lm411

"we protect our first-party products from abuse like bots, scraping, fraud, and other attempts to misuse the platform"

The scary part is that you don't even see the irony in writing this.

Or, are you just okay "misusing" everyone for your own benefit?

That is ridiculous.

You imply that "an expensive llm service" is harmed by abuse, but, every other service is not? Because their websites are "static" and "near-zero marginal cost"?

You have no clue what you are talking about.

I would love for the ad-supported model to die. I hate ads, and I hate having to serve ads. We get some subscription users but nowhere near enough to cover costs.

Unfortunately, what I think will happen - and indeed already is - is that the AI companies themselves will replace much of the WWW. Sites like the one I am talking about will cease to exist. AI companies, once they can no longer scrape (steal) the data will end up licensing the data themselves and replace us as the distributor to end users. Perhaps as a subscription add-on or also with an ad based model.

Which to some may be fine. Personally, I don't want a few centralized AI companies replacing the hundreds of thousands of independent websites online. Way too much centralized power there.

Fail2ban doesn't scale well to these volumes of traffic and request patterns.

Just like fail2ban is not very useful against a DDOS attack where each unique IP only makes a few requests with a large (hour+) delay in between requests. There is no clear "fail" in these requests, and the fail2ban database becomes huge and far too slow.

- 400,000 Unique IP addresses

- 1 to 3 requests per hour per IP addresses - with delays of over 60 minutes between each request.

- Legit request URLs, legit UA & referrer

Maybe Anubis would help, but it's also a risk for various reasons.

AI companies and notably AI scrapers are a cancer that is destroying what's left of the WWW.

I was hit with a pretty substantial botnet "distributed scraping" attack yesterday.

- About 400,000 different IP addresses over about 3 hours

- Mostly residential IP addresses

- Valid and unique user agents and referrers

- Each IP address would make only a few requests with a long delay in between requests

It would hit the server hard until the server became slow to respond, then it would back off for about 30 seconds, then hit hard again. I was able to block most of the requests with a combination of user agent and referrer patterns, though some legit users may be blocked.

The attack was annoying, but, the even bigger problem is that the data on this website is under license - we have to pay for it, and it's not cheap. We are able to pay for it (barely) with advertising revenue and some subscriptions.

If everyone is getting this data from their "agent" and scrapers, that means no advertising revenue, and soon enough no more website to scrape, jobs lost, nowhere for scrapers to scrape for the data, nowhere for legit users to get the data for free, etc.

Yeah.

Of all the Apple software piss-off's I've had over the last few years, I feel that Screen Time is a broken mess. So many things don't work, require newer versions of iOS than the device supports, etc.

I've used it for years on my sons devices and it's a constant hassle.

CBC used to be so excellent.

Now we've got a CBC that punishes those that go against their political ideology - funded by the Liberals, with people like David Cameron and Rosemary Barton choosing who gets to be on discussion panels.

Cost of living and the seemingly continuous drop in quality of life are playing a much bigger role than social media use. Trudeau's devastating policies may have done well for the pat-themselves-on-the-back-because-we're-so-great folks, but, the country is really not doing well.

Born and raised Canadian, but I lived outside of Canada in a non-OECD country for most of Trudeau's tenure, and returned a few years ago. The changes - almost all for the worse - in Canada during that period are quite astounding. And obvious to me as someone who rarely visited Canada until I moved back.

I think Canadians suffer a sort of a "boiling frog" thing, where the changes were gradual enough that they don't realize how much things have turned to crap.

My wife and I have already decided that we will leave Canada again once our son graduates high school. We stay here for him so he can be with his friends, and that is the only reason.

It's such a shame as the country truly has so much potential to be awesome, and I love the people here.

Not even close compared to Google Play and their review and appeal process.

Recently I had an app for a customer. Approved easily by Apple. Rejected by Google.

The reason given by Google was completely meaningless in the context of the app. When this happens, I usually make a bullshit change, increment the version, and submit again. That was also rejected in this case. I asked for more info and they provided a meaningless screenshot of the app - that was all. So I appealed. That was also useless! They provided no info to help.

