I always force myself to do this too. The only 3rd party python library I regularly use is "requests" basically —a dependency that comes with its own baggage, see the recent controversy about "chardet"— but I go out of my way to grab it from pip instead installing it via pip. :-)

Something like this:

    try:
        import requests
    except ImportError:
        from pip._vendor import requests

I thought it was only me. Or it's temporarily down because some HN overload or something.

A lot of extensions are simple enough you can write your own *monkey user js

Or just use it as an example to vibecode your own. Extension laundering through vibecoding.

Looks like it needs a meta account? As soon you hit enter it wants to log-in. I guess I won't try this any time soon. :)

I recall we could dial up a super slow connection over telephone lines, get all our mails into such client in less than 4 minutes over said slow line, just to dial off again.¹ Afterwards we would read all our mails offline with all the time in the world, carefully crafting replies and put those into an "Outgoing" folder for the next time we could dial up a connection again (usually the next day). :)

¹) back then you paid Internet by the minute, or in case of the Deutsche Telekom it was a 4 minute tact in the evening, so you had to wait until after 21:00 to get the cheaper prices.

That worked because while the link may have been slow, it was circuit-switched and generally provided the 2400 bits. "Bad wifi" is unbelievably bad compared to an old dial-up link. It's so much worse than you're imagining.

Macs that no longer get reboot-requiring updates by Apple usually have long(er) uptimes. :) My record here with my primary Mac mini was a bit over a year. Only to be forced to reboot because of a power outage.

Generally it feels like sometimes you boot into a stable "session" that can go on forever, but often enough you boot in a "session" and something goes wrong quickly and you'll have to reboot after a week or two. But I do experience the same with my Raspberry PI. :)

When I wrote my own brainf*ck interpreter (in C) at the start of the year I was really struggling to find a use for the language. Eventually I had the idea to obfuscate emails on my websites with the language.

Basically each email gets written as a brainf*ck program and stored in a "data-" attribute. The html only includes a more primitively obfuscated statement "Must enable Javascript to see e-mail." by default which then gets replaced by another brainf*ck interpreter (in JS) with the output of the brainf*ck code. Since we only output ASCII we can reduce the size of the brainf*ck code by always adding 32 to each value it outputs. The Javascript is loaded from what seemingly looks like a 3rd party domain. There we filter basing on heuristics and check if the "referer" matches before sending out the actual interpreter code.

Of course all this would not help if a scraper properly runs things through Javascript too.

Recently I read you soon will be able to run DOOM via CSS, so certainly it should be possible to have a brainf*ck interpreter in CSS? That would be the next step… just to get rid of the Javascript, but then I'm okay with all the downsides of using Javascript just for the e-mail obfuscation.

Anyway… I also regularly (at least once a year) rotate those public contact addresses.

How does this approach meaningfully differ from having javascript that XORs the email with a random sequence of bytes stored in that JS?

It's more fun? :)

/edit

And you can combine both approaches: XOR'ing the code first for good measurements. :)

How does that work if the scraper takes a screenshot to feed to a LLM or OCR?

That seems like a very expensive way to crawl the internet

Scrape normally collect emails, if no email seen take screenshot and OCR OCR is cheap and REGEX is cheap

It would be interesting to show bf code rather than the actual email on the webpage. A lot of OCR systems struggle with this kind of repeated symbols where the exact count is required.

Sounds interesting. I always wanted to use a Raspberry PI as router (to have one as backup in case the OpenWRT Linksys goes down), but couldn't wrap my head around properly how to overcome the single network port (I think the usual recommendation is to use an extra USB network card/adapter). Can you elaborate more about this VLAN stuff (you would put your modem, your router, and all your machines on the switch... and in the switch you tell the router connection to double use the connection for WAN and LAN separated via VLANs? And put the modem into the "WAN VLAN" too?)

Ideally the PI also should to what the extra DSL Modem does… but I guess that's where the dram must stop. :D

When you setup your single ethernet port (let's call it eth0) as a VLAN trunk port, you'll get the ability to configure multiple virtual interfaces off of it. How many virtual interfaces you get depends on how many VLANs you want to tag traffic for. For example, if you have 2 VLANS with ids 100 and 200 (100 being your public Internet-facing traffic, and 200 being your LAN traffic), you would then have interfaces eth0.100 and eth0.200 to work with that you can then use in your firewall scripts as if they were two separate, physical interfaces.

This of course means you need a VLAN-aware switch that this single ethernet port can plug into, configured as a VLAN trunk (in Cisco terms) port. You would then want to configure one of the other switch ports as a VLAN access port assigned to VLAN 100 (untagged). This is the port you would plug your cable modem into. Then (in the simplest example) you could assign all the rest of the switch ports to VLAN 200 (untagged), and you would plug all your LAN devices into them.

I've created a blog post about this: https://louwrentius.com/raspberry-pi-as-a-router-using-a-sin...

The TL;DR is to have two vlans on the cable from your switch (called a "trunk"), "lan" and "wan", carrying the respective LAN and WAN networks. Then, on the Pi, create two vlans on the underlying Ethernet interface. Then those two VLAN interfaces can be configured just like the LAN and WAN interfaces of the router. On the switch, you’d dedicate one port to the WAN by adding it to the WAN VLAN without tagging, and the other interfaces do the LAN VLAN, also untagged.

I'm with a slightly older Firefox and can't use many websites at all anymore because the Cloudflare cancer.

Of course then you got sites like gnu.org too that block you because your slightly outdated user agent.

I... Don't think it does that? It shouldn't, anyway. How long has that been a thing? They've been hit pretty hard by the slop crew lately but I couldn't imagine it being so bad they require an up to date UA

It's going on since quite a while. Want to update some GNU software, or look up something? I have to switch the user agent to "curl" to be able to visit the sites.