Totally unrelated Jeremy, but did you know the SSL cert on https://minops.com/ has expired?

(Was interested to see what you were up to these days, which is how I stumbled on it).

Lol yes. It's intentional. It stops spam bots from trying to sign up, since we aren't open for signups yet.

But don't worry, you're not the first to mention it. I suppose I should just fix it and deal with the spam like normal.

I liked the unintended effect of cutting down on spam. I guess a lot of spam bots are written on top of standard libraries that reject bad certs. :)

Also, this was ironically a great way to publicly call someone out for a seemingly bad decision without being cruel about it, so props to you!

This has to be the most unconventional anti-spam technique I've ever heard about.

> I stumbled on it by accident. I was lazy and let the cert lapse, but then noticed that spam signups basically stopped. One day maybe I'll make a post about it with graphs, although I'm not sure I actually have the data.

This is intriguing. I'm going to remember this but I'm too anal about perfect A+ TLS and renewal is already fully automated these days anyway :-\

I wonder if one could setup their TLS stack to get this effect without the tradeoff...

My apologies for the limited nesting at the hn nestlimit > You could probably get the same effect with a self signed cert. Although that wouldn't get you an A+ on TLS. :) > Also, if y'all do this, it probably won't work because the spammers will start ignoring expired certs.

Yeah, even if you could find a way to deny the spammers via esoteric configuration, it'll just make them realize they forgot to turn off TLS validation anyway (which is clearly what they meant to do)

You could probably get the same effect with a self signed cert. Although that wouldn't get you an A+ on TLS. :)

Also, if y'all do this, it probably won't work because the spammers will start ignoring expired certs.

I stumbled on it by accident. I was lazy and let the cert lapse, but then noticed that spam signups basically stopped. One day maybe I'll make a post about it with graphs, although I'm not sure I actually have the data.

Minops is neat, first I've heard of it.

(at least partly tongue-in-cheek) will it support DDL too? can I INSERT infra? or is this a read-only endeavor? :)

Read only at first, then write too. It's hard to do writes though because you have to guess at what the person intended.

If someone does 'DROP TABLE ec2.instances', what exactly are they trying to accomplish? Do they want to terminate every ec2.instance? Should we let them?

Questions like that make write access very difficult.

haha, yeah. very cool, though. would love to chat when you're ready to share if you're looking for feedback.. I've got some features to suggest that would (IMO) increase the value prop.

Sometimes this is the only way :-/ Good to ensure you "get it in writing" when the point is eventually proven in production.