6 Jul
2026
6 Jul
'26
10:34 p.m.
I run www.punchcardarchive.com. It runs on a shared server so I don’t worry too much about
that stuff. My fun and games are defeating the bots and useless messages from my Contact
page. I have a homegrown captcha. I require Roman characters. I added a honeypot field. I
require a minimum number of words in the message. I recently got a message that had a
whole page of text with a very weird message. So I am putting in a max number of words
test. And I am adding a timer to the page so if the send-receive time is less that some
number of seconds I will consider it spam.
The internet is the Wild Wild West. Minus Jim West and Artemus Gordon.
8 Jul
8 Jul
2:38 a.m.
New subject: old-computers.com - down?
I don't like to post all of my tricks but I can tell you AI has made bots
smarter and we have had to respond accordingly. Ultimately they can only
use what someone came up with in the past, not as good at coming up with
new original hacks.
On Tue, Jul 7, 2026 at 4:54 PM info--- via cctalk <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org>
wrote:
I run www.punchcardarchive.com. It runs on a shared
server so I don’t
worry too much about that stuff. My fun and games are defeating the bots
and useless messages from my Contact page. I have a homegrown captcha. I
require Roman characters. I added a honeypot field. I require a minimum
number of words in the message. I recently got a message that had a whole
page of text with a very weird message. So I am putting in a max number of
words test. And I am adding a timer to the page so if the send-receive time
is less that some number of seconds I will consider it spam.
The internet is the Wild Wild West. Minus Jim West and Artemus Gordon.
3:06 a.m.
New subject: old-computers.com - down?
I don't like to post all of my tricks but I can
tell you AI has made bots
smarter and we have had to respond accordingly. Ultimately they can only
use what someone came up with in the past, not as good at coming up with
new original hacks.
I've ended up putting half the globe in my packet filter list, but thanks to
residential proxies and the subhuman sludge that runs them, even that does not
eliminate days when the server gets slammed.
I understand why people "CloudFlare all the things" but I hate that. I don't
want networks gatewayed by one more or less benign actor who may not be benign
tomorrow.
--
------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ --
Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser(a)floodgap.com
-- Nasty habits/Here to stay! -- Oingo Boingo ---------------------------------
3:15 a.m.
New subject: old-computers.com - down?
On Jul 7, 2026, at 2:36 PM, Cameron Kaiser via cctalk
<cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
I understand why people "CloudFlare all the things" but I hate that. I
don't
want networks gatewayed by one more or less benign actor who may not be benign
tomorrow.
I understand it too but I don’t think they know it _doesn’t work_. I haven’t been able to
access any (of the increasingly ubiquitous) Cloudflare site in over a year, because the
captcha just loops over and over. I’ll pass it only to be put straight back into the
captcha. I don’t care why, I’m not changing my browser configuration to accomodate
whatever it is they think they need to make it work, but it does mean that more and more
of the web has become inaccessible for me.
ok
bear.
4:27 a.m.
New subject: old-computers.com - down?
I don’t care why, I’m not changing my browser
configuration to
accomodate whatever it is they think they need to make it work, but
it does mean that more and more of the web has become inaccessible
for me.
As a guy who has to keep a variety of web sites running, I can explain
the why:
1. Spiders and robots, many driven by the current AI craze, have
increased in number, mendicacity, lawlessness, and aggressiveness by
orders of magnitude. If you're running a web site that provides content
via some sort of dynamic mechanism (content management system) that runs
code and does database queries to generate each response page, the new
level of offered load squashes your server into a greasy spot.
2. These spiders (a) lie about who they are, pretending to be real
humans; (b) don't obey robots.txt; (c) retrieve the same page multiple
times at the same instant, sometimes using different user agent strings,
to try to be sure they get the page in the face of increasing server
hostility to their bullshit.
3. These bots don't care about request rate; they just expect you to
deal with it. Will the VPS where you host your ccmp Wordpress install
keep up with dozens of page requests per second? Because if the slop
machine gets interested in something, those requests will come, and will
probably flatten you.
4. Search and (especially) AI companies have had to resort to making
end user machines fetch the content they want. Smart TVs, phones,
tablets, and other devices are increasingly being used. These devices
live in IP address space that's assigned to DSL, cable modems, cell
companies, etc.
... and the difficulty of surviving the onslaught:
1. Because these requests come from where real users live, blocking by
IP address blocks the real users.
2. Because the user agent strings are fabricated to be indistinguishable
from real user browsers, blocking by them blocks the real users.
3. Blocking by behavior has some promise, but you really need insight
into behavior across a wide swath of the internet, unless you're that
big yourself. I.e. Cloudflare and Google and Amazon have a chance.
Hobbyists don't.
For a dynamic web site, that basically leaves putting some sort of
challenge in front of your site that humans can solve easily, but the
bots can't (or don't want to bother), coupled with broader intelligence
on trends across the 'net. That looks, unsurprisingly, like Cloudflare
and similar services.
