If you’re a geek like me then you probably enjoy spending your time hardening and optimizing your servers to support modern security standards and policies. If so, I’d like to share my favorite online resources and encourage you to take up the challenge of beating paranoidpenguin.net.

The amount of services offering (or even demanding) two-factor authentication (2FA) is ever-increasing. This has encouraged me to find a more resilient strategy for how I store, manage, and backup my secret keys. My old approach relied solely on using time-based one-time password (TOTP) applications capable of exporting and importing 2FA accounts.

I figured there are already too many mediocre tech blogs on the Internet, so from here on out I’ll embrace my true passion instead. Well, anime blogging is over-saturated as well, so my niche will be the sick and depraved side of anime. Thankfully, there are plenty of riches to choose from.

Content warning: The following post contains violent imagery and descriptions and absolutely no mention of Fruits Basket.

My interest in the Brave browser originated from my affection for cryptocurrencies, but I also believed in the Basic Attention Token’s potential as a digital payment platform. Lately, my experiences with the Brave browser and, by proxy, Brave Software, have changed my mind.

I recently moved my self-hosted email service from Scaleway to DigitalOcean. After receiving a new IP address for my mail server, I’m effectively once again the new kid on the block. Let’s find out if the big kids are willing to talk with me if I play nice and put on my best behavior.

After noticing that the majority of the .ICU spam campaigns were drying up, I headed over to Namecheap to find out which gTLD was the next likely target for abuse. Well, what do you know, Namecheap was throwing out .XYZ domains for 1$ a pop.

This weekend I decided to extract the IP addresses belonging to hosts used in the ongoing .best and .icu spam campaigns. I’ve only got three weeks of logs to work with so the data set is small, but it still paints a somewhat interesting picture.

The Brave Browser is on a mission to fix the web and has been gathering a lot of praise and attention from tech and crypto enthusiasts alike. Brave will diligently protect your privacy by removing intrusive ads and trackers from websites while offering you to view ads delivered through their advertising platform instead.

In preparation for my move from WordPress to Hugo, I read a few blog posts on the subject to make sure I wouldn’t run into a brick wall. After all, Google had already indexed over 3000 posts covering the subject in detail so what could possibly go wrong?

I was spending an evening window shopping for a future BSD hosting provider when I came across ARP Networks and its list of VPS plans. What caught my attention was not the technical specifications, but rather the naming scheme that I found to be simply astounding.