I've started using phish.report along with SpamCop to specifically report phishing sites separately. They do a hosting lookup and link directly to the abuse contact or form.

Phishers are definitely trying to become cleverer. My "favourite" so far is adding the phishing link only in a QR code in an embedded PNG.

Many of my consciously subscribed-to newsletters use Mailchimp, such as record shops and labels.

They're also one of the mail services I have a better impression of given their responses to my reports.

DB-less is underrated. You can take it even further.

One of my favourite websites ever loads its entire main content index into the client as a JSON file. It's about 5 MBs I think, so maybe 10% of the ad and autoplay video crap most "modern" websites make you download in the first few seconds. Except that this initial download actually gives you an amazing UX in return, because all the searching, filtering, pagination etc. happens entirely client-side without further network requests. I don't know any other website that is as much of a joy to just browse through. You never wait for anything until the point that you found what you want and actually want to open a detail page. Just wonderful.

I suspect there may also be a strong "it's what people want" aspect to this.

Why do smartphones barely outlive their warranty period? Check the statistics on how long most people keep their phone before voluntarily replacing it, and it makes a lot more sense. Why invest in the premium components and workmanship to make your phone last 5 years, if 95% of your customers will not use it for more than 18 months? (These numbers are made up, but from what I remember, the reality is not far off from that).

I could totally believe a similar thing being at play for backpacks, jackets, shoes, etc. where the people who keep their stuff long enough to even notice it falling apart are a maybe vocal, but small minority.

According to people in the thread, Deuter and Osprey are still independent and high-quality.

I don't know about backpacks specifically, but my general impression with Decathlon and their own brands has been that they somehow manage to be ridiculously cheap, while also being better made and lasting longer than many name brands that cost several times as much.

My impression of Decathlon is that they also have very helpful and usually knowledgable staff. People go work there because they're into the sports!

Tough to define and enforce, though.

It reminds me of EIG (Endurance International Group), who at least at one point owned a large portion of major mainstream webhosts (including Arvixe, Bluehost, Hostgator, A Small Orange, Site5...). They "streamlined" them all into one big operation, with reliability and customer support going to shit for every host they bought. But they kept all the brands separate, so people kept bouncing from host to host, wondering why they were all so shit, not realising that they never actually switched providers.

That's a one-shot, though. Now try making something you want to build on. It falls apart very, very quickly.

Not to mention that these prototypes and samples all turn out more or less the same. Obviously, given how LLMs work. Like LLM prose, LLM-generated web apps have a distinctive, samey look and feel.

Even with Glacier, S3 is ridiculously expensive compared to almost anything else.

As with anything, there are tradeoffs. There are situations where S3 is cheaper. For my use case (long term storage, rarely downloaded), Glacier Deep Archive is about $1/TB/mo which is cheaper than anything else out there (rsync.net, Backblaze R2, Cloudflare R3, Wasabi). Where you get bitten by Glacier is if you need frequent access since you pay a fee for AWS to retrieve the file in addition to the bandwidth used to download it.

But Crashplan also had an absolute abomination of a bloated, sluggish, Java-based client.

It was a bit, but I never found it as bad as Backblaze.

CrashPlan required, if I recall correctly, 1GB of RAM for every 1TB backed up. It got a bit unwieldy after a while, because I have multiple terabytes of photos and videos over many years.

These clients can't be that hard to write, surely?

I restored a 2 TB drive via the net no problem from them some years back, although I didn't use the client, but downloaded one massive ZIP file from the web interface.

Well, "no problem" is an overstatement. Once you need a restore, you learn that their promise of end-to-end encryption is actually a lie. (As in, you have to break the end-to-end encryption to restore since everything has to be decrypted on their servers.)

I've backed up and restored ~14-15TB[0] with their B2 product. IIRC sync each way took three or four days, not really that bad. I used rclone, though, not any official client. And that's B2, not their "unlimited" backup service.

[0] My home file server, migrating a four-disk mirrored-pairs ZFS array to RAID5 including replacing the smaller pair of disks with ones matching the larger pair, so the old ZFS filesystem had to be totally destroyed in the process and I needed somewhere to put the data for the like 15 minutes the logical disk wouldn't exist in any form. The alternative would have been to build an entire new four-disk array, doubling the disk cost of the project and requiring some kind of second host-machine. This approach saved me $400 or more, probably wouldn't have attempted it otherwise, cost would have been too high. Ended up costing somewhere in the tens of dollars as I recall.