this is great. Google has a vendetta against small personal blogs and is one of the original reasons why I fell in love with Google was because I got to discover all these indie publishers. as much as I love sub stack and Reddit these platforms along with all the garbage and slop is pushing us down.

I'm hoping one day the entire internet forks

you are absolutely right, standards are so important in web design esp when you take into consideration ppl with ADA needs, elderly people having a familiar env etc

to be fair a lot of ppl still run this way and just have really good backups, or have an offline / truly on-prep server where they can flip the dns switch in case of true outage.

Yes and for many services that is totally fine. As long as you have backups of data and can redeploy easily. It's not how I personally do things usually but there is definitely a place for it.

I agree with you, even for the servers I am responsible for I always make decisions like putting db on supabase instead of local, hosting files on s3 with versioning/multi region etc. then of course come up with a backup and snapshot system.

I haven't heard minix in so long!

why does Microsoft just not listen to its people

RCS is incredibly centralized. More than half of the phone carriers decided it was too complicated to run their own RCS servers and so just sub-contract them to a Google subsidiary (Jibe).

To be fair that seems to be the path email is going down. Most businesses don't want run their own email and just use one of two big providers.

I already do this with next cloud and s3, I've never once had an issue in many years

it really varies, you are correct most modern ones search the byte string for @ characters but there are probably hundreds of different methods out there in black hat marketing circles to scrape emails.

Haven’t heard “black hat marketing” before but that’s very fitting for a lot of the “growth hackers” out there

you know what's funny is that llms are also good at detecting spam as they are generating it. I've got an automation that scores incoming emails and it's getting better and better each day (also more expensive haha)

I can’t explain it well, but I think there is an asymmetric issue here… that the ability for an LLM to write a plausible email, and the ability for an LLM to detect that it’s spam are mismatched.

If an LLM and make a plausible email, the best another LLM can do is to rank it as plausible. Blackbox creation and detection have to be on the same level.

Perhaps if you said the detection LLM had all your context and websearch. That it could know that a Penny Pollytree at Coco Co isn’t a real person, but… that just seems like burning a ton of coal to detect fraud where the creation LLM was able to easily come up with the fictitious spam cheaply.

The real story here is this will go beyond email verification. That every system we have is going to need to up its security. Paper birth certificates and social security cards and email addresses and all manner of identity is going to need new systems of auth. The challenge will be to prevent authoritarian centralization.

But I think there's also an asymmetry strongly favouring the defense, namely that for a spam mail to be worthwhile, it needs some call to action, a way to lure in the victims.

A link to a shady website, an infected attachment, a weird freemail address in the body or Reply-To header that doesn't match the forged From header, etc. They're trying to get cleverer for sure -- I started getting phishing mails where the malicious link is only in a QR code in an embedded image -- but I think the need to somehow link to the trap is an inherent weakness against any defense. SpamAssassin rules give a good overview of stuff that help detection no matter how the rest of the mail is generated.