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I wish my web server were in the corner of my room (2022)

Back in college I used to run part of my website from a Linux box in my room. I made it into a speech synthesiser, and people could connect to the machine to talk into my flat. (Retrospective apologies to my flatmates.) This is way back in 2000 so before smartphones, and before texting, and before always-on internet (college was an exception), and before camera phones or being able to reliably email photos let alone video. Decent text-to-speech still felt novel. We had a friend who was travell

Say Bye with JavaScript Beacon

Sometimes we want to send a piece of data to our servers when user leaves our website or webapp. Maybe it’s for for analytics or even auto-logout when they leave the website. But do you know what is a reliable way of doing it? Most of you might say use XMLHTTPRequest (or fetch) in beforeunload or unload events. Like, window . addEventListener ( "beforeunload" , () => { fetch ( '/analytics' , { method : "POST" , headers : { "Content-Type" : "application/json" , }, body : JSON . stringify ({ eve

Static sites enable a good time travel experience

Varun wrote about gamifying blogging and personal website maintenance which reminded me of the time when I awarded myself some badges for blogging. I mentioned this to Varun who asked if I had any screenshots of what it looked like on my website. My initial answer was “no”, then I looked at Wayback Machine but there were not pictures of the badges. Then, a bit later it hit me. I don’t need any archived screenshots: my website is built with Eleventy and it's static so I can check out a git comm

Show HN: JavaScript-free (X)HTML Includes

This is a simple example of using browsers' built in XSL support to build a website with common theming across all pages without any server-side code, static website generators, or Javascript. See the demo site How it works When you browse to index.xml (or any of the other XML files), the browser loads the template file given at the top of the XML. This template file describes how to render the various custom tags in the XML as HTML.

Ask HN: Why does the US Visa application website do a port-scan of my network?

I have recently installed this extension on FF: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/port-authorit... and yesterday I visited this website: https://ceac.state.gov/genniv/ and I got a notification that the website tried to do a port-scan of my private network. Is this a common thing? I have just recently installed the extension, so I am not sure if there are a lot of other websites who do it. Since looking into it, I noticed that uBlock Origin already has the default list "Block Outsi

UK sentences “serial hacker” of 3,000 sites to 20 months in prison

A 26-year old in the UK who claimed to have hacked thousands of websites was sentenced to 20 months in prison after pleading guilty earlier this year. Al-Tahery Al-Mashriky of Rotherham, UK, was arrested in 2022 based on information received from U.S. law enforcement and charged for stealing log in details of millions of Facebook users, and hacking websites belonging to the government in Yemen, an Israeli news outlet, and organizations in the U.S. and Canada. Al-Mashriky pleaded guilty to the

ForgeFed: ActivityPub-based forge federation protocol

ForgeFed is a federation protocol for software forges and code collaboration tools for the software development lifecycle and ecosystem. This includes repository hosting websites, issue trackers, code review applications, and more. ForgeFed provides a common substrate for people to create interoperable code collaboration websites and applications. Federation means that these websites can interact, allowing the humans using them to interact too, despite being registered on different websites. Fo

This website is for humans

8 August 2025 Walking past a bus stop yesterday I saw an advert for Google’s AI search. The person in the ad had pointed their phone’s camera at a bowl of ramen, and the AI result explained how to reproduce it at home. How does it know? Because it’s trained on all the ramen recipes that multiple recipe authors spent hours, weeks, years perfecting. Generative AI is a blender chewing up other people’s hard work, outputting a sad mush that kind of resembles what you’re looking for, but without an

Website Is for Humans

8 August 2025 Walking past a bus stop yesterday I saw an advert for Google’s AI search. The person in the ad had pointed their phone’s camera at a bowl of ramen, and the AI result explained how to reproduce it at home. How does it know? Because it’s trained on all the ramen recipes that multiple recipe authors spent hours, weeks, years perfecting. Generative AI is a blender chewing up other people’s hard work, outputting a sad mush that kind of resembles what you’re looking for, but without an

This collaborative doodling website is like Google Maps plus MS Paint

A new website that lets you paint over a world map with other users in real-time has taken the digital illustration community by storm. Wplace is a collaborative pixel art platform that serves as a spiritual successor to Reddit’s r/Place April Fools’ Day experiments, placing time restrictions on drawing tools that motivate users to team up to complete large or complex paintings. While r/Place provided its users with a blank white pixel grid, Wplace is layered over an interactive canvas of a wor

Why Is Web Performance Undervalued?

