Your keystroke biometrics are everywhere

Real time collaboration software and text boxes that rapidly save drafts to the cloud essentially log your fingerprintable typing behavior. The industry refers | Continue reading


@seirdy.one | 2 hours ago

Common Crawl and search engines

Common Crawl is the closest thing we have to an open index, though it doesn’t meet your requirement of ignoring robots.txt for corporate websites while obeying | Continue reading


@seirdy.one | 3 months ago

On a more selective Google

Selectivity is long overdue. Marginalia, Stract, and Teclis feel like a breath of fresh air for broad short-tail queries because they downrank or skip pages | Continue reading


@seirdy.one | 4 months ago

On valid XHTML5 again

Switching a site to XHTML5 is only a lot of work at first, because it may have latent bugs. For instance, you may have a stray tag that the HTML parser | Continue reading


@seirdy.one | 4 months ago

Working through forge downtime

Sourcehut and Codeberg are experiencing reliability issues due to an ongoing layer-3 DDoS attack. I managed to continue working on this site uninterrupted: I | Continue reading


@seirdy.one | 10 months ago

Enshittification and user domestication

I admit that I feel salty about the word “enshittification” taking off instead of my phrase for the same thing: “user domestication”. I prefer the latter | Continue reading


@seirdy.one | 10 months ago

Ideas for filtering fediverse timelines

An alternative to controversial recommendation algorithms is timeline-filtering algorithms. Feeling pressured to scroll through too much is unhealthy and lends | Continue reading


@seirdy.one | 11 months ago

Some site optimizations

I continue to work on my site over break. Today I got the build time down to 3.5 seconds for the Hugo build and just under 3 seconds for post-processing and | Continue reading


@seirdy.one | 12 months ago

How to build this site

Instructions for re-building seirdy.one from its source code | Continue reading


@seirdy.one | 12 months ago

More native than a Web app

Whenever I discover a new GUI toolkit, my first question is always “is it more native than the Web?” For reference, here are some ways Web apps have better | Continue reading


@seirdy.one | 12 months ago

Choosing an encrypted DNS protocol

The three most popular DNS protocols with transit encryption are DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH), DNS-over-TLS (DoT), and DNS-over-QUIC (DoQ). This should help you choose | Continue reading


@seirdy.one | 1 year ago

Webrings are already back

Webrings are alive and well; they don’t need to be “brought back” because they’re already here. I’m in 14 webrings. If you think that’s a lot, foreverkeith.is | Continue reading


@seirdy.one | 1 year ago

Proposal: an HTML element for spoilers

The case for including dedicated elements for spoiler tags in HTML. An informal proposal describing use-cases, syntax, semantics, and recommended user-agent behavior. | Continue reading


@seirdy.one | 1 year ago

Fixing Tor Browser accessibility

It looks like the Tor Browser is finally addressing some of the accessibility issues inherent to its fingerprinting resistance, starting with Issue 42226: | Continue reading


@seirdy.one | 1 year ago

Testimonials

What do people think about Seirdy? These are some quotes about me. | Continue reading


@seirdy.one | 1 year ago

Real name policies

The primary, hopefully-unintended function of a “real-name policy” is to exclude people and make people less genuine. Many aren’t at home with the name deemed | Continue reading


@seirdy.one | 1 year ago

Firefox focus ring regression

Firefox 120 appears to have regressed to its older WebKit-like blue focus outlines; it briefly had dual-color white-and-blue outlines. I’d previously advised | Continue reading


@seirdy.one | 1 year ago

Support me

Support my work by sending me donations! This helps me continue Fediverse moderation, blogging, and coding. | Continue reading


@seirdy.one | 1 year ago

Fediverse defederation considerations

What I consider: Is an offending post a property of the instance or the user? It may reflect the instance if it’s written or reblogged by a staff member or part | Continue reading


@seirdy.one | 1 year ago

Fedora is pretty stable

Fedora is a stable distro now, with three levels of pre-release: Rawhide is unstable, Branched is sort of like an alpha release, and Beta is for early adopters. | Continue reading


@seirdy.one | 1 year ago

WCAG 2.2 and validation

WCAG 2.2 removed SC 4.1.1, Parsing (Level A). I maintain that valid markup has important benefits despite no longer being required. We may find it possible to | Continue reading


@seirdy.one | 1 year ago

Living dead internet theory

I propose an alternative to the Dead Internet Theory called the Living Dead Internet Theory, an exaggerated version of my actual beliefs: Any content written to | Continue reading


@seirdy.one | 1 year ago

Thoughts on callout semantics

Interesting proposal! Some thoughts: I’d suggest looking into the doc-notice, doc-tip, and doc-example DPUB-ARIA roles. I’m a big fan of DPUB-ARIA and I do not | Continue reading


@seirdy.one | 1 year ago

Targeting secure browser profiles

It’s hard to target browsers’ secure profiles. Safari’s Lockdown Mode disables a dozen or so APIs and a handful of other features; the Tor Browser disables | Continue reading


