I don’t think ActivityPub is set up for one server storing and forwarding a whole feed of everything, like Usenet. Right?

But you can, in fact, be too careful. Availability is one arm of the security triad.

If whatever complex configuration you have set up to avoid exposing something to the Internet is incompatible with something and what you wanted to do can’t be done, or if you look and see that setting all that up would be too hard and don’t bother to expose the service at all, then your security posture is incorrect because your service is just as unavailable as if someone else broke it.

That certainly sounds like a thing you would want, nay need, to fix.

[ In lieu of a comment, please see “Bullshit Jobs”, by David Graeber, which is incorporated here by reference. ]

The first like three or five episodes of Discovery are basically a different show than the rest. And a couple seasons in they change the whole premise and it’s a different show again.

Why does Anthropic think they need a JS runtime though? Are they just like “well Microsoft has a command line tool for installing JS packages so we need one too”???

I don’t think there can be that high a density of fascists. sh.itjust.works just voted overwhelmingly to defederate some kind of MAGA nonsense instance. Mostly it seems like nice folks overhere who know fascists are bad news.

It might be full of individualists with no grounding in Marxist theory, of the type that much annoyed Vladimir Lennin. I couldn’t tell you because of my poor grounding Marxist theory, and I don’t see that as a problem because of my individualism.

Probably.

I mean if you put up an Internet-facing unauthenticated file acceptor it will quickly become stuffed with all sorts of garbage and aspiring malware. You definitely don’t want to hook that up to an untar and exec loop, even with some notion of sandboxing. It will just start mining Bitcoins or sending spam or something.

But if it is built properly, with only authorized users being able to upload stuff, and a basic understanding of not dropping stuff where the web server will happily execute every PHP web shell someone sticks in the slot, and the leverage to threaten people into not uploading pictures of their own or others’ butts or Iron Man (2009), I don’t see why all but the file-uploading professionals should immediately give up.

You could definitely build something like this. You definitely want either human review before execution or a fair amount of sandboxing for whatever your students submit.

Do you want students trying to brute force or exfiltrate whatever test data lives in the server? If not, either they should just have the test cases already, or they can get back how many/which of the secret test cases they passed along with their grade, so showing them the results live might not be so important. Unless you want something like “you have 3 tries to pass the secret tests so you can get a hint that your own tests missed a case and go back and try to guess what it was”.

You also might want to invest time first in test harnesses for the students to run themselves, because you want them to learn good practices like coding against a test suite. If nothing else it makes it easier to make the auto-grader later if the students’ code is all already hooked up to the same test framework.

Teaching students how to use fully use a multi-user Unix system can for some topics put unnecessary faffing about between the students and what they are trying to learn (are you teaching front-end web dev or something?), but in a lot of cases your students might actually be better served by something that makes them touch the deep magic than by a slick web UI that handles everything for them, as long as you turn it into a learning experience and not a protracted period of bafflement.

Does your school not already have some kind of shared CD department server/Unix environment for the students that could get you out of account management?

Also, the Right Way to get the code to the server is probably going to be Git and not a tarball. The students could/should be set up with a Git forge and indoctrinated in never leaving their code on their laptop to be sat upon and lost.

Your cell provider is tracking many of your moves by seeing what cell towers you are talking to.

Your phone is only tracking your every move if appropriate spyware is installed.

I think the real obstacle isn’t even the regulations but the safety systems. The various US DMVs can comprehend things like scratch-built or kit cars, but the level of engineering to make a thing that can even sometimes decelerate a person from like 60 to 0 without killing them more with exploding airbags is several levels above that required to make a thing with wheels that drives forward.

So you can build and probably even drive a car from plans you got off Github, but if you crash it it will kill you.

Probably not any existing systems; you can still finger and thus demand censorship from a block producer, and you end up with situations where you just can’t host the chain anymore because it’s full of pirated MP3s or whatever now.

And they introduce new problems around having to globally replicate everything and thus getting the net performance out of the system that you get from the worst server involved.

If you need to track some kind of root signing key for a whole p2p system, or something, maybe you can stuff it into Ethereum somewhere. But I don’t think you can get very far trying to actually run a service out of a globally replicated database, and even then you’d have hundreds of operators in legal trouble rather than no operator.

Something like Tor only solves half the problem. A Tor hidden service still has physical reality and a person who is hosting it, and who can be held responsible for failing to register the thing with the feds or file a moderation transparency report or whatever the latest nonsense is. The anonymity network helps to hide where the equipment and who the operator is, but there’s still a single point of failure and a person to blame for the community.

We need a way to run online communities that are not online services: no single point of failure, no individual or partnership describable as a service’s operator, and no meaningful way in which one person provides access to the system to another person.

You may be looking for The Promised LAN.