Tech Fascists and the Enshittification of Access

Photo de Lukas sur Unsplash

You know exactly what this article is going to be.

I’ve woken up on this bright Saturday morning not living the best life, mainly because the weather is so unpredictable that when I set the heating over night it didn’t account for shit to get very cold. Jarod has also been a total dick today and I woke up with him clinging on all the covers while I was very much balls in the wind.

Anyways, I for some reason decided that the things I absolutely had to do today was start wokring on 18 different things at once. You see I have been working and very busy, being a little too tired to deal with just general me time projects. Servers ticking away on their own in corners needing care and attention.

I started with trying to find some information on routing specific email addresses in Postfix so I could get the main big server I pay for to relay emails from outside of my network into the BBS. Because I don’t want to need to use 18 different domains (side note I’m sure there are 18 different domains redirecting to mmn.ca now) for my little projects I decided to set the BBS up on mmn.ca.

The trouble with that is of course that I have big server handling my email there and I don’t need little BBS to be dealing with 2025 emails. I know this must be some kind of possibility since transport postmap actually exists and I use this a lot.

I go to find my answer using different search engines, I can’t find shit, I get some kind of close approximation of something to do with postfix but nothing to do with my actual question. I give up and I use ChatGPT. I get my answer, probably stolen from Stackoverflow. It vaguely works, good enough.

I then setup the modem on the BBS because I’m so fucking ADHD, Jarod is screaming at me for wet food because having the croquettes isn’t good enough. We exchange screams.

I clean the dust from the clim. I check the 200 emails in both of my inboxes I haven’t had time for.

My effort to create a thing and share a thing has apparently a huge price tag because I don’t use somebody elses platform or have the time to really handle a lot of the WAF business on my own. I check, the vast majority of the traffic is non genuine bots. Even the bot people can’t really stop them. Each bot has a price, 0,002 cents.

I grow furious. Probably because of my apeshit blood pressure. I can’t search for a simple answer, I can’t run my hobby without some extravagant nonsense blocker, I look at the tarpit I threw up for the lolz and I see yet another fucking AI bot just chewing at it since the last time I checked.

I read the news.

Its all just the point isn’t it. Make existing outside of Facebook impossible with the constant injustice of if they’re not stealing your images, your text, then they’re stealing your resources and that of the planet to not be able to tell people to make pizza without glue.

It feels insane. That’s probably the point.

I remember when I first setup my website on my Macintosh Quadra using QuidProQuo, a little email server ran as well. Served up local files for not-local people. Now I’m writing up rules to keep Facebook from DDoSing my home internet connection.

I got fed up and I switched on the ultra setting on Deflect, an additional JS check to at least throw off a lot of these low effort bots. Unfortunately that also means it fucks with people who don’t want to use Javascript or the latest version of Chromium with Extra AI(tm). I also have the fediverse pointed here, so I need to figure out what URLs they all use to make sure that they don’t end up in the bot blocker, allowing people to fetch my articles through a RSS reader, and more security tools being able to ping inwards.

That’s also the point, make it impossible to opt-out of techno surveillance capitalism because everybody got to use some kind of tool to block anything out.

Fuck all these people who make our world worse and their enablers.