@seirdy.one | 1 year ago

Fingerprinting and customization

These addons work by injecting or altering stylesheets in the page, and are trivially detectable. A good rule of thumb is that if it can trigger a CSP violation | Continue reading


@seirdy.one | 1 year ago

Regex feature creep considered non-harmful

De-facto standard extensions for recursion and variable-length look-arounds have existed for ages; the word “regular” in most regular-expression engines is | Continue reading


@seirdy.one | 1 year ago

Adblocking with a clear conscience

There is no such agreement on the web: On the users’s end, we don’t have advance notice that a link destination will contain malware (such as ads). The page has | Continue reading


@seirdy.one | 1 year ago

CNET didn’t have to delete old articles

CNET actually didn’t have to delete old articles to improve ranking. If CNET simply removed those articles from its sitemap, used WebSub to inform Google (and | Continue reading


@seirdy.one | 1 year ago

Screen2x and DOM Distiller

I just tried Chromium’s “Screen2x” article distiller (experimental in chrome://flags). Before, the DOM Distiller removed elements far too aggressively. The new | Continue reading


@seirdy.one | 1 year ago

Permissions Policy header bloat

I’m a browser “with the latest in header compression”, fetching a web page. I race a TCP-based ALPN run against an HTTPS record lookup (Chromium’s behavior). | Continue reading


@seirdy.one | 1 year ago

“Open Artificial Intelligence” misses the point

The Open-Source Initiative (OSI) is planning to form a definition of “Open Artificial Intelligence” (not to be confused with OpenAI, a company selling | Continue reading


@seirdy.one | 1 year ago

Polygot XHTML5

Why is my site’s markup polygot XHTML5? I have had to deal with some really awful user-agents: Bespoke markup parsers in RSS readers. Link previews in obscure | Continue reading


@seirdy.one | 1 year ago

Semantic tone indicators

We need semantic markup for sarcasm for the best of both worlds! Style sarcasm with CSS and have your client/browser indicate it to you however you prefer. The | Continue reading


@seirdy.one | 1 year ago

Blocking certain bots

I don’t want my content on those sites in any form and I don’t want my content to feed their algorithms. Using robot.txt assumes they will ‘obey’ it. But they | Continue reading


@seirdy.one | 1 year ago

De-federating P92

A compilation of my reasons and non-reasons for proactively de-federating from Facebook/Meta-affiliated projects, and refusing to support them. | Continue reading


@seirdy.one | 1 year ago

Irrevocable consent

When I use my legal rights to request an organization to delete my data— Do they also un-teach their ML models everything they learned from my data? Can they | Continue reading


@seirdy.one | 1 year ago

I love your website

When I talk about website accessibility, I think a lot of people get stressed out and wonder if their personal site passes a really high bar. Some feel pressure | Continue reading


@seirdy.one | 1 year ago

Problems with BIMI

Everything about Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI) feels so half-baked. Lukewarm take: BIMI should mandate DMARC with DKIM and just ignore SPF. | Continue reading


@seirdy.one | 1 year ago

Thoughts on trademarks

I don’t think trademarks are, in principal, evil. But anything that has billions of dollars riding behind its ability to get twisted out of proportion will be | Continue reading


@seirdy.one | 1 year ago

Default text sizes

I’ve previously been an advocate of making websites with long-form body text increase the default size just a bit, since their text should be larger than the | Continue reading


@seirdy.one | 1 year ago

Defederation is a feature

Federation is a revocable privilege contingent upon instance staff maintaining a community that other instances feel safe connecting to. If staff fails to meet | Continue reading


@seirdy.one | 1 year ago

Approaches to speculative preloading

instant.page (mentioned in another response) is popular, but it’s not the only game in town. Google Chrome Labs made an alternative called quicklink which also | Continue reading


@seirdy.one | 1 year ago

My Fediverse blocklists

Documentation on which Fediverse blocklists I offer, how they are made, their differences, their caveats, and their intended use. | Continue reading


@seirdy.one | 1 year ago

Opting out of LLM indexing

I added an entry to my robots.txt to block ChatGPT’s crawler, but blocking crawling isn’t the same as blocking indexing; it looks like Google chose to use the | Continue reading


@seirdy.one | 1 year ago

Re: automated workflows for websites

This is so similar to my setup! I run Stylelint and v.Nu too. I send v.Nu output through a JQ filter to filter out false-positives (after reporting them | Continue reading


@seirdy.one | 1 year ago

Clang supports wiping call-used registers

Here’s a compiler flag that slipped my notice: Clear Linux has -fzero-call-used-regs=used in its CFLAGS for security-sensitive x86_64 packages, wiping call-used | Continue reading


@seirdy.one | 1 year ago

ClientHello extension randomization

To limit ossification, Mozilla and Google have begun randomizing the order of TLS ClientHello extensions (as of Chromium 110 and NSS 3.84). I see this as a nice | Continue reading


@seirdy.one | 1 year ago

Fediverse search and consent

Indexing Fediverse posts should be “mandatory opt”, not opt-in or opt-out. Account creation should offer a few checkboxes: indexing could be done by “your | Continue reading


@seirdy.one | 1 year ago