Unfortunately, those kinds of challenges, and the interface between them
and the protected website, is largely dependent on javascript and
cookies. Grumble.
Welcome to late stage capitalism.
The future, for those of us who hate the technologies, budgets, and ick
factor required to survive the post-web sewer, probably lies in static
web sites. Think tools like Hugo, Jekyll, Pelican. Edit the page on
your local machine. Run the generator. Synchronize the updated flat
HTML pages to the server.
Web servers deliver flat files with remarkable efficiency. sendfile(2)
is damn fast.
Additional upside: it's hard to hack a web app that has no code running
on the server.
De
4:42 a.m.
New subject: old-computers.com - down?
i wrote a program that counts requests by IP and frequency. That and some
fancy code to teduce server load and the bots are blocked fairly well. I
capture the attempts and lot them so I can see where and how theyre doing
it. Inhave noticed many bots use the same exact probe progression, there
must be a popular scraper bot you can download
b
On Tue, Jul 7, 2026 at 6:58 PM Dennis Boone via cctalk <
cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
I don’t care
why, I’m not changing my browser configuration to
accomodate whatever it is they think they need to make it work, but
it does mean that more and more of the web has become inaccessible
for me.
As a guy who has to keep a variety of web sites running, I can explain
the why:
1. Spiders and robots, many driven by the current AI craze, have
increased in number, mendicacity, lawlessness, and aggressiveness by
orders of magnitude. If you're running a web site that provides content
via some sort of dynamic mechanism (content management system) that runs
code and does database queries to generate each response page, the new
level of offered load squashes your server into a greasy spot.
2. These spiders (a) lie about who they are, pretending to be real
humans; (b) don't obey robots.txt; (c) retrieve the same page multiple
times at the same instant, sometimes using different user agent strings,
to try to be sure they get the page in the face of increasing server
hostility to their bullshit.
3. These bots don't care about request rate; they just expect you to
deal with it. Will the VPS where you host your ccmp Wordpress install
keep up with dozens of page requests per second? Because if the slop
machine gets interested in something, those requests will come, and will
probably flatten you.
4. Search and (especially) AI companies have had to resort to making
end user machines fetch the content they want. Smart TVs, phones,
tablets, and other devices are increasingly being used. These devices
live in IP address space that's assigned to DSL, cable modems, cell
companies, etc.
... and the difficulty of surviving the onslaught:
1. Because these requests come from where real users live, blocking by
IP address blocks the real users.
2. Because the user agent strings are fabricated to be indistinguishable
from real user browsers, blocking by them blocks the real users.
3. Blocking by behavior has some promise, but you really need insight
into behavior across a wide swath of the internet, unless you're that
big yourself. I.e. Cloudflare and Google and Amazon have a chance.
Hobbyists don't.
For a dynamic web site, that basically leaves putting some sort of
challenge in front of your site that humans can solve easily, but the
bots can't (or don't want to bother), coupled with broader intelligence
on trends across the 'net. That looks, unsurprisingly, like Cloudflare
and similar services.
Unfortunately, those kinds of challenges, and the interface between them
and the protected website, is largely dependent on javascript and
cookies. Grumble.
Welcome to late stage capitalism.
The future, for those of us who hate the technologies, budgets, and ick
factor required to survive the post-web sewer, probably lies in static
web sites. Think tools like Hugo, Jekyll, Pelican. Edit the page on
your local machine. Run the generator. Synchronize the updated flat
HTML pages to the server.
Web servers deliver flat files with remarkable efficiency. sendfile(2)
is damn fast.
Additional upside: it's hard to hack a web app that has no code running
on the server.
De
4:56 a.m.
New subject: old-computers.com - down?
On Jul 7, 2026, at 3:57 PM, Dennis Boone via cctalk
<cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
As a guy who has to keep a variety of web sites running, I can explain
the why:
I should perhaps have made my point more clearly. I know the motivations, and fully
believe in the need for solutions.
What I don’t care about is what, specifically, has made the Cloudflare solution fail to
work correctly in my browser, because I know there are people out there who read that and
RIGHT NOW are itching to tell me what I have to do differently. I wanted (probably in
vain) to head them off, if at all possible, by making it clear that it doesn’t matter what
it is, because I’m not going to do it. I’m not doing anything abnormal to the point where
it should be my problem to figure out. I would be most grateful if, instead, Cloudflare
could figure that out.
I’m well off-topic now.
ok
bear.
5:05 a.m.
New subject: old-computers.com - down?
The future, for those of us who hate the technologies,
budgets, and ick
factor required to survive the post-web sewer, probably lies in static
web sites.
Or perhaps we go to a different protocol. Most of my file archives are only
accessible by Gopher, for example. Gopher spiders of course could be built and
some web spiders try to do so through ill-configured Gopher proxies, but my
Gopher server contributes a lot less to my load average (and bandwidth usage)
right now than the web server does. It's also easier to reason about the bad
actors, since there are fewer of them.
