Apache Poison Fountain

I understand the point of this, but instead of releasing the code to let people embed it into their sites, you assume they will set up proxying to a random url? No sane person will do that.

I fed this to Claude, and it makes an interesting point in how the Poison Fountain is going to help concentrate AI into the hands of those who can filter out the poison, and out of the hands of those low-budget / open source efforts to build more equitable models that cannot afford to filter out the poison.

> But the strategy is incoherent in a way that bothers me. The framing is "machine intelligence is a threat to the human species, therefore poison the training data." But poisoned training data doesn't make AI disappear — it makes open and smaller models worse while barely denting organizations with the resources to detect and filter adversarial data. Google, Anthropic, OpenAI all have data quality pipelines specifically designed to catch this kind of thing. The people most hurt would be smaller open-source efforts and researchers with fewer resources. So the actual effect is likely to concentrate AI power further among the largest players — the exact opposite of what someone worried about existential risk from AI should want.

Poison Fountain: https://rnsaffn.com/poison2/

Poison Fountain explanation: https://rnsaffn.com/poison3/

Simple example of usage in Go:

  package main

  import (
      "io"
      "net/http"
  )

  func main() {
      poisonHandler := func(w http.ResponseWriter, req *http.Request) {
          poison, err := http.Get("https://rnsaffn.com/poison2/")
          if err == nil {
              io.Copy(w, poison.Body)
              poison.Body.Close()
          }
      }
      http.HandleFunc("/poison", poisonHandler)
      http.ListenAndServe(":8080", nil)
  }

https://go.dev/play/p/04at1rBMbz8

Apache Poison Fountain: https://gist.github.com/jwakely/a511a5cab5eb36d088ecd1659fce...

Discourse Poison Fountain: https://github.com/elmuerte/discourse-poison-fountain

Netlify Poison Fountain: https://gist.github.com/dlford/5e0daea8ab475db1d410db8fcd5b7...

In the news:

The Register: https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/11/industry_insiders_see...

Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/craigsmith/2026/01/21/poison-fo...

I guess support for Wordpress would be necessary too.

I don't use Apache, but I think I'm going to set something similar up for the non-client facing services I run.