hendrik

A software developer and Linux nerd, living in Germany. I’m usually a chill dude but my online persona doesn’t always reflect my true personality. Take what I say with a grain of salt, I usually try to be nice and give good advice, though.

I’m into Free Software, selfhosting, microcontrollers and electronics, freedom, privacy and the usual stuff. And a few select other random things as well.

MRZ LCK 00

About: 🔒🐧🕵🏽
Pronouns: [any]
Pixelfed: Hendrik Langer (npub13uj…3rhg)
Peertube: hendrik@tube.p3x.de

Last Notes

2026-08-20 15:10:25 UTC

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Does your bank even allow you to file debit notes, or collect money from other people's credit cards? As far as I know that's never part of a regular consumer bank account...
For payment in advance (if you clients put in the effort to do a bank transfer) I think there's HBCI or whatever standards we have integrated in some CRM and eCommerce solutions.

2026-03-27 07:41:29 UTC

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Probably more NSFW instances? We barely have one.

2026-03-21 23:31:16 UTC

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To be fair, it doesn't have to be computer code. You could ask it to write a letter to your boss, demanding a raise. Or apply for a new stapler for the office?! Draw an astronaut on a horse as a logo for the new interconnection between the atronomy and horses libraries? 😂

2025-11-28 01:21:12 UTC

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As far as I know, one way to do it is to use an image2image model / image editing model. You'd need to generate one reference image of your character. And then feed the reference image into it and tell it to draw that character in a different scenario. I haven't done it in a while, not sure what people use these days to do it locally.

2025-10-30 18:43:05 UTC

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Sure. It's a clever idea. I was mainly concerned with the side-effects like removing all information from Google as well, so the modern dynamics Cory Doctorow calls "enshittification" of the internet. And I'm having a hard time. I do development work and occasionally archive content, download videos or transform the stupid website with local events into an RSS feed. I'm getting rate-limited, excluded and blocked left and right. Doing automatic things with websites has turned from 10 lines of Python into an entire ordeal with loading a headless Chromium into an entire Gigabyte or more of RAM, having some auto-clickers dismiss the cookie banners and overlays, do the proof-of-work... I think it turns the internet from an open market of information into something where information isn't indexed, walled and generally unavailable. It's also short-lived and cant be archived or innovated upon any more. Or at least just with lots of limitations. I think that's the flipside. But it has two sides. It's a clever approach. And it works well for what it's intended to do. And it's a welcome alternative to everyone doing the same thing with Cloudflare as the central service provider. And I guess it depends on what exactly people do. Limiting a Fediverse instance isn't the same as doing it with other platforms and websites. They have another channel to spread information, at least amongst themselves. So I guess lots of my criticism doesn't apply as harshly as I've worded it. But I'm generally a bit sad about the general trend.

2025-10-30 17:58:14 UTC

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I think the main point is to load a JavaScript and make the client perform a proof-of-work. That's also the mechanism they advertise with.
The additional (default) heuristics seem to be [here](https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis/blob/main/data/botPolicies.yaml) looks like they match for some known user agents and header strings and there are some IP address ranges in there. And some exception to allow-list important stuff.

2025-10-30 17:38:41 UTC

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Well, pretty much all browsers fake their user agent strings for a long time now. That's for privacy reasons. Because malicious actors can single you out with all that information, the combination of IP, operating system and version and exact version of the browser and used libraries. Also they don't want to advertise if you skimped on updates and are vulnerable for exploits. And they fake more because via Javascript a website can get your screen size, resolution and all kinds of details. That's business as usual. These pieces of information still serve some purpose, occasionally... But they're more a relic from the distant past when the internet was an entirely different place without an advertisement and surveillance economy.
And sure, shady bots fake them as well. It's rare to see correct information with anything. Lemmy for example advertises the correct name and version number.

2025-10-30 17:03:15 UTC

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I don't know how you're reading this, in case you didn't know, a lot of browsers have the word "Safari" in their user agent string.
My Vanadium browser identifies as: "Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 10; K) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/142.0.0.0 Mobile Safari/537.36"
So there's Safari in it, but it's a Chromium based browser on Android. And none of the information is correct. It's Android 16, not 10 and Vanadium or Chromium isn't even in it. Also doesn't use Mozilla's engine nor AppleWebkit. It is version 142.something however.
My Firefox (LibreWolf) identifies as: "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:144.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/144.0" that doesn't include anything else.
But the desktop Chromium does the same thing again: "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/141.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"

2025-10-30 16:40:37 UTC

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Interesting. For me on a 16 month old PieFed instance, mostly used by me, 95% of the total incoming traffic is federation. With some countermeasures activated. In the last 3 days I got 450k requests from Lemmy instances, 7k from PieFed, 10k from Mastodon, 30k from PeerTube and 30k have a browser User Agent string so those are users or crawlers. That's roughly 5%. 5k of those have bot or crawler in the User agent, that's 1% of my requests. Fun fact: 52% of all incoming traffic is just to federate with lemmy.world.

