Thefoggiest.dev

June 25, 2026

One of the most usefully scary websites around must be haveibeenpawned.com, the site that lets you fill out your email address and then tell you how many services have leaked it, of course together with your date of birth, gender, geographic location, actual name, phone numbers, physical addresses and the md5sum of your eternal soul.

Before I started hosting my own email server (which taught me a lot about security in its own way), I used a gmail address and while my current address somehow has a score of 0 leaks, my old gmail address counts 21, all but the first of which occurred after I stopped using it:

1. Wired (2025)
2. Synthient (2025)
3. French Citizens (2024)
4. Not SOCRadar (2024)
5. National Public Data (2024)
6. LinkedIn (2021)
7. Gravatar (2020)
8. Appen (2020)
9. Lead Hunter (2020)
10. PDL Customer (2019)
11. unnamed popular hacking forum (2019)
12. LinkedIn (2018)
13. Pemiblanc (2018)
14. Onliner Spambot (2017)
15. River City Media Spam List (2017)
16. Disqus (2017)
17. Exploit.In (2016)
18. LinkedIn (2016)
19. Plex (2015)
20. Bitcoin Security Forum (2014)
21. Gawker (2010)

So what can I learn from this? Not how my email ended up in a French citizen dump. I have been to France a few times (there’s an entire country between mine and France, but I still live only about 500km from Paris) and once even got a speeding ticket, I have never been anything but a Dutch citizen.

Even though I can imagine having had an account at Wired between 2004 and 2010, I don’t have any record of it in my password store. How many more accounts have I forgotten about and will at some point start to leak like forgotten corroded batteries?

Appen trains AI. I hadn’t thought about that. When these training bots, the scourge of the internet, go around stealing, apart from leaking it through AI responses, they can also leak their victims’ data if it is stolen from them directly. Apparently, my email conversations were already training fodder as early as 2020.

Appen is of course one of the many companies and services my email data ended up at without me knowing, or consenting. Plex, LinkedIn and Gravatar are services I directly used myself and created accounts with. Others got my data either because the three mentioned sold it to them, they forwarded my data to them as third party service provider, or they got my data illegally, like that hacker forum.

Oh, LinkedIn, why oh why are you in this list three times?

June 22, 2026

“I had never expected you to buy a mobile phone”

-- Someone noticing me trying to beepingly configure my Philips PocketLine Swing, January 2000

There is a YouTube video of a 1997 Dutch television programme, asking people in the streets whether they would buy a mobile phone. Most just didn’t know why they would want others to be able to reach them all the time. Just as I had used computers for over a decade before needing an internet. Not having these things didn’t make your life worse, or better, just different. We did not sit around waiting for the überconnected hightec world to happen that we now live in.

I was re-reading Mathew Duggan’s post “The Intolerable Hypocrisy of Cyberlibertarianism”, which opens with three paragraphs all but stating that life before the internet and digital media was simply horrible. I disagree. Maybe that’s because I never experienced audio cassettes or their players to destroy tapes. I actually made mixtapes for friends and found the audio quality as good as I needed to listen to Prokofjev piano concertos while taking hour long bus rides.

Another thing his posts complains about is never knowing where people were. I do want to know where my daughter is, or if she is with responsible grown-ups that I personally know, but that’s because she’s six years old. My ten and twelve-year-old sons have bicycles, and they use them to go where they want (within set boundaries of course). Only the twelve-year-old even has a phone and he always forgets it. I don’t know where they are, I don’t need to, and they probably don’t know where his parents are all the time, just that if we didn’t tell them to take a key, at least someone will be home. It was the same with me and my brothers in the eighties and that was never a problem.

Wrong

Matthew’s point is, however, and there I do fully, wholeheartedly and enthusiastically agree, that the internet is wrong, deeply wrong. It is, but I find it somewhat nihilist to blame John Perry Barlow since he wrote a manifesto called “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" (1996), inspired on Ayn Rand and Milton Freedman. The latter two I would blame for my loose laces if they would notice. “The market will sort it out. Regulation is theft. Wealth is virtue”. Sounds familiar?

“People are still people. They flame each other, they post slurs, they doxx, they harass, they spam, they post CSAM, they radicalize each other, they grief, they coordinate, they lie. A space with humans in it requires governance.”

