It shows that my DNS resolvers are my (public edge) gateway server and then declares that the DNS resolver belongs to my ISP although the PTR is correctly (more or less, let's not get into it) set to an FQDN which is under my domain. In actuality my resolvers don't have public addresses at all (and all of the DNS traffic does of course go out through the gateway server).
Ok, free tech support I guess. It could be shitty DNS provisioning, that's pretty common. But are you using wireless? Are you familiar with Buffer Bloat generally, let alone some of the other implicit shenanigans in "traffic shaping"?
A few years ago the cognitive dissonance of people saying "DoH is faster" to the same DNS server(s) started really bugging me: is it really DoH, or is it simply TCP vs UDP? So I wrote a little thing I can install on my laptop to do DNS forwarding over plain old TCP (originally no encryption): https://github.com/m3047/tcp_only_forwarder
Golly, on my wifi TCP was certainly more reliable than UDP. It's due to how wifi devices prioritize and buffer traffic. Maybe they should implement / enable DoH on their own servers.
On the other hand if all of your access from the workplace network to web resources is proxied (and since DoH is a web service), they may not care.
I've put contact info & jurisdiction for my domains in TXT records at the apex since Hover doesn't actually have whois. I publish dynamic status information in the DNS on a special server outside of the ICANN roots, but it's mostly technical information.
Depends on the small business obviously. I've been in IT for 40+ years and enjoy torturing clankers; I ran a bot motel 20 years ago. These things are so badly written, and obviously they don't care because they're not truly conscious, but the meat in charge is ignorant or doesn't care. So web scraping, and the point cloud of nearly indistiguishable abuse it travels with, is pretty easily tripped by some simple technical tests and salting of content. At least mostly.[0]
I've been wondering to myself "how can I get people to go through a login process without going through a login process?" for a few months, and I've come up with a simple solution which I'll be implementing in the next few weeks.[1] Like the other technical measures it doesn't identify bots but there will be a gate with backpressure that at a point in time a given IP address has some probability (adjusted in realtime based on $things) of passing through, and through my mysterious process is then "logged in". Then that address is pretty much given a free pass as long as its behavior remains "human". Real humans may be denied access initially and have to try again, and their luck will be affected by how aggressively the bots are fighting it out at that point in time. This isn't much different than the extant reality, but it is in terms of what happens after an initial successful page load. It's an experiment, I'm hoping it's tunable so that the experience is more or less indistinguishable from the status quo; we will see.
I'd love to find a group of likeminded individuals where we can discuss some of this TLP:YELLOW or Chatham House Rules. If you are savvy enough to hunt me down and can demonstrate that you're a real human, small operator, and that you can keep things closely held I'll talk with you, if you want someone to run your mitigations that would cost money.
[0] Had an episode last week where somebody scanned approximately 1000 URLs (maybe 60% of the discoverable URLs) over six hours. 1200 addresses fetched exactly one URL, another 400 or so fetched two or three. Every one of those URLs was fetched exactly two times. Real showshoe stuff, nicely done.
[1] Firewall rules and fail2ban. I give fail2ban special powers in terms of the logs it follows and the actions it can invoke. Conntrack without conntrack (of course the firewall has conntrack, it's just not the best option for this use case).
I like that metaphor. But what it calls to my mind is an "alien artifact" which was found by a road, and "how did these refined metals get placed inside of a rock, in such an unnatural formation?" and there was much debate about this artifact. Years later it was determined that it was in fact a spark plug which had been remineralized by the effluent from a mine upstream: an unusual process acting on a discarded object, and people who want to believe. Nobody thought that the remineralization process could take less than hundreds of years, which ruled out "spark plug".
"a security vulnerability disclosed back in 2022 shows the shuffle can be reversed, and some states have not applied the software update that resolves it."
"a team of researchers published a report showing that certain ballot scanning machines used throughout the US had a critical privacy failure in how they anonymized ballots"
"Specifically, the machines would assign a seemingly random number to each electronic ballot record at the time of scanning to label each ballot for later auditing."
I can tell you that before WA went to all-mail voting it wouldn't have happened, because I served as a pollworker and election site inspector. There was a optical scan ballot reader / counter, my confidence is high it only kept running totals. The ballots fell into a bin, at the end of the day the bin was unlocked and the ballots were tossed into bags (no particular order) which were then sealed. As inspector I printed a copy of the tape which went downtown with the bag(s); they would have been able to print a new tape until the machine's memory was wiped (at which point they still had "hardcopy backup"). The ballots were not marked upon by the scanner in any manner. There was an incident where one of the ballot printing / counting companies (because they both typically had to come from the same manufacturer) started printing sequence numbers on ballots (not just ballot styles) and that went to court.
I've not witnessed what happens with all-mail voting, but there is no sequence number on the ballots. ;-) The count is not supposed to start until the polls close. Before that the ballots are ostensibly separated from their identity (the envelope) in an identity confirmation ceremony. My impression is that they're scanned at this point and the scans are utilized for counting / optical scan, but I'm not certain about this or that it's the same everywhere. I don't know what happens to the physical ballots; back in the day what I know is that if a ballot needed to be corrected (defacement or damage renders it unreadable) then a new ballot was prepared under the supervision and adjudication of election observers and the old ballot was destroyed; but that's the exception which proves the rule that physical, anonymized ballots were retained.
The voting process is in the hands of the individual (United) States; in WA it's largely in the hands of the County administrators and varies to a degree Statewide.
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