It’s DNS so they just have to accept the query and redirect it to a local server that answers for anything and returns the 451 error. However, it’s also worth noting that Cloudflare is a giant MitM proxy who already decrypts everything and retransmits it. No communication with any domain fronted by Cloudflare is secure.
That’s not recidivism, which is the return to committing crimes after release. This is a punishment for bad behavior while inside the jail. It’s a method of behavioral control in real time. I doubt that anyone who gets out of jail is using the argument of, “maybe I’ll have to eat Nutraloaf if I go back to jail” as a factor in choosing to commit or not commit further crimes.
>That’s not recidivism, which is the return to committing crimes after release.
you raise an interesting point, and I did a bit of a dive into various dictionaries, new and old: chances of re-incarceration after release is an important aspect of criminology and public policy, but it's not built into the word recidivism.
recidivism is "backsliding", so it's more a case of "draw a line or a gradient, then measure recidivism across that line or gradient"
in the context of prisoners, it's probably a good idea to be clear about the sense of the definition chosen.
it's a small point and maybe a different word would have been more clear (because I agree, recidivism commonly refers to committing crimes again after being released from jail), but none of the definitions I found for recidivism were specific to release from jail - the definition seems to be committing offenses again after some type of intervention. in the case of the nutraloaf, you're already in jail and you commit some additional offense (say, starting a food fight). the article seemed to indicate that in most cases, the offender avoided doing the sorts of things that could get them back on nutraloaf - in my opinion, that meets the definition of recidivism.
And it also isn’t “dreadfull.” I am very skeptical of taking any advice from a person unable to use basic spell checking before publishing an article. I’m also skeptical of advice from someone who has only recently discovered a possible solution for his very personal problems and feels he should share it with the world. In the 12-step world there are people who only do the first and last steps. They’re called two-steppers. You can look up the steps yourselves, but essentially it translates to, “we admitted we were powerless, that our lives had become unmanageable, and having had a spiritual awakening, we told everyone else how to fix their lives.” There are a lot of steps in between being stuck and becoming unstuck. The author should just quietly repair his life and shelve his egotistical need for external validation.
Your skepticism is valid; advice should be considered carefully, especially when it’s based on personal experiences that might not be universally applicable. My letters are less about instructing others and more about sharing my reflections as I navigate through my own journey. It’s not about two-stepping around the hard work of self-improvement, but about the ongoing process of understanding and growth.
As for the need for validation, I see this platform more as a conversation with others who might relate or benefit from my experiences, rather than seeking applause.
Again, I appreciate your candor — it’s an important part of the dialogue.
> two-steppers ... “we admitted we were powerless, that our lives had become unmanageable, and having had a spiritual awakening, we told everyone else how to fix their lives.”
LOL, though it may be the starting point of all the self-help systems, which later evolve iteratively adding intermediate steps.
> I’m also skeptical of advice from someone who has only recently discovered a possible solution for his very personal problems and feels he should share it with the world.
Advice should never be just taken at face value. Even if it is a successful person giving it. Personally, any advice from Elon Musk is worth less, than any random link on HN.
> The author should just quietly repair his life and shelve his egotistical need for external validation.
This is just mean.
I one hundred percent guarantee that there are other people, with the same problem as the author. And his solution will be useful. Sharing is a net good.
TL;DR through a Dev World Prism: No, I completely disagree that only staff engineers should be allowed to have technical blogs.
Syncthing is great, and I use it at home. For a robust multi-user alternative to Dropbox (or *cloud), I can also recommend Seafile. I replaced Dropbox with a self-hosted version of Seafile and have never looked back. Also, for a fantastic mail server solution with a great webmail client, look at Axigen. Their free version is more than enough for a personal server, and you can use Amazon SES for outbound mail to avoid reputation issues. I host mine at Linode and love it. If you have a business need or are larger than the limits of the free version, their license costs are quite reasonable.
