This is history repeating itself.
Try looking for anything in relation to computing between 1975 and 1990, the birth of the home computer and you'll discover just how much has vanished.
this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2024
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It's OK, I have all my backups on floppy disks. I keep them on the fridge with a magnet so I'll always know where it is.
Should back those up on punch cards, just to be extra safe. As a bonus, they even make good coasters.
Tsk, everyone knows you shouldn't use magnets to hold floppy disks. Just staple them into your lever arch file.
No because it is being sued to dust
I’m part of the problem, a tiny bit. For altruistic reasons - ok more like “I’m kinda weird, maybe this will make people on IRC like me more” reasons - I ran mspencer.net and hosted web pages for people for free. Ended up with web content for around 100 people, and they weren’t all just using it as a drop box. (Older than wikipedia.org by 199 days, woo!)
Hosted on ancient hardware, nothing even remotely approaching a modern security architecture, I eventually left it to run un-maintained until the IDE HDD died. More recently I got the data off of it. (Heads unstuck themselves while in a cardboard box for a decade? Dunno.) But I don’t know how to get everything back online in a safe way.
I’m a proper software engineer now, I can kinda see how work handles securely hosting web services. Now just throwing everything together on one box feels too lazy and insecure. But I can’t figure out a reasonable security architecture to use. I thought I had one, but I failed to account for VM jackpotting attacks. And it feels like it takes me a month to do what a competent ops person can do in a day.
But that’s a discussion for a different comment section.
But I can’t figure out a reasonable security architecture to use. I thought I had one, but I failed to account for VM jackpotting attacks. And it feels like it takes me a month to do what a competent ops person can do in a day.
You're overthinking it, just secure things enough that you're ahead of the script kiddies automated scan tools (which isn't a lot tbh)
The people with actual real skill don't care about you, they'd rather go after juicy targets, like companies or politicians or rich people
If it's static content, nothing beats an AWS S3 bucket.
Last time I went snooping:
15 installs of phpbb, which would require work to put back online as their communities are of course gone. Remove spam, undo defacement, etc.
7 installs of Dormando’s Oekaki BBS Clone
5 installs of WonderCatStudio BBS
4 installs of OekakiPotato / RanmaGuy etc.
and several users who just used php to ‘include’ headers and table of contents page parts.
(Yes I was quite the weeb. Still am, but I was one too. :-) )
If this was my problem to solve, I would host it internally, as-is, on a virtual machine of your choice, then create a a static html mirror version from the public information and put that up on AWS S3 as a static website.
That does make a lot of sense.
I think I’m feeling embarrassed about not being a perfect ops person, while I was going to school for computer science. Like, part of me wants to create this unrealistic private cloud thing, like I’m going to pretend “I’m still around, where have you been? See your old password still works, and look at all the awesome stuff I can do now!”. I already have my 20+ year old passwd file imported into OpenLDAP / slapd and email is using that already.
It’s not realistic. I feel fondness for the internet of 20-25 years ago, but it’s not coming back. If people can log in with 20 year old passwords and upload web content, we both know what’s really going to happen.
I just feel like such a failure for letting it rot away. Really, any place that accepts submissions requires a live audience and staff to keep it moderated, and accepting new submissions is the only reason to even run original code. What you’re describing is probably the only sane way to do this.
Edit: although I do still feel that the world needs that sort of private cloud in a box. Sure Facebook has taken all the wind out of the sails of many private web hosting efforts - the “family nerd” no longer gets love and gratitude for offering to host forums and chat, they get “that’s stupid, I’ll just use Facebook” - but we still need the capability.
And an open security architecture to clone would help cover the daylight between “here’s a web app in a docker container” and an actual secure hosted instance of it. It would require more inconvenience than necessary for the substantial security benefits it would offer. (A better designed, more customized solution would help that, but one step at a time.) But that would give the average homelab user protection against future attacks that today would feel like wild “whoa who are you protecting against, the NSA?” paranoia.
Try to ask in self hosting community here in lemmy
Honestly, this is a good thing imo. Let data rot. Let data die. Let data be destroyed. This way it won't contribute to the data pollution problem that we are in.
Can we please start with stackoverflow? If I see one more 20 year old code snippet I’m going to vomit.