Everything just seems to be getting worse at the moment. The mainstream internet has been going down hill for a while, but recently it feels like it is getting to a tipping point.
Moving from GitHub #
Over the last few weeks I have been moving all of my public and private repositories off of GitHub. In case you missed it in the news, a couple of weeks ago GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke stepped down and now GitHub is going to become part of Microsoft's CoreAI team.
GitHub is supposed to be a tool for developers to collaborate on code projects, but I think Microsoft have made it pretty clear that they are more interested in it as a source of training data for AI.
I now have my code spread about in a few different places depending on the project.
- Private ForgeJo Server — I have moved all my private repositories to a self-hosted ForgeJo instances that sits on my home server. This is only accessible externally through a VPN. I have had this instance set up for a while to back up my Obsidian notes, but it now hosts all my private repositories too.
- Public ForgeJo Server — All my public repositories have moved to git.alexhyett.com that I am hosting on my Hetzner instance. I still need to set up Anubis on this instance to block the bots as well.
- Codeberg — I also have my public repositories on Codeberg, so others can raise issues. Any changes I make on my instance are automatically pushed up.
If you are considering moving your repositories to Codeberg, note that even though private repositories are supported Codeberg is meant for free/libre software only and isn't meant for private personal projects.
There are a few gotchas if you want to move your code off of GitHub but for most repositories it is quite simple.
- Private repositories — these are good to move.
- Public repositories with no forks — also good to move.
For public repositories with forks it is a little more complicated.
If you delete a repository that has been forked then one of the forks becomes the new main repository. If you don't want this to happen you have 2 options.
- Update the repository with a link to its new location and archive the repository. Leaving the code behind.
- Rewrite the history removing all code and then archive the repository.
I went with option 2 for my repositories. If you want to know how to do this you can see an example on one of my archived repositories which gives instructions as well.
People can still see the code if they visit one of the forks, but it will no longer be getting any updates.
Online Safety Act #
The UK government has rolled out it's Online Safety Act (OSA) as a way to “protect the children” from the harmful materials on the internet.
The Government's website outlines which sites this applies to:
The Act’s duties apply to search services and services that allow users to post content online or to interact with each other. This includes a range of websites, apps and other services, including social media services, consumer file cloud storage and sharing sites, video-sharing platforms, online forums, dating services, and online instant messaging services.
So this includes any public service where members have the ability to post content. This is obviously targeted at social media but is vague enough to include the comment section on people's blogs, issues raised on GitHub/Codeberg and other online communities.
Any website that is caught under these vague terms, which is any website which isn't read-only, need to perform age verification and moderation. Websites failing to do this could face an £18 million fine or 10% of their revenue (whichever is greater) as well as prison sentences.
It should go without saying, but you should never upload your identity details to a third party especially not to some random website. This is a privacy and identity theft nightmare just waiting to happen.
Most websites can't keep your email and password secure, would you really trust them with your identity documents?
For now, the only way around this is by using a VPN, although they are talking about trying to ban those too. I am not sure if this will get anywhere as it is an integral part of most businesses, but I could see them trying to block consumer VPNs.
If you are looking for a VPN, Mullvad is what I use (no affiliation here). You can buy an activation code from Amazon, it gets delivered like a gift card. You only need this code to use Mullvad and no personal details are recorded.
But what about the children? #
I don't have a problem with trying to prevent children from accessing harmful content, but we already have parental controls for that. This really isn't about the children but about censorship and control.
At the end of the day, if a child is smart enough to get a VPN they are smart enough to find other ways around it.
When I was in school we liked to play online flash games during lunch (or lessons). Naturally the school IT guys started blocking all the domains we frequented to stop this. What they didn't block were the translation websites (I think it was babelfish.altavista.com at the time).
So we would go on to a translation website, put in the URL of the games site we wanted to go on and then “Translate to English”. The translation website would then appear as the URL and the website wouldn't be blocked. Where there is a will there is a way.
Let's look at some of these harmful websites that have had to be shutdown or restricted due to the OSA:
- Gaming on Linux forum — The website is still there, but their online forum is now gone. They still have a Discord but have had to shut down the user forum.
- Green Living Forum — Can't have the children living sustainably now. Apparently this site had nearly 500,000 posts on sustainable living.
- Lemmy.zip — Lemmy is a federated (like Mastodon) alternative to Reddit. This is now being blocked for UK users.
- HEXUS Forums — Another tech forum gone.
There is a lot of great content on Reddit but now communities and posts marked NSFW or are for adults are hidden from UK feeds. If you go directly to it, you are then prompted to verify your age by uploading your ID.
For example, my wife bought me an unusual beer yesterday. It was a Delirium Tremens a Belgium strong blonde beer (worth getting by the way but quite strong at 8.5%).
Anyway, I wasn't sure whether to drink this cold or at room temperature, so I did a quick search which naturally took me to this Reddit post: Was given Delirium as a gift. Any serving suggestions? : r/beer.
In the UK you will get a prompt to verify your age and will be taken to withpersona.com where you can verify your identity by uploading your ID.
I am not doing that, and I am glad I have a VPN. I would also like to point out that neither this Subreddit nor the post is marked as NSFW, but it is now effectively censored for UK users.
What next? #
As mentioned, it is worth getting a VPN if you don't want to succumb to identity theft and don't want a censored internet.
If the UK does block VPN's or at least require handing over ID to get one, then there is also Tor. It isn't overly fast, but it is unlikely to be blocked as the governments use it too (the US even funds it). Tor routes your traffic through relays and exit nodes to hide your identity.
