Yes, you can configure non-router DNS in your DHCP server or you can manually set DNS on individual hosts. For a VPN you want to make sure the VPN connection has DNS manually configured.

If you have your router setup to resolve DNS, which is common, then while the VPN is active if you use your router for DNS, your router will be sending queries with the sites you visit from your real ip address to your DNS provider.

Passkey is FIDO2.

Change is hard. It has been a long road to get where we are today: major OS and Browser vendor support. Users now need to change their behavior.

Passkey is resistant to these attacks, but user adoption is not widespread enough for Discord to be able to mandate it.

Cloudflare has a bot score. Depending on how sus your bot score is you can use several different levels of verification. The checkbox you refer to is kind of in the middle. There is also a more complicated intrusive captcha and a totally transparent javascript. It’s a pretty slick system.

A lot of legal detail in this post. Here are three key points I pulled out the aricle:

• Internet users have a First Amendment right to speak on social media—whether by posting or commenting—and that right may be infringed when the government seeks to  interfere with content moderation, but it will not be infringed  by the independent decisions of the platforms themselves.

• Underlying these rulings is the Supreme Court’s long-awaited recognition that social media platforms routinely moderate users’ speech

• This term’s cases also confirm that traditional First Amendment rules apply to social media

Some great advice here. I also like this piece of verbal judo: “I have taken up too much of your time, I will let you go now. I have bored you enough with my pedantic nonsense.”

I had an Impala that I named Vlad, so it was “Vlad the Impala”.

Nit exactly a movie, but I rewatched the first season of True Detective. It is a Masterpiece, IMHO.

Neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.

Here are two I recommend:

The Rest is History - two historians, Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook go deep on interesting topics from history.

Never Post - a podcast described as “about and for the internet” and in some sense the spiritual successor to Hello Internet but also reminding me of classic Radiolab. Worth checking out.

I ride my ebike to work and I worry about getting hit by a car a lot. The more miles ridden, the more the probability that an accident will happen. I try to take steps to reduce the risk: stick to back-roads with less traffic as much as possible, use trails and protected bike lanes when available and ride defensively. I am lucky that I have a route that keeps me off the main roads and on trails/protected bike lanes for almost all of my trip. It was hard to come up with this route and it makes what should be a 10 mi ride into a 14 mi ride. That said, I can do it in an hour on my ebike. If the ride was much longer or I had to ride on busy main roads, I would not do it.

Be safe!

Took this with my iphone 15.

What are your use cases?

A better question is, is there any difference between the illusion of free will and actual free will. Is there some experiment you could conduct to tell the difference?

Great list! I would also add to this PCR, the technology that allowed us to map the human genome.

Now I desperately want to know how he got that surfboard. How much does this hypothetical streaming service cost?