Ben Tasker
bentasker.co.uk · Personal blog · on HN since 2019
Ben Tasker, a UK developer and sysadmin, writes about home networking, monitoring, security, and personal projects, such as baiting a romance scammer.
What HN saysHN links it for his scammer-baiting post and a guide to running a DNS-over-HTTPS server; the author says there is usually a tech angle.
22HN people shared it
4linked it in comments
29stories submitted
823story points
3 months agolast shared
2019people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1My Scammer Girlfriend: Baiting a Romance Fraudster2 people · 455 points · first shared 2025 · 156 comments on HN
- 2Examining a Copyright Claim from Copytrack2 people · 8 points · first shared 2025 · discussion on HN
- 3Using Mastodon as a RSS Feed Reader2 people · 5 points · first shared 2023 · 1 comments on HN
- 4Monitoring an Aquarium with InfluxDB and Grafana2 people · 2 points · first shared 2023 · discussion on HN
- 5Configuring Split Horizon DNS with Pi-Hole and Tailscale1 people · 121 points · first shared 2025 · 37 comments on HN
- 6Spending an afternoon in the Sizewell control-room simulator1 people · 116 points · first shared 2024 · 37 comments on HN
- 7Trying Out a Far Infrared Heated Poster1 people · 71 points · first shared 2024 · 60 comments on HN
- 8Matt Mullenweg's Crusade Undermines Open Source1 people · 8 points · first shared 2024 · 2 comments on HN
- 9The Effectiveness of SSH Tarpits1 people · 4 points · first shared 2022 · discussion on HN
- 10Vulnerability: Infiltrating a network via Powerline (HomePlugAV) adapters (2014)1 people · 4 points · first shared 2022 · 1 comments on HN
- 11Should've Bought a Playstation1 people · 4 points · first shared 2024 · discussion on HN
- 12Perplexity.ai Is Susceptible to Prompt Injection from Arbitrary Pages1 people · 4 points · first shared 2024 · discussion on HN
- 13Is Our Hot Tub Thermal Cover Worth the Cost?1 people · 2 points · first shared 2024 · discussion on HN
- 14Setting Up Anti Hot Linking Protections for ChatGPT1 people · 2 points · first shared 2025 · discussion on HN
- 15Feedback on the Online Safety Act (An Email to My MP)1 people · 2 points · first shared 2025 · discussion on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
btasker · 2023-07-05
https://www.bentasker.co.uk
I write about a range of stuff, though there's usually a tech angle to it
recursivecaveat · 2025-05-30
I found it again: https://www.bentasker.co.uk/posts/blog/security/seducing-a-romance-sca…
EgoIncarnate · 2023-09-30
It seems Mark Pizzolato was at the time the primary maintainer and recent contributor (by a large margin) (https://groups.io/g/simh/message/1501).
Mark made a change to how the virtual disk system worked that broke an esoteric use case (using dd to image multiple disk images to an SD, without an actual file system). The user didn't want to use a workaround (specifying the transfer size in the dd command), and proceeded to use twitter to get people to harass Mark. (https://www.bentasker.co.uk/posts/blog/the-internet/toxicity-in-softwa…
Mark got sick of the harrasment and decided to take his toys and go home.
Toxic user prompts toxic reaction by developer.
cuillevel3 · 2021-07-08
Oops, I meant this one: https://www.bentasker.co.uk/documentation/linux/407-building-and-runni…