I’ve been using porkbun and they never asked my ID. Maybe it’s specific to the .xyz TLD? That surprises me but the domain you wanted are super cheap, so maybe they attract spammers. .xyz is somewhat disreputable anyway.

This is actually the first time I had heard of the 6-9 digit .xyz domains being discounted (.99/year). That was not mentioned on porkbun’s .xyz page, but web search found info. For those unaware, those domains register and renew at $0.99/year at some registrars, though $1.24 at porkbun.

And lol, almost everything I could think of related to mathematical constants were unavailable, e.g. 61803399.xyz. Some random ones were available and maybe I’ll try to buy one just to see what happens.

I wonder if porkbun suddenly requires ID for all domain purchases? That would be annoying. It’s been a while since I last bought from them.

Added: ok, this might help: https://kb.porkbun.com/article/225-why-porkbun-id-verification

There’s an HN thread about this and yes it sounds like the guy is being stupid and/or there was a communications error. He submitted a PR for a potentially breaking change and it was closed as “needs discussion”. That is, instead of clicking “open PR”, he was advised to instead click “open discussion” and talk about the proposed change and its potential downstream effects. He instead got pissy and started spamming forums.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47941590

I don’t use most of the software you mention, but converting FLAC to other formats is pretty easy. E.g. with ffmpeg you’d say

ffmpeg -i somesong.flac -o somesong.mp3

or similarly for other formats. There are more options to control the output bit rates and that sort of thing.

It’s obviously not clean room since the original code was in the training data.

Unified Push if you want to use the internet, though for important stuff I prefer to use SMS texts. For that you need a gateway. I’m still on vitelity.net and it’s ok, but I’d look at alternatives if I were doing it again. Twilio has lately gotten all weird though.

Well start with a few not-that-private letters to check for evidence of their being opened. What happens with ordinary email by the way?

I think it’s hard, and even if there is something that works, its use can probably be detected somehow, and that could get your family in trouble.

Tbh I’d probably use snail mail letters for anything private on the theory that the RU govt doesn’t have the resources to open all the envelopes, and you can use special phrases for particularly private meanings. All that stuff like media attachments is asking for trouble. You could also send microSD cards by snail mail though that might attract attention.

Remember that Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan had no internet connectivity at all. If he wanted to send an email, he’d write it to a USB drive and have a guy on a motorcycle take it to a café 70 km away or something like that. Replies would be brought to him the same way. They still managed to find him and kill him in his bedroom.

Today with AI analysis of massive amounts of traffic logs, I’m sure signal ID is far easier than it was in 2011.

Lichess is great. TTT is more of a venue for following pro games, kind of an ESPN for chess. It’s also supposed to be good, but its purpose is different. Using Lichess as a gameplay backend lets them host online games without the effort of the somewhat evil chess dot com, or the unsuccessful Chess24. Seems like a win for TTT. I’m not so keen on Lichess doing something that commercial but we’ll see.

You can use Lichess online at lichess.org. It’s completely free, no ads, and no mobile app is needed. It’s the best fancy web UI I’ve ever seen by far.

Ironic that the info is on youtube. Maybe put it ccc.de or something?

These are services, nothing to do with source code, and most don’t release theirs.

Nice but doesn’t sound self hosted.

What is going on with you? Anyway, if you want to try self-hosting on a VPS, make an account on lowendspirit.com and hang out there for a while. There are lots of offers for free or ridiculously cheap VPS there. Like this starts at 25 cents per month ($3 per year):

https://lowendspirit.com/discussion/10636/tierhive-256mb-ram-3gb-disk-3-p-year-hourly-vps-kvm-big-project-updates-more-ports-ipv6

Open a thread there saying what you’re trying to do, and ask for hosting and for technical help if you need that.

Just use a text editor. I use Emacs org files but that’s just me.

I guess I don’t understand the issues you think you’re facing with straightforward approaches. You probably don’t want it on an internet server, right? Maybe just scrounge an old laptop with no internet connection and set it up with an encrypted disk. Then use it as your journalling box. So you’re fairly safe from network attacks. You might have to worry about someone snagging the laptop itself and recovering the key somehow. Yes there are approaches you can take to mitigate that. I don’t know of any super simple ready made methods though.

Maybe you could try a prepaid credit card from a store.

You’re asking a support question for a provider that most of us here have never heard of. I’d wait a day or two and then maybe open a ticket with the provider.

Maybe also look here: https://lowendspirit.com/discussion/10104/free-vps-for-open-source-developers-with-fossvps

I’ve scraped html for this type of thing but nowadays sometimes hit cloudflare captchas and the like. A json endpoint would be great.

I remember having to puzzle over the borg documentation a little when I started using it, but I don’t use any tools. I just have a couple of aliases in my .bashrc and that seems like enough.

I don’t understand, what’s wrong with Borg?

I mean the icons that are already there will have trouble rendering in a text browser! :)