I have also been looking at I2P the Invisible Internet Project. Unlike Tor and VPNs it isn't used for viewing the “clearnet” (public websites) but instead can only be used for viewing hidden services on the I2P network. It is more secure than Tor and VPNs, but obviously the content is limit to what people host on the network. Again it isn't fast, but it should get faster with more users.
There isn't anything particularly “dark” about the darknet. I mostly just found peoples personal blogs when searching.
I plan to set up my own I2P website (eepsite) in the near future as a fun side project.
❤️ Picks of the Week #
📝 Article — Spotting base64 encoded JSON, certificates, and private keys — Being able to quickly tell what is base64 encoded seems like a neat party trick!
🛠️ Tool — KittenTTS: State-of-the-art TTS model under 25MB — This looks promising but from what I have read of the comments the demos are better than people have managed to achieve running it locally.
📝 Article — I gave the AI arms and legs then it rejected me — This is the downside of open-source, when billion-dollar companies can make use of an open source project and give nothing back.
📝 Article — How I use Tailscale — Tailscale makes it super easy to access you server from any device while you are away from home. There are a few tips in this post that I didn't know about.
📝 Article — Building Bluesky comments for my blog — This is a cool idea. I have seen people do this with Mastodon as well. One issue is many don't like the fact that their name and picture is shown on another website. I think it might just be better to link out to the site but show the number of comments.
📝 Article — Cursed Knowledge — I like the concept of this as a way of showing lessons learned or “how I got burned”.
📝 Article — Linear sent me down a local-first rabbit hole — More web apps should be local first. The difficulty is in managing conflicts between devices and making it clear that something hasn't been updated.
🛠️ Tool — Modos Paper Monitor: Open-hardware e-paper monitor and dev kit — This looks cool and reasonably fast for an e-ink display. I still have my eyes on the TRMNL X when it comes out.
📝 Article — Getting good results from Claude Code — I only use AI for writing small bits of code that I can quickly review and understand. I am always interested to see how others are using it though.
📝 Article — Tor: How a military project became a lifeline for privacy — A bit more information about Tor if you are interested.
📝 Article — The Framework Desktop is a beast — This looks impressive and good contender if you plan on running large LLMs locally as it can be set up with 128 GB of shared memory.
📝 Article — OpenFreeMap survived 100k requests per second — A big plus for having Cloudflare sitting in front of your services.
📝 Article — How I code with AI on a budget/free — AI can get expensive but if you are on a budget there are ways of using it for free.
🛠️ Tool — One Million Screenshots — This is quite a fun way to look at the design of different websites.
📝 Article — How to Build a Low-tech Internet — Part of me just wants to disconnect completely and self-host everything. Like a private community internet.
📝 Article — Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act — Great. At some point the UK could lose access to Wikipedia too.
📝 Article — Search all text in New York City — This is such a fun project. I am sure there are so many uses for Google Street View.
🐛 Issue — Claude says, You're absolutely right!‚ about everything — This is one of my pet peeves. I am sure this can be prompted away, but I never know if I am right or the AI is just agreeing with me.
📝 Article — Style your underlines — I like the styling of the links on my website. They are slightly thicker than normal which I think looks cool.
📝 Article — This website is for humans — I love the styling of this site. I must admit my previous websites used to be more fun than minimal. I might have to make something fun just for the sake of it.
🛠️ Tool — 9001/copyparty: Portable file server with accelerated resumable uploads, dedup, WebDAV, FTP, TFTP, zeroconf, media indexer, thumbnails++ all in one file, no deps — This is going on my home server. It is like a Swiss army knife for files.
🛠️ Tool — Lazy-brush‚ smooth drawing with mouse or finger — It is surprisingly easy to draw with this. It is also worth checking out perfect-freehand as well.
🛠️ Tool — OverType - The Markdown Editor That's a Textarea — This looks really good if I ever wanted to build an alternative to Obsidian.
📝 Article — Google is killing the open web — It is funny to think that Google's old motto was “Don't be evil”.
🛠️ Tool — usestrix/strix: Open-source AI hackers for your apps — I am going to have to give this a try against my own applications and see if it can break in. Could be an interesting learning experience.
🛠️ Tool — Obsidian Bases — Finally the power of Notion databases comes to Obsidian too. I wonder how this works under the hood and whether they are still keeping their markdown first priority. I haven't started using this yet, but it looks interesting.
📝 Article — Vendors that treat single sign-on as a luxury feature — Security really shouldn't be a luxury.
📝 Article — AWS in 2025: Stuff you think you know that's now wrong — I have mostly been using Azure for the past couple of years. It is fascinating to see what has changed.
📝 Article — Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears — Could the AI bubble be coming to an end?
👨💻 Latest from me #
I am moving my subscription plans back to Patreon. Thank you for those who have supported me with a subscription to this newsletter or through my “One a Month” subscription on Ko-Fi, I really do appreciate the support.
The donation model hasn't been overly popular with just 5 people signing up. I realise I need to offer more if I expect people to sign up. Due to EU VAT rules I have to do this via Patreon or a provider who handles VAT.
You can read more about this move here: Moving back to Patreon
The TL;DR is that I plan to offer:
- Exclusive tutorials, courses and blog posts.
- Code access to all my videos and some additional fun projects.
- Ad-free access to all my videos.
- Early access to videos before they are made public on YouTube.
- Your name listed on my site and at the end of videos.
- A link to your personal website on my subscriber's page and in my newsletter.
- Private Patreon Chat.
It is £3 / month at the moment while I set things up, but I will be increasing the price as more content becomes available. I am never going to increase the price for existing Patreon subscribers so whatever price you sign up on is what you will pay. I will just create a new tier and unpublish the old one.
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