Something that I don’t see people talking about here is that MyQ is the core/required integration component for Amazon Key in-garage delivery, a service used by millions of people to have their packages delivered to their garages instead of having them stolen off their porch. That’s why it needs Internet access. All the talk about how Chamberlain will go bankrupt because a comparatively small number of tech people stop using the product is fluff. I ran into the MyQ API problem with Homebridge a couple weeks ago, and I bought a unit from Meross that integrates directly with Apple HomeKit. I still have the MyQ installed because I _need_ it for Amazon deliveries. Yes, all the fury about ads and user hostility and probable polling requiring extra resources with no recompense is correct and justified. But at the end of the day, Chamberlain doesn’t care if they piss us off. They get all their money from the same people who think their phone screen is _supposed_ to be covered in ads on every page they visit, and they likely get TONS of money from Amazon.
Somewhat off topic but it is quite stunning to me that American carriers just leave the package at the door. I lived in different European countries and in all of them the expectation is that the mailman (official mail, or any of the services like dhl, ups, etc) will ring the bell. If you don't answer they will ring the neighbour and then take it back and either try again another day or you can go to a pickup point. Instead the U.S. has an entire category of devices to avoid package theft when the solution lies in holding carriers to account. I don't want to open the garage for Amazon or Bol or any other delivery company...
What you describe is how it worked in the US maybe 10 years ago too. But Amazon's free delivery race to the bottom made the cost of reattempts to deliver eliminate any margin. It's cheaper for Amazon to replace stolen shipments for a few people than to make multiple attempts to do re-delivery for many people. And creating a problem in order to charge people to solve the problem you created is a basic monopolist playbook move.
UPS used to do that. I hated it. If I'm not at home I have to wait another day to get my package, or drive across town to get it from the depot.
Just put it on the porch. Not everyone lives in an area with a package theft problem, let those folks work out their own solution but don't punish the rest of us.
Meanwhile, it is quite stunning to me that European carriers would intentionally mis-deliver (i.e. leave with a neighbor) packages rather than just leaving them on the porch! Over many years and many neighbors, I've had plenty who I would be happy to let receive my packages and plenty I would very much not. Likewise, I would be quite peeved as a permanent WFH-er to be the neighborhood final delivery guy.
There are plenty of places in the US where packages left on the porch aren't secure, but there are also plenty of places where it's completely fine and saves everyone time. I've never once had a package stolen off my porch anywhere from an apartment in the Bay Area to a house on 10 acres in rural Oregon. I really think that the places where package theft is rampant are the exception, not the rule.
Thanks, interesting insight. Here it's just a normal thing to do. Why not do my neighbour a favour? The mail carriers mostly are regulars (except for the new Amazon carriers) so if you refuse parcels they will also respect this and not bother you.
When I lived in NYC and like most didn’t own a car this was the way it worked (sans the neighbor, delivering a package to the wrong recipient is a big no no, and makes some huge assumptions about the neighbor, relationship to the neighbor, and sensitivity of the delivery). If you weren’t home you got a hang tag. They attempted redelivery a few times, held it for a while for pickup, then sent it back.
I worked, like most folks, and people are not generally home. The pickup location took two hours to get to via public transit. That’s a four hour round trip. There was one and only one pickup location in the entire NYC region for fedex.
It made life impossible. Amazon came along and decided to take responsibility for losses directly and instructed carriers to leave packages and not reattempt delivery or hold them. Customers vastly preferred this, carriers too as they saved tons of money. Amazon got a reputation for being much more convenient to order from. Their losses as a percentage were low compared to essentially owning mail order due to the convenience. When I had packages stolen they immediately shipped a replacement no questions asked.
Amazon Key is an attempt to mitigate theft but also a lot of folks just feel uncomfortable with packages on their front step. The idea of leaving you garage slightly open for deliveries isn’t a new one, but the Key product improves on that by only opening for the delivery person and recording their interactions to ensure they don’t do something they shouldn’t.
I used it briefly but I didn’t like it because I have a workshop in my garage and I just didn’t want people seeing what I’m working on. I wasn’t worried they would rob me per se, just didn’t like showing my work in progress to random strangers. If it opened the garage slightly to allow the package delivery I would have kept it but it opened 100%.
