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Test a DNS Leak in 2 Minutes: Complete Methodology + Per-OS Fixes (2026)

TL;DR Testing for a DNS leak takes 2 minutes: connect your VPN, open dnsleaktest.com and run the Extended Test, then check whether the DNS servers det…

How to not Lose $500M via API Bills: Run Private AI for 100 Engineers Under $1 Million

Last week a company nobody can name spent $500 million in a single month on Anthropic's Claude API. Not $500K. Not $5M. Half a billion dollars. In one…

[Day 9] A local Japanese sentiment AI (BERT) read 8 years of a LINE chat, and the ups and downs surfaced from numbers alone

Intro Day 9. Today is less about model internals and more of a personal experiment: have a local AI analyze the entire chat history with one LINE frie…

Part 8: Free Self-Hosted Mind Mapping for a Home Lab: Why I Put a Significant Part of MindMapVault on GitHub

When people say they build a privacy-first product, I ask one simple question: How much of the implementation story is publicly verifiable? For MindMa…

Through the Looking Glass of Logs: Karachi Police, DuckDuckGo, and IPv6 Magic

Remember when I said reality turned out to be harsher? When you open the logs of a custom-built analytics package after a couple of days, you expect t…

Zero-Knowledge Proofs: Proving You Know a Secret Without Revealing It

Suppose you need to prove you are over 18 without showing your birthdate, or that you know a password without sending it, or that a financial statemen…

How I Protected My Inbox from Spam Bots While Building Landing Pages

As developers, indie hackers, and solo founders, we launch numerous static sites, minimal landing pages, and open-source project documentation blocks.…

Stop pasting tokens into random websites: meet SmartDevUtils

If you've done any of these in the last week — Googled "decode jwt online" , clicked the first result, and pasted a real token into a textbox on a dom…

Hackers are trying to steal Signal users’ backups in new wave of phishing attacks

A new hacking campaign is trying to trick Signal users to give up their secret recovery key, which can be used to access online backups containing pas…

Why Analytics Is Product Infrastructure

Analytics is often treated as a reporting feature: a dashboard added after the product already exists. That is usually too late. For software operator…

I built a "what is my IP" site because I was tired of the ugly ones

I use "what is my IP" sites maybe once a month. Every time I end up on something covered in ads, calling three different tracking APIs, and showing me…

Why We Open-Sourced OpenLoomi AI

Your AI work partner shouldn't also be your landlord. The day we finished building OpenLoomi's core architecture, we sat around and asked ourselves on…

Nobody on the internet knows if you are a human

Cartoon by Peter Steiner, The New Yorker , July 5, 1993. Technology is progressing to the point where it is getting increasingly harder to tell if som…

Privacy-by-design: что наш edge не пишет на диск и почему это сложнее, чем кажется

Я пилю VantageDNS — рекурсивный DNS-резолвер с фильтрацией. NextDNS-clone, если коротко: юзер настраивает роутер на наш DoH endpoint, а мы рекурсивно …

Document photos are a tiny image-processing problem with sharp edges

Disclosure: I work on Passlens, a browser-first passport and ID photo maker. This post is about the product decisions behind that workflow, not a neut…

Why I Built a Privacy-First Discord Alternative

I'm a solo founder building Ally — a communication platform that puts privacy first. The Problem Every major communication platform today follows the …

been working on a tool site for months, finally sharing it

so ive been building this thing on and off for like 8 months now. its basically a bunch of online tools — pdf stuff, image compression, json formatter…

Why Your API Gateway Might Be Your Biggest Compliance Liability

Why Your API Gateway Might Be Your Biggest Compliance Liability Your microservices architecture handles thousands of customer verification requests pe…

CLOUD Act, GDPR и ваш DNS: что на самом деле может ваш провайдер

Сразу важное: я не юрист. Я инженер, который пилит свой DNS-резолвер по ночам, и читал законы не от хорошей жизни, а потому что это мой бизнес, и мне …

Canada’s Bill C-22 and the security cost of collecting more data

How Free Online Tools Survive Without Collecting Your Email

The question comes up every time someone recommends a free, no-account tool: "How does this even stay online? How are they paying for servers?" It's a…

Contract Analysis Will Replace Legal Gatekeeping

Software will absorb the contract review process within the next few years. Not the negotiation or the decision-making, but the mechanical work of rea…

Designing Website Analytics for AI Crawlers Without Surveillance

tags: seo, analytics, webdev, ai Most website analytics still start from the same old question: who visited the site? That question is useful, but it …

The Hardest Part of Building an Encrypted Journaling App Wasn’t Encryption

Lessons learned building client-side AES-256 encryption, secure sync, and emotionally safe UX in Flutter. Most apps treat privacy as a feature. We tre…

HTML meta referrer: canonical reference

framework-html-meta-referrer.md Comprehensive reference for HTML <meta name="referrer"> , the page level referrer policy declaration. Covers the…

Why Detecting PII Matters More Than Ever

Why Detecting PII Matters More Than Ever Every modern application processes data. Usernames, emails, phone numbers, payment details, addresses, govern…

Embedding sing-box in an iOS messenger to bypass Russian DPI (no VPN)

Embedding sing-box in an iOS messenger to bypass Russian DPI (no VPN) Our HTTPS API was timing out and our WebSocket refused to upgrade for a growing …

The Privacy Bug in My First Chrome Extension (And How to Avoid It)

Day 4 of building ReFind, and I found a bug that I'm embarrassed took me this long to find. My clipboard listener Chrome extension was capturing every…

Migrating off Google Analytics: Umami vs Plausible vs Fathom

I've been on a slow march away from Google Analytics for about two years now. Three client projects, one personal blog, and a small SaaS — all moved o…

Training Data Provenance: The Manifest Diff That Explains the Hash

AI x Crypto Systems disclosure: this article was prepared with AI assistance as an editorial helper. The ideas, facts, code, sources, and conclusions …