. But that’s a very specific type of person who’s a tinkerer and happens to be into programming, it’s not because they’re a programmer.

I’ve tried Firefox limited to 1 GB for a laugh. It’s usable. It won’t do many tabs at the same time but it’s usable.

You can actually go lower than that but you’ll start to run into limitations with YouTube videos etc.

There are also other browsers out there that are more light-weight but perhaps not as feature-full as Firefox. Giving up extensions alone reduces a lot of complexity. If you fire up the package installer on any Linux distro and search for “browser” you’ll find a ton. There aren’t many engines but there are a lot of browsers.

YouTube was built on illegal content and still has a buttload of illegal content and Google knows it but won’t do anything about it. Let’s not call the kettle black.

If they really want to be serious about it fine, turn it into paid-only access. It will neatly solve the whole ad debacle and they won’t have to play cat and mouse with VPNs and blocking and all these shenanigans.

Ask yourself why they don’t do that. It’s because 90% of the content on there is illegal and when they host it for free they have an excuse. But if they turn the whole thing private and ask for money to access it they become liable for all of it.

Over here it’s not necessary for a person to restrict access because access to the credit records is restricted to banks, allowed only when a bank is asked by you explicitly for a credit, and all loans must be done only by banks. So it’s basically impossible for anybody to access it outside very specific circumstances initiated by you.

I’m many EU countries there is a state-run Credit Bureau of sorts that keeps track of each citizen’s debt.

The debt data is only available to banks and usually reduced only to the answer to the question “can this person be allowed to take on this credit”. So not what their running debt is but only whether they can take on a new, specific one.

The rules for determining that vary from state to state but generally it’s related to the person’s income and not allowing their credit payments to drop that income below what’s considered viable. Some states may use a percentage on top of that.

For context, most people in EU do not usually use credit in day to day life, only debit.

They tend to resort to credit for large purchases, the most common being a house/apartment or a car. Some stores may offer the ability to resort to credit for things like home appliances (refrigerators, AC, washing machines/driers etc.) that can put a strain on a person’s finances. Some may even offer it for more trivial purchases. These deals go through a bank as well and become a rate that you have to repay monthly. It is not related to a credit card.

There are other types of credit that are related to cards and resemble what you are familiar with in the US — ability to spend above the money you actually have and some perks on top of that. But they still work like a regular credit, they are done by banks, they are recorded at the Credit Bureau, they count towards your total indebted ability etc.

In the US people also use credit card purchases add a form of shopper assurance. In the EU this is done by the state. The entire EU has strong consumer rights in the law and there are state run national and regional consumer bureaus that will take complaints, investigate and fine the company. The law is very consumer friendly and puts the burden of responsibility on the company/bank in the case of unauthorized/unproven purchases.

You can reverse payments through the bank in the EU as well but it’s seldom necessary, since the companies tend to revert the charge willingly when confronted by the consumer protection bureaus.

I’ve only had to resort to bank reverse a couple if times.

One was when I ordered a pair of shoes of what appeared to be an Italian website. It later turned out it was a scam site that listed popular models that were not made anymore and then sent you a ridiculously poorly made knock-off copy from China. I explained the issue to my bank and showed the knockoffs I got and a week or so later the charge was reversed.

The second was while vacationing in another EU country, I started getting the same amount withdrawn (about €50) from the card each day by an entity in the country I was visiting. No idea if it was a scam or some sort of automated payment gone wrong. I blocked the card and contested the charges and they were reversed.

These days I follow a hard heuristic: Always use synthetic keys for database tables.

And the way to follow this rule is fairly simple, but it has a few twists.

For internal use, the best and most common key (in a relational database) is an auto-generated incremental sequence. But it it ok to use it externally? – across databases, across types of data storage, across APIs / services etc.

It’s tempting to refer to the sequence number in API calls, after all they are going to that particular database and are only going to be used with it, right? Well not necessarily; the database and the code powering the API are different systems, who says there won’t be other apps accessing the database for example.

The current OpSec school of thought is that sequence keys are an internal database mechanism and sequence numbers should only be used for internal consistency, never used as external references (even for the “local” API).

Sequence keys also don’t offer any way to deal with creating duplicate data entries. If you’ve been around for a while you’ve seen this, the client sends the same “create” request twice for whatever reason (UI lets user multiple-click a button, client assumes timeout when in fact it had gone through etc.) Some programmers attempt to run heuristics on the data and ignore successive create attempts that look “too similar” but it can backfire in many ways.

An UUID is pretty much universally supported nowadays, its designed to be unique across a vast amount of systems, doesn’t give anything away about your internal mechanisms, and if you ask the client to generate the UUID for create requests you can neatly solve the duplicate issue.

Do keep in mind that this doesn’t solve the problem of bijection across many years and many systems and many databases. An entity may still acquire multiple UUID’s, even if they’re each individually perfectly fine.

There can also be circumstances where you have to offer people a natural-looking key for general consumption. You can’t put UUID’s on car plates for example.