Interesting, it seems in the EU countries I lived in, a different solution emerged: the mail carriers cooperate with local corner shops (common in any EU city) and even supermarkets to serve as pick up points. In addition there are package lock boxes run by the mail carrier and distributed in central locations. I have never lived anywhere where I would have walked more than 10 minutes to the pickup, usually much less. The only issue I ever had was with a huge bulk parcel which I had to pick up at a depot, and a deouevry from china on which I had to pay duties. But that were 2 out of probably thousands of deliveries over the years.
On neighbours, the carriers usually let you choose if you want this to happen, but it's just a normal part of life to accept (and hand over) your neighbour's parcels. I have done so dozens of times and had it happen for me, even in rougher areas where I barely knew the neighbours. I guess levels of interpersonal trust might be higher in Europe than the U.S.?
This is how it used to work in the U.S., too, until the major carriers recently realized they can make that into a paid feature for the customer. Now you can't even request something to be held at the store or distribution center for pickup without a fee or subscription.
Yikes, I would never in a million years use a shipping service that delivered my packages to my neighbor, nor one that required me to go to a pickup point. WTF is the point of that? If I wanted to go somewhere to pick up my stuff, I'd just buy it from a store instead of ordering it online!
Most mail carriers (the majority of deliveries are carried by a national (ex) monopoly let you choose what you want to happen to your package. And we have many corner shops in EU cities and towns, and the mail companies have installed dedicated lockers as well in central locations, so a pickup point is usually 5 minute walk away. On the neighbour - for me that's normal. I guess we generally trust our neighbours more? We also do not have the strange U.S. laws that you can keep anything that arrives at your door, so it is normal for anyone to receive (and then hand over) neighbour's parcels. Like a real community...
Thanks for the long winded justification, but all of these are strictly worse than simply leaving my package at the doorstep. I'm 40 years old and in my entire life I have had exactly one package go missing after being delivered... that risk is not worth even considering "a 5 minute walk" to get every packages, nevermind having them delivered to random neighbors -- that's just beyond the pale, absolutely absurd.
I only have MyQ for Amazon Key. Fortunately Amazon also supports the Aladdin Connect - which works with all garage doors. And is fully supported in Home Assistant.
I have one on order and will be swapping out, bye bye Chamberlain.
> Something that I don’t see people talking about here is that MyQ is the core/required integration component for Amazon Key in-garage delivery, a service used by millions of people to have their packages delivered to their garages instead of having them stolen off their porch.
Would be nice if this functionality could work with arbitrary openers via webhooks. You could even have a fancy auth flow that you trigger from your smart home dashboard so users don't have to know or care how it's implemented under the hood.
I just called up the folks that installed my garage door, and recommended that they look for a different brand because of how hostile Chamberlain is being towards their customers. I'm not the only one doing that.
Sure, we're just a couple drops in the ocean, but eventually those drops can start to add up.
Back in the early 2000s my secondary DNS server was getting slammed with MX requests from some spammer. I set up a BIND view for just that requesting IP that returned the IP of the FBI mail server for every MX request. I then contacted the spammer’s ISP and told them what I had done. I’ve never seen an ISP take their customer down so quickly.
I just logged into AirBNB after not using it for a few years (pandemic and all), only to find that my account was deactivated for not following their ToS and community standards. I only ever had great reviews from the places that I stayed, so I figured they just deactivated it because it was stale.
I requested that they reactivate it and got an automated response saying that they deactivated it because of information in my credit report, and until I dispute that information, their decision is final.
I went and pulled all three credit reports to find that I have no negative information in there at all. I have stellar credit, scores in the "very good" to "excellent" range, minimal debt, no collections, great ratios between available credit and current balances, no negative consumer information...so what's there to dispute?
I've asked them to reinstate my account, but as someone who reads HN and knows how these automated systems behave, I have minimal confidence that they'll do anything about it.
I also reported them to the FTC for misusing/abusing consumer credit information, and I encourage anyone who has been swept up in their Kafka-esque universe to do the same.
That is most often caused by reputation issues around the IP where your mail server lives. If you host it at home or in any “residential” block of addresses, then most definitely. Same if hosted on a VPS or with a provider whose address space may have been burned by spammers spinning up machines and then redeploying them when they start getting blocked. As someone said further down below, you can still host at home and use Amazon SES as your verified outbound relay. I do that with the Axigen free email server, and I have no issues with reputation.
