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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • NaibofTabr@infosec.pubtoSelfhosted@lemmy.worldSelf host websites
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    7 days ago

    I think the answer depends a lot on the use case of each business’s website and what the business owner/employees expect from it.

    Is the website a storefront? You’ll be spending a lot of time maintaining integration with payment networks and ensuring that the transaction process is secure and can’t be exploited to create fake invoices or spammed with fake orders. Also probably maintaining a database of customer orders with names, emails, physical addresses, credit card info, and payment and order fulfillment records… so now you have to worry about handling and storing PII, maybe PCI DSS compliance, and you’ll end up performing some accounting tasks as well due to controlling the payment processing. HIPAA compliance too if it’s something medical like a small doctor’s office, therapist, dialysis clinic, outpatient care - basically anything that might be billable to health insurance.

    Does the business have a private email server? You’ll be spending a lot of time maintaining spam filters and block lists and ensuring that their email server has a good reputation with the major email service providers.

    Do the employees need user logins so that they can add or edit content on the website or perform other business tasks? Now you’re not just a web host, you’re also a sysadmin for a small enterprise which means you’ll be handling common end-user support tasks like password resets. Have fun with that.

    Do they regularly upload new content? (e.g. product photos and descriptions, customer testimonies, demo videos) Now you’re a database admin too.

    Does the website allow the business’s customers to upload information? (comments/reviews/pictures/etc, e.g. is it Web 2.0 in some way) god help you.

    You’re going to expose this to the public internet. It will be crawled, and its content scraped by various bots. At some point, someone will try to install a cryptominer on it. Someone will try to use it as a C2 server. Someone will notice that you’re running multiple sites/services from one infrastructure stack and attempt to punch their way out of the webhost VM and into the main server just to poke around and see what else you’ve got there. Someone will install mirai and try to make it part of a DDOS service provider’s network.





  • I like strategy games that allow you to design your own units such as Warzone 2100 where you select different components to get different functionality or Endless Space 2 where you pick a ship hull type and then assign different modules to adjust the combat stats or add special abilities. The production cost of the unit changes with your selections in whatever the base game currency is and/or requirements for specific resources.

    This gives the player the freedom to adjust their forces to fit their play style, their economic situation or to accomplish specific objectives or strategies. It also breaks the rock/paper/scissors aspects of unit combat in more simplistic games and creates far more complex unit interactions, and the potential to win with clever design rather than just numbers of units.




  • Oh, you are absolutely right. The whole concept of advertising as an industry happened during this period.

    There is a pretty great documentary by Adam Curtis on this titled The Century of the Self, which focuses heavily on the influence of Edward Bernays. We are still dealing with the fallout of his impact on society:

    Bernays used ideas of his uncle Sigmund Freud to help convince the public, among other things, that bacon and eggs was the true all-American breakfast.

    There were real concerted efforts not just to get people to buy things, but to change the way people thought about things, and they were surprisingly effective.

    And as far as the gilded-age cyberpunk distopia goes, I think All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace is a good follow-up. Curtis shows the overlap and collision of Randian philosophy (which influenced Alan Greenspan), the new field of ecology, and the growing digital computer revolution.

    Taken together, I think these documentaries explain a lot of how we got where we are today.