Why is Web Performance Undervalued? Web performance is one of those things so fundamental to businesses that you would expect them to absolutely nail it. If consumers care about performance, which seems to be true, then in an efficient, competitive market you would expect businesses to be under immense pressure to optimize it. And yet, poor web performance is ubiquitous. Huge companies across the board are shipping websites and web apps so sluggish that it is killing the web. The economic upsid

Inside the Multimillion-Dollar Gray Market for Video Game Cheats

Software that can see opponents through walls. Aimbots that can lock onto other players automatically. Tools that can boost characters’ stats to the max. The world of online game cheats is expansive—with some cheat websites advertising hacks for dozens of PC games—and it’s being driven by an underground economy that’s allegedly raking in millions every year. Over the last two years, a group of computer scientists has been analyzing and mapping the online cheat marketplace, observing what behavi

Accessibility and the Agentic Web

Accessibility and the agentic web Posted on Friday, 8 August 2025 by Léonie Watson in Strategy, User experience Imagine being in a department store that sells clothes from multiple brands and having a personal shopping assistant to help you select the clothes you want to buy. As a blind person, that's about the only way it's possible to go clothes shopping, independently at least, but few stores offer such a service, so you resort to shopping online. Except that retail websites are rarely acce

Library of Congress explains how parts of US Constitution vanished from its website

The Library of Congress has given a fuller explanation as to why large sections of the U.S. Constitution suddenly vanished from its official website. As TechCrunch previously reported, parts of Section 8, as well as the entirety of Section 9 and Section 10, were deleted from Article 1 of the Constitution on the U.S. government’s official website over the past month. The changes to the sections, which pertained to the Congressional powers, the rights of individual states, and the rights to due p

Coding error blamed after parts of Constitution disappear from US website

The Library of Congress today said a coding error resulted in deletion of parts of the US Constitution from Congress' website and promised a fix after many Internet users pointed out the missing sections this morning. "It has been brought to our attention that some sections of Article 1 are missing from the Constitution Annotated (constitution.congress.gov) website," the Library of Congress said today. "We've learned that this is due to a coding error. We have been working to correct this and e

Sections on habeas corpus and nobility titles were temporarily removed from Congress' US Constitution website

Key sections of the US Constitution were temporarily removed from Congress' website. Provisions including habeas corpus (due process) and the prohibition of nobility titles (like, say, King) vanished from the digital version of the document. They've since been restored. 404 Media first reported on the edits after users on Lemmy forums spotted them. There are many ways to read a copy of the US Constitution. But the Library of Congress' online version is one of the easiest to find. Alongside its

Some people are defending Perplexity after Cloudflare ‘named and shamed’ it

When Cloudflare accused AI search engine Perplexity of stealthily scraping websites on Monday, while ignoring a site’s specific methods to block it, this wasn’t a clear-cut case of an AI web crawler gone wild. Many people came to Perplexity’s defense. They argued that Perplexity accessing sites in defiance of the website owner’s wishes, while controversial, is acceptable. And this is a controversy that will certainly grow as AI agents flood the internet: Should an agent accessing a website on b

Perplexity is allegedly scraping websites it's not supposed to, again

Web crawlers deployed by Perplexity to scrape websites are allegedly skirting restrictions, according to a new report from Cloudflare. Specifically, the report claims that the company's bots appear to be "stealth crawling" sites by disguising their identity to get around robots.txt files and firewalls. Robots.txt is a simple file websites host that lets web crawlers know if they can scrape a websites' content or not. Perplexity's official web crawling bots are "PerplexityBot" and "Perplexity-Us

Dark patterns

What to look out for when shopping online Hidden costs Hidden costs are extra costs you only find out about towards the end of your purchase, or which are made less obvious. They include pre-selected extras you may not want and add-ons presented so you feel you have to buy them. Some hidden costs are even sneakier, such as a pre-selected free trial period for a service that renews automatically if you don’t cancel before it ends - charging your card for an ongoing membership. Trick questions