2025-10-30 08:39:47 UTC

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Hmmm. I mean my instance is small, almost all of my traffic comes from federation. There will be like 50 requests in the log to forward some upvotes, and then one or two from a user or crawler. Most of them seem to behave, it was just Alibaba and Tencent who did proper DDoS attacks on me. I've blocked most of their ASNs and so far it seems to do 100% what I was trying to do. I suppose the minor stream of requests from South America and other places of the world isn't humans either, but they mostly read articles and that's kind of a cheap request on PieFed and it's not a lot. I'll keep an eye on it, maybe that's an alternative solution. Though currently it's a manual process to look up the address ranges and write the firewall rules. It should probably be automated in a way before random people adopt it.

2025-10-30 00:00:30 UTC

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To be honest, I'm not really a fan of fighting the AI scraper war. It's ultimately the same dynamics which turned the open internet into what it is today... 10 years ago I could just look up stuff... google whether my Thinkpad supports more or faster RAM than what the specs said, and I'd find some nice Reddit thread. And now it's all walled off, information isn't shared freely anymore, and I'm having a hard time. And we do the same thing.
But... We do need to fight. I just wish there was some solution which doesn't add to the enshittification of the internet. I've been hit by them as well and the database load made the entire server grind to a halt. I've added some firewall rules and deny lists to my reverse proxy to specifically block the AI companies and so far it's looking good. I'll try to postpone solutions like Anubis until it's unavoidable. And I guess it won't work for everything. We need machine-readable information, APIs, servers to talk to each other...
But that's just my 2 cents and I'm going to change my opinion and countermeasures once necessary.

2025-02-18 01:54:41 UTC

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Wear a mask. Or a helmet.

2025-01-17 22:02:42 UTC

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Uh, that's definitely too much technobabble about funghi. Can you dumb that down a bit for me and describe it from a user's perspective? How do I use this? How do I get my favorite music in? And it what form does it return recommendations to me?

2024-11-21 14:52:17 UTC

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And will we get that technology to keep the Fediverse and free platforms safe? Probably not. All the predecessors have been kept away for sole use of the big players, despite populism always claiming we need to introduce total surveillance to keep the children safe...

2024-07-27 19:37:24 UTC

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I don't get that either. The "All" feed ist just a random pile of uninteresting stuff (to me). Lots of news of the day, memes that aren't even funny... I think I would have left Lemmy a long time ago if that had been my experience. I subscribe to the things I want to read. But I took from a few conversations that some people like to browse the "All" feed. I still don't get it.
I kinda lost hope that Lemmy will provide us with a new and different approach to this. The developers are kind of doing their thing. There have been suggestions and new ideas. But usually they don't get implemented. Maybe they're just not that progressive. And a few attempt I read about were really radical in re-defining social media. And people also don't seem to like anarchy and freedom of speech over everything else because that just ends up being a place for trolls. I'd like to have something in the middle. And I think we've already learned a few things in the time Lemmy has been around.

2024-07-26 11:33:07 UTC

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I think I mostly agree. The thing with that, we could solve a lot of the issues with technology. Give users more tools to decide what content and which users to expose themselves to. Maybe hide or collapse content on a user level. But we just have these blunt tools and lots of fine granular tools that would be able to actually tackle the issues are missing on Lemmy. And I think we should revamp some other aspects too to foster good behaviour. I don't see things change substancially, the way it is.
One good thing about the Fediverse is everyone can have their own instance and make their own rules. Theoretically that enables us to have a locked down "safe" space and an anarchic place with freedom of speech next to each other.
In practice most people don't lean towards the extremes, you're right. I want something in between. Not just a*holes and trolls but some meaningful discussions. I wouldn't want to be on a free speech instance. But I also don't want to be in a bubble all day. So something in the middle would be appreciated.

2024-07-26 09:40:09 UTC

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I think what we ultimately need is a healthy and welcoming culture of being nice to each other and engaging with each other with a minimal amount of drama. But that's difficult to pull off and a long process. We aren't there yet but we can make an effort.
Question is: how do we get there? Defederation might be part of that. But it's a bad tool with lots of consequences and side-effects. And ultimately the Fediverse is about connecting people. So disconnecting them will prove to be problematic. However we don't all agree on that. And it's a good thing that the Fediverse is a diverse place. You can sign up at beehaw and they have a strict policy and are happy to defederate with a lot of the network. Maybe OP is better aligned with what they do, than be on lemmy.world

2024-07-26 08:16:48 UTC

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You can cross off lemmygrad and hexbear. Those are defederated already.
https://lemmy.world/instances
It's just lemmy.ml we have to talk about.