Posts by Kurgan

Re: Nuke codes?

Probably all zeroes anyway.

Re: Accessibility nightmare

I think this is inevitable if you use such a method. Also a simple copy/paste from a user wanting to keep some text from the page will fail.

I am using Anubis web firewall to try and stop scrapers. Of course it might not work, but at least a human can still copy/paste my pages if they like.

Re: It wouldn't be an exact simulation

While you are right, I don't think that "dynamic range" and "tape cassette" belong in the same phrase. Tape cassettes were the worse medium of their time. Reel to reel tapes were a different beast, but too expensive.

More and more web sites that I visit are implementing some sort of challenge or puzzle that I must solve to prove that I'm not a bot from a US AI company before it will let me in in order to keep their servers from being ground to dust by the AI scrapers

The issue here is more complicated that that: "legit" AI companies are scraping the hell out of everything, but at least they are doing it with a user agent that states who they are, so you can block them if you like. Then there are search engines turned AI companies (Google, Bing, Meta, and some others) that still use a proper user agent string, and these you can block, too... but if you block them you disappear from Google or Bing, so you are committing web suicide. They are the purest evil because you cannot keep Google from accessing your site if you want visibility, but you cannot tell them "index my site in the search engine but do not use it for AI training", so you know you cannot win. And some of them (Meta) are pounding hard, with a lot of requests per minute, killing sites that have database-intensive page generation.

Then there is the great majority of "under cover" AI scrapers (usually Chinese, but not only Chinese) that use a random / fake user agent. And while I absolutely want to block them all (not because they are Chinese, but because they are hiding their name and scope) I cannot do it without some trickery like Anubis web firewall or similar systems. And this course of action is mostly useless because they will soon learn how to trick Anubis into letting them in.

Re: Modern solutions

Every such "home made" mod is effective because it\s unique. In this case security through obscurity does work. My uncle had such a mod in 1980 on his Fiat 500.

Re: Possibly even a good one.

Yes, it's nuts, but still every business and even a lot of government entities rely completely on MS, Google, Amazon. And it seems that no one sees the need to actually own and control their IT assets (hardware, software, etc) and their data that is stored on such systems.

Re: I'm curious to see

I'm a strange beast and while I'm Italian, I use a US keyboard and a Denmark language, Denmark time format and day/month names and Italian numbers and currency on my Linux Mint. So dates are in the right format dd/mm/aaaa but language is English, week starts on Monday (Italian style) currency is Euro, decimal is comma, number separator is dot. And Betterbird 140 ESR works and the dates are right.

Or it shows that the AI can now improve itself, which is the whole point of the system. Once the AI can improve itself, it will become super intelligent in a very short time, Bezos will fire every worker in every sector and then sell his products to nobody because nobody will have the money to buy anything. But it will probably be irrelevant because we will all be dead by that point.

Re: If this was real

Yes, if this is real it's scary not because the model jumped the blocks, but because the same model, without any block, is currently in use by every government. And by miscreants, too, soon.

Re: Versions...

7.0.2 is the fixed one. 7.x is vulnerabile.

Re: Nonsense

Yes, open source software can help here, and the technolgy for everyday computing (not AI slop) is here since forever.

Still EVERYONE USES MICROSOFT.

Why?

Well, because everyone else uses Microsoft. It's that simple. We must break away from this idiotic loop, but it's not easy at all, even less easy since there are tons of rules, policies, etc, and "best practices" that have grown over time around only one service, and that's Microsoft ecosystem. No one will break away from it unless required by law.

Let me explain how thoroughly fucked we all are

The issue is you pay for AI even if you don't use it.

- hardware costs are 10X, and you need hardware even for "classic" computing.

- energy cost is raising fast, and you need energy even for "pen and paper" computing, if you want heat, light, or air conditioning.

Because of these two facts, even grocery cost is increasing because the people who make, transport, and sell groceries need computers and power. Everyone needs computing and power nowadays.

Also, because of the crazy expense in AI from idiotic IT companies, their products (even without AI integration for the customer) will cost you a lot more. And since everything a subscription, the cost increase will happen NOW and not "if and when we buy the new version of software X"

Re: Plenty of room on top

It is not as if internet use is a zero-sum game: every time a bot scrapes a page, a human is denied it

Well, it turns out that it indeed is. I manage some services that are quite niche like storiaememoriadibologna.it, a web site dedicated to information about people and event and places about Bologna, Italy.

This site has limited resources and the queries tend to be very database intensive. Human visitors are quite sparse, this is not a high volume site. Well, now AI scrapers make for 95% of the traffic, and they tend to kill the server, generating outages that last from minutes to days.

I also manage a medium sized e-commerce for a sports apparel reseller. This site has 24 cores, all flash storage, 128 GB of RAM and it has quite a lot of human visitors.... well, AI bots can kill it anyway, quite easily. If the site can generate a page in 0,2 seconds but the AI bot makes 20 request a second, it's easy to see what will happen. And again, humans are denied the access to the service. And the owner of the site is not happy to pay for a monster server that is capable to serve 5 times the usual human traffic, but chokes on AI slop generators coming to scrape everything.

Re: Chat Control.....

Yes, it works... but:

1- if you don't produce your amount of cleartext data, you'll be put on the watch list

2- if your communication system requires spy-level operational security practices, it will be so inconvenient to use that almost no one will use it.

Re: OTOH: quote: Microsoft is really trying to make people stop using Windows uh?

And anyway real sysadmins do not "sudo nano".

Re: Late 2027?

The issue here is that a lot of common people are unintentionally investing in AI because banks are selling aggregate funds (sorry I don't know how they are called in English) that contain AI stocks to their customers. And rest assured that once the crash comes in sight, the banks will promptly "sell the debit" to unknowing / inexperienced customers and we will all lose money.

Uhm... maybe this time they have a new wapon. The power of bribes. In the current situation maybe some crypto payments can open doors for the patent trolls.

Re: Own servers.

We have put ourselves into this situation. Now we have to escape the trap we have got ourselves into. And of course it's hard. Very hard.

Re: The Big Question Is

This is surely part of the experiment

Re: Lobbyists

Because politicians are part of the system.

Lobbyist fund politicians who get elected because they have the money to campaign for their election.

And the real issue here is that this (unless it comes down to bribes and corruption) is perfectly legal.

And while Europe is living (right now) its worst heat wave (WORST FOR NOW, not worst overall) it's also green-lighting a ton of useless AI data centres.

Re: Interesting

Exactly. Every "strong" and changed over time password is like:

MonthYEAR!

SeasonYEAR!

Supplier_nameYEAR!

Customer_nameYEAR!

Re: The biter bit?

Yes, I'd really like to have their list of ip addresses related to AI companies to block them all from accessing all of my websites. (by the way I'm currently using Anubis as a web scrapers blocker)

Re: @Kurgan

Yes, i was thinking about the IME. The issue is... is the IME really disabled? How can you know? I'm not saying that Purism is lying. I'm saying the only ones who knows if IME is really disabled are Intel or the CIA.

Re: but how to shore up to protect yourself?

I'm not American so I don't know how their pension works, but here in Italy if you have insurances and such (a sort of private pension fund) you usually don't get to choose where they do invest money. They invest in other funds that invest in other funds, etc. Who knows where does the money actually go in the end?