NSW Fair Trading – Dark Patterns

What to look out for when shopping online Hidden costs Hidden costs are extra costs you only find out about towards the end of your purchase, or which are made less obvious. They include pre-selected extras you may not want and add-ons presented so you feel you have to buy them. Some hidden costs are even sneakier, such as a pre-selected free trial period for a service that renews automatically if you don’t cancel before it ends - charging your card for an ongoing membership. Trick questions

The HTML Hobbyist (2022)

This is an extremely streamlined path to show you how easy it can be to build a website for the World Wide Web. I suggest reading the rest of the site before attempting to follow the One Page Starter instructions. I give more details about coding HTML and building websites — and more details and options about domain names, hosting, and uploading than we just went through in the One Page Starter. There are some other hosting options that you could take advantage of that are free but with some res

The HTML Hobbyist

This is an extremely streamlined path to show you how easy it can be to build a website for the World Wide Web. I suggest reading the rest of the site before attempting to follow the One Page Starter instructions. I give more details about coding HTML and building websites — and more details and options about domain names, hosting, and uploading than we just went through in the One Page Starter. There are some other hosting options that you could take advantage of that are free but with some res

How to make websites that will require lots of your time and energy

Some lessons I’ve learned from experience. 1. Install Stuff Indiscriminately From npm Become totally dependent on others, that’s why they call them “dependencies” after all! Lean in to it. Once your dependencies break — and they will, time breaks all things — then you can spend lots of time and energy (which was your goal from the beginning) ripping out those dependencies and replacing them with new dependencies that will break later. Why rip them out? Because you can’t fix them. You don’t e

Internet age verification begins rollout, and Apple is set to be dragged into it

The UK has become the first major country to introduce a legal requirement for internet age verification, but it affects all websites and apps worldwide. Additionally, the US has recently revived a bill very similar to the British legislation. While the law was presented as a way to prevent children accessing adult websites, the reality is very different, and we’re already seeing the privacy risks of good intentions being turned into bad legislation – with iMessage and FaceTime in the firing li

My website is one binary (2022)

my website is one binary 2022-04-06 ---------------------------- a.k.a. this one weird trick that inspires me to program creatively i have struggled for years to figure out a website framework that feels good to me. i tried all of the classics, including but limited to: - ghost - hugo - jekyll - sr.ht + tarball - manual html editing i have very high and unusual standards, and none of the above felt correct to me. more importantly, none of the above excited me. i have uncovered the secret. i have

The Age-Checked Internet Has Arrived

Beginning today, millions of adults trying to access pornography in the United Kingdom will be required to prove that they are over the age of 18. Under sweeping new online child safety laws coming into force, self-reporting checkboxes that allow anyone to claim adulthood on porn websites will be replaced by age-estimating face scans, ID document uploads, credit card checks, and more. Some of the biggest porn websites—including Pornhub and YouPorn—have said that they will comply with the new rul

Microsoft Office is using an artificially complex XML schema as a lock-in tool

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My bank keeps on undermining anti-phishing education

TLDR: my bank sent out emails with websites which looked a lot like phishing mails, so much so that this similarity could potentially be used against them legally by potential phishing victims – Discussion at hackernews (soon) Chapter 1: You’ve got mail# As I was writing my first post some weeks ago, I got an email from my bank in my inbox: Here the English translation of the email: Dear …, The big Wero Win Weeks are starting! Take part now and secure your chance every week to win 7 prizes o

My Bank Keeps on Undermining Anti-Phishing Education

TLDR: my bank sent out emails with websites which looked a lot like phishing mails, so much so that this similarity could potentially be used against them legally by potential phishing victims – Discussion at hackernews (soon) Chapter 1: You’ve got mail# As I was writing my first post some weeks ago, I got an email from my bank in my inbox: Here the English translation of the email: Dear …, The big Wero Win Weeks are starting! Take part now and secure your chance every week to win 7 prizes o

Squarespace Promo Codes: 50% Off | July 2025

Squarespace helps small businesses and regular Joe Schmoes to get software help to build their own websites (for both personal and business), even including the commerce side of things with point of sale, inventory, and customer data features (both online or in person). In the age where literally everything is digitized and accessed through the World Wide Web, having an online presence is the most important thing you can do for your business or brand’s growth. Creating a website can be difficult