The Gemini crowd likely has some similar thoughts.
--
------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ --
Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser(a)floodgap.com
-- Advertising is the banging of a stick in a swillbucket. -- George Orwell ---
5:12 a.m.
New subject: old-computers.com - down?
Gopher is an interesting direction to go. I've been meaning to give it a
try.
I was wondering if there's a desire to pass a few copies around, like the
old debian or netbsd mirrors, to help maintain the content of these sites.
I've seen a few go off-line in the last few years and don't want to lose
the content. I know Internet Archive is struggling with various issues, so
I was wondering if there's something a bit more home grown to participate
in.
~Daniel
On Tue, Jul 7, 2026, 17:35 Cameron Kaiser via cctalk <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org>
wrote:
The future, for those of us who hate the
technologies, budgets, and ick
factor required to survive the post-web sewer, probably lies in static
web sites.
Or perhaps we go to a different protocol. Most of my file archives are only
accessible by Gopher, for example. Gopher spiders of course could be built
and
some web spiders try to do so through ill-configured Gopher proxies, but my
Gopher server contributes a lot less to my load average (and bandwidth
usage)
right now than the web server does. It's also easier to reason about the
bad
actors, since there are fewer of them.
The Gemini crowd likely has some similar thoughts.
--
------------------------------------ personal:
http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ --
Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com *
ckaiser(a)floodgap.com
-- Advertising is the banging of a stick in a swillbucket. -- George
Orwell ---
3:24 a.m.
New subject: old-computers.com - down?
Do people mirror sites these days? I'd love to see these resources
mirrored so that they won't be lost when they get hacked / taken off-line /
pass away. With all the AI scrapping and the draconian blocking because of
it, I'm having a much harder time mirroring the few resources that I
regularly use.
~Daniel
On Tue, Jul 7, 2026, 15:36 Cameron Kaiser via cctalk <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org>
wrote:
I don't like to post all of my tricks but I
can tell you AI has made bots
smarter and we have had to respond accordingly. Ultimately they can only
use what someone came up with in the past, not as good at coming up with
new original hacks.
I've ended up putting half the globe in my packet filter list, but thanks
to
residential proxies and the subhuman sludge that runs them, even that does
not
eliminate days when the server gets slammed.
I understand why people "CloudFlare all the things" but I hate that. I
don't
want networks gatewayed by one more or less benign actor who may not be
benign
tomorrow.
--
------------------------------------ personal:
http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ --
Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com *
ckaiser(a)floodgap.com
-- Nasty habits/Here to stay! -- Oingo Boingo
---------------------------------
5:07 a.m.
New subject: old-computers.com - down?
Do people mirror sites these days?
I imagine, but this activity would be indistinguishable from bots nowadays, and
likely ends up in the same bitcan.
--
------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ --
Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser(a)floodgap.com
-- We won. Every computer in the world is basically a Mac now. -- S. Wozniak --
8:28 a.m.
New subject: old-computers.com - down?
what may need to happen is analyze the code and update / modermize it.
this can ebe dine as a wrapper to preserve the original code. that's the
beat long-term approach
b
On Tue, Jul 7, 2026 at 7:37 PM Cameron Kaiser via cctalk <
cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
Do people mirror sites these days?
I imagine, but this activity would be indistinguishable from bots
nowadays, and
likely ends up in the same bitcan.
--
------------------------------------ personal:
http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ --
Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com *
ckaiser(a)floodgap.com
-- We won. Every computer in the world is basically a Mac now. -- S.
Wozniak --
10:39 a.m.
New subject: old-computers.com - down?
On 2026-07-06 10:58 a.m., info--- via cctalk wrote:
I run www.punchcardarchive.com. It runs on a shared
server so I don’t worry too much about that stuff. My fun and games are defeating the bots
and useless messages from my Contact page. I have a homegrown captcha. I require Roman
characters. I added a honeypot field. I require a minimum number of words in the message.
I recently got a message that had a whole page of text with a very weird message. So I am
putting in a max number of words test. And I am adding a timer to the page so if the
send-receive time is less that some number of seconds I will consider it spam.
The internet is the Wild Wild West. Minus Jim West and Artemus Gordon.
Soon to be run by By Big Brother, AI.
It seems every link is hijacked for a AD, or adult or other wise.
I don't mind a site going off line, but rather the site being removed
from the web. I might not need to know of punch cards today, but who
knows in 5 years.
What I would like to is how MAG tape (7 track) was used before computers
has Operating Systems.
0
days inactive
2
days old
13 comments
8 participants
participants (8)
-
ben -
Bill Degnan -
Cameron Kaiser -
Christian Corti -
Daniel Williams -
Dennis Boone -
info＠punchcardarchive.com -
r.stricklin