-- Mathew Duggan

I see no reason whatsoever not to blame the sorry state of the internet since 2004 on capitalism itself. It is capitalism, or at least Ayn Rand’s ultra version, that teaches people it is okay, more than okay, morally good behaviour even, to relentlessly take what you can, despite any and all others.

It feels natural, so people think capitalism is natural. But it was designed, by the very Ayn Rand whom Mathew mentioned, and promoted by people like Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Alan Greenspan and the huge influence they had on politicians and bankers worldwide for three decades, but especially in the liberal democracies of the west.

Hence, American technology companies turning their customers into their product. Hence, A.I. bots stealing data where they can. Hence, oil companies destroying entire ecosystems. Hence, Elon Musk littering Low Earth Orbit with his satellites. Hence, people voting for fascists.

You adopt the ethics of the environment you grow up in.

Hyves

De Digitale Stad (The Digital City) was an early social network in the Netherlands, predating Facebook, predating even Hyves, where the owners noticed the sheer amount of personal data that users uploaded. Realising what they had, they cancelled the entire network. Nobody should have that kind of data, they thought.

Imagine what the internet would look like in a society filled with people and companies with a better morale. Then, imagine what society would look like.

Feeling betrayed by technology and blaming a specific niche philosophy while ignoring that it’s society and not technology what you are writing about sounds like still believing in neo-liberal capitalism and not wanting to blame it, which then causes generalising people’s behaviour, as if ultra capitalist people equal naturally behaving people.

There are countless people, who created this niche, this smallest of corners on the Internet, from their homes or their VPSs, because they like it, not because they took it from someone and wanted to make money off it.

Blame

StackOverflow, JavaRanch and other participant-maintained tech forums have run fine for many years until some better version became available, not until participants started doxxing and lying. StackOverflow was killed by A.I., not by lying.

So no, I don’t share Mathew’s sombre view of humanity. I can’t, even. I see a society that degrades into this 21st century version of the 19th century while I don't understand how we are not all just dropping what we are doing until we've avoided the worst parts of the climate disaster. If it feels too easy to blame capitalism, perhaps that is because it just is.

You cannot reduce people to what they show while having to function in a cut-throat society.

June 18, 2026

On Linux machines, I’ve been mounting remote directories over ssh for decades, typing ssh://host/dir in gnome’s file manager or fish://host/dir in Konqueror/Dolphin or using the Midnight Commander when those were not available. But when someone in your household uses a Mac, it’s not that easy. There is macFUSE, but it’s a pain to set up and maintain on a machine not under your control and any update can have you reconfigure everything again. I’ve even been running an NFS server in the past, but that too stopped working on MacOS long ago. I’ve used Nextcloud’s ssh mounting too, but I stopped that for security reasons.

To fix this, I’ve recently reinstalled Filestash, an “Open Source Platform for File Sharing / Document Management / MFT / Archiving”. Filestash is fast and looks good doing it, but setting it up can be a tad tricky, making some use sFTP where the Local plugin could be used instead.

$ curl -O https://downloads.filestash.app/latest/docker-compose.yml

That YAML file contained much I didn’t need, so this is what I kept:

filestash:
   image: machines/filestash:latest
   container_name: filestash
   ports:
     - "8334:8334"
   restart: unless-stopped
   volumes:
     - /volumes/filestash:/app/data/state
     - /data/archief:/mnt

After creating the directory for the app data state on the host, I ran the container, and opened host:8334/admin in my browser. After setting up an admin password, I found myself in Filestash’s admin console.

Filestash Admin console

Clicking Local under Storage Backend selects the Local storage plugin. Under Authentication Middleware I chose Local as well, having Filestash take care of authentication. A link to admin/simple-user-management appeared, which allowed me to create the needed accounts.

Scrolling down, there was a section called Attribute mapping:

Attribute mapping for Local storage

This is where, together with my admin password, I could enter the volume where I had the container mount the data I wanted to make available, /mnt.

And that was all. Filestash can do much more, so I feel like I’m heavily underusing it, but that’s okay. Anyone inside my network opening port 8334 on that host who can log in, can easily browse through the files, view them and upload new ones. It shows pictures in a gallery and also shows video.

It’s fast too, and much, much easier than setting up macFUSE.