I use OpenNIC for DNS, it's cool, independent and custom
Permalink | Author: Dan Dart | Published: 2025-03-14 18:30:00 UTC | Tags: cool custom dns independent networking opennic
Ever wish you could register domain names for free, with cool TLDs? Well... you can, in a private, democratic community namespace.
So what is it?
It's a set of community-maintained DNS servers, some of which run with DoH, DoT, DNSSEC and claim to not log, etc.
What's so good about that? Doesn't everybody do that? What's the niche, then?
The niche here is a set of custom, OpenNIC-only TLDs you can register and maintain for free, which is kind of neat.
What about TLS, though? How do you get certificates for it? Surely if other DNS providers don't understand
Well, what you can do is that you can use custom certificates. Of course, this means you'll need to do one of two things:
- Create and self-sign your own certificate This means that everybody will have to trust you and pass through the yellow screens when visiting your website.
- Create and run your own certificate authority on your own computer This means that you, and only you, will not have to face the yellow screens, and it's kind of useful. It still protects against man-in-the-middle attacks, because you'll have to click through otherwise signed certificates.
- Import a "special" root certificate from the wiki, then run ACME against their server, specifically. This means you can share the authority between users of the authority, and that you'll have to trust the authority, but otherwise no yellow screens.
Nice. Anything else you can do with it?
There's always volunteering to run a DNS server or providing translations if you're multilingual.
That's pretty cool. How do I get started?
Simply visit their website. You'll find information about what DNS servers to add that are closest to you, and you can decide what kind of domains you wish to register. There are some pretty gnarly ones available.
Ta-ta!
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Behind the Times: Sites still without IPv6 in 2025
Permalink | Author: Dan Dart | Published: 2025-03-13 23:45:00 UTC | Tags: 2025 amazon baidu behind bilibili canva chatgpt cnn duckduckgo dzen ebay fandom globo google ipv6 linkedin mail.ru meta microsoft naver netflix networking pinterest quora reddit samsung sites still temu tetlegram tiktok times twitch vk weather.com wikipedia without x yahoo zoom
Hi!
As of 2025, a lot of the world's top websites do not work on an IPv6 connection, which is slated to become the default for new internet connections, due to IPv6 exhaustion.
Top sites stolen from Wikipedia:
| Website |
Works? |
| Google-owned websites |
Yes |
| Meta-owned websites |
Yes |
| X |
Partial (Request succeeds but page complains as Fastly CDN has no IPv6 record) |
| Wikipedia |
Yes |
| ChatGPT |
Yes |
| Reddit |
Yes |
| Yahoo |
No, first redirect has no IPv6 record |
| Amazon Shopping |
No |
| dzen.ru |
No |
| Baidu |
No |
| Tiktok |
No |
| Netflix |
Yes |
| Microsoft |
Sometimes yes (e.g. microsoft.com, bing.com, office.com), sometimes no (e.g. microsoftonline.com, live.com, sharepoint.com) |
| LinkedIn |
Yes |
| Naver |
No |
| Pinterest |
No |
| Bilibili |
No |
| Twitch |
No |
| VK |
No |
| Mail.ru |
Yes |
| Samsung |
No |
| Fandom |
No |
| Globo |
No |
| Canva |
Yes |
| DuckDuckGo |
No |
| Telegram |
Yes |
| Weather.com |
Yes |
| Quora |
No |
| Temu |
No |
| CNN |
Doesn't load well... |
| Zoom |
Yes |
| Ebay |
No |
Perplexing, perhaps. So what are people to do?
Interestingly, here are the results for some of the most popular open source/free software and management:
Top sites stolen from my memory, TechRadar and DistroWatch.
| Website |
Works? |
| Mozilla |
Yes |
| LibreOffice |
Yes |
| VLC |
Yes |
| GIMP |
No |
| Shotcut |
No |
| Audacity |
Yes |
| FileZilla |
Yes |
| Thunderbird |
Yes |
| KeePass |
Yes |
| KeePassX |
Yes |
| KeePassXC |
Yes |
| Internxt |
No |
| Brave |
Yes |
| Linux kernel |
Yes |
| Mint |
No |
| MX Linux |
Yes |
| EndeavourOS |
No |
| Cachy OS |
Yes |
| Debian |
Yes |
| System76 |
No |
| Manjaro |
Yes |
| Ubuntu |
Yes |
| Fedora |
Yes |
| OpenSUSE |
Yes |
| Arch |
Yes |
| FreeBSD |
Yes |
| OpenBSD |
Yes |
| NetBSD |
Yes |
| NixOS |
Yes |
| GitHub |
No, only some Pages sites such as this |
| GitLab |
Yes |
Sobering, who takes the future of the Internet seriously.
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Issuing modem commands to an unrooted Android device
Permalink | Author: Dan Dart | Published: 2018-07-31 19:37:00 UTC | Tags: access android connection gsm hayes linux m2msupport minicom mobile modem network networking phone port root screen serial
Did you know that Android devices expose a modem on the USB interface, even when "Tethering" is turned off? It appears like this in dmesg:
[22338.529851] cdc_acm 1-3:1.1: ttyACM0: USB ACM device
You can connect to this as a raw serial console like:
screen /dev/ttyACM0
or:
minicom -D /dev/ttyACM0
This will accept GSM modem commands prefixed with AT, and give information about the phone, and presumably allow a dialup-like interface.
Many of the examples on M2MSupport.net will work with the phone, depending on which manufacturer and capability set, presumably. With my Samsung Galaxy XCover 4, I got the GSM capability set.
Try playing around with this, but don't get charged by your provider too much for making calls you never end! Make sure you hang up properly as per the protocol.
For more on standard modem commands, see the Hayes command set article on Wikipedia.
That's all for now!
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Xenon Alpha released!
Permalink | Author: Dan Dart | Published: 2009-12-29 13:20:00.001 UTC | Tags: ajax api apps cloud css desktop fast gui html html5 javascript linux networking operating system os php social sql xenon
An alpha version of the Xenon Desktop has been released. A description of the project follows.
Xenon is a portable web or browser based desktop for netbooks and thin clients, designed to be the easiest desktop ever.
The desktop includes a new GUI stepping away from traditional menus and is optimised for touchscreen and small devices.
The system integrates social networking features and standard desktop features into one software package.
Being browser-based, it is cross platform and cross architecture. It is built on HTML5 and PHP components, and can be run on extremely low-powered machines, allowing for cheap distribution and devices.
The backend can be run online (for users to access their data everywhere), on a personal LAN server, or on a small device, so the system can work offline, or if there are concerns about cloud storage.
An API is available at xenon.kevinghadyani.com/wiki/index.php/Developing_Apps (edit 2021: page not archived), so anyone can start developing apps to distribute in Xenon's upcoming App Store.
The project's homepage is located at https://hackerlanes.com (edit 2021: archived) including the online desktop, ready for instant testing and a download of the alpha image for your server. The actual small footprint OS that will run on netbooks will come later.
We encourage contributions to the project, in the form of code (the languages currently used are (X)HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP and MySQL), art (eg icons, backgrounds, GUI concepts) or even just ideas.
To send any requests or contributions, or to join the project, please email the head developer at dan.dart@googlemail.com. Thank you!
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