Eventually I just created a new Google Play account and re-submitted a new version of the app, and it was accepted near immediately.

I've had some annoying experiences with Apples review process but it is gold compared to Google Play.

It was a hell of a time to be on the internet, for sure.

Security was basically non-existent or so badly implemented that it was a joke.

Some fond memories of my early teenage years:

- Causing net splits to steal ops / takeover IRC channels

- As part of a warez group, using site to site FTP transfers to move massive (at that time) amounts of warez without being limited by my 14400 modem

- How crazy easy it was to crash/DOS pretty much any computer on the internet

- Taking over company networks just for fun, and putting in backdoors that drove the sysadmins nuts

Yeah, I was a shithead teenager, and am sincerely sorry to the sysadmins I messed with, as I am a sysadmin myself now.

Eventually I ended up having many FBI-instigated meetings with the RCMP Commercial Crimes Division... They had boxes upon boxes of paper printouts from sniffing my connections.

I think I got off partially because of my age (about 14). But also the fact that the telecom company I was using had illegally sniffed incoming telnet sessions to my Linux box before there was any warrant, and had logged in using credentials they had sniffed to read many personal emails between my brother and myself, and other friends that used the system.

I realized what they were doing pretty quickly, but, I'm pretty sure their recklessness in doing that is what saved my butt in the end. This was a big crown corp telecom company.

Sounds good! I'm usually in Cranbrook a couple times a year.

If you mean Bell, they are near non-existent in these parts.

I love Canadians. And Americans.

And I've lived in a few different countries in my life. No country is without faults, but, Canada right now is a mess.

Close enough though a bit more in the boonies.

They wanted me to drive to the Rogers store in Cranbrook or Kelowna.

Shaw Mobile on the other hand, did go to Rogers.

I (born and raised Canadian) moved my family to Canada 5 years ago.

We've been on a waiting list for a doctor ever since. My only option to see a doctor here is to go the emergency room at the closest hospital.

Funny thing, I lived outside of Canada for many years though I am Canadian born and raised. I moved my family back for a "better quality of life".

Jokes on me. ;)

I love the land and the people, but, the country itself is a mess. We have already planned our exit.

They did mail me SIM cards, three times, for three different numbers each time.

Their system didn't work when setting them up, and I had two different support operators tell me that my only option was to drive to Cranbrook. In the middle of winter. This is a drive that involves 3 mountain passes.

Networking 101 doesn't apply when you have collusion between the only two major telecom companies... and they both are bad.

Why spend money on reliability when there are no consequences of not doing so?

Yep.

Allowing Rogers to purchase Shaw was absurd.

The Commissioner of Competition was very strongly opposed to the merger, the court ruled against him, and Canadians had to pay Rogers $13 million CAD because he opposed it.

I was a Shaw Mobile (not Freedom) customer, and Rogers wanted me to drive 600km (both ways) through the Kootenay mountains in winter to get my new SIM cards. I told them where to go.

Rogers is junk and Canada is an oligarchy.

You don't have the slightest clue what you are talking about.

Sorry.

Regards,

Someone who knows many people in the garment industry.

In Southeast Asia there are many markets selling used clothing like this. It provides a good business for the vendor and a great option for many locals to get much nicer clothes than they could otherwise obtain. Googling, it appears similar in Africa.

I'm not sure it's quite as evil as the author implies, though, I don't doubt dealing with the junk is a problem and there should be some recycling infrastructure setup to deal with the junk clothing.

Damn, you mean we can't just swap resistors to under/over volt anymore?

I am getting old.

(tongue in cheek, and yes, I am getting old)

Shit, I remember just using a pencil to lower resistance values.

The numbers might be a bit bloated, but not by a lot.

We had just moved to Canada from a country without a reciprocal drivers license exchange - no matter as she never had one. Where we had moved from, drivers licenses are largely considered optional and although I taught her to drive and she had been riding motorcycles since age 12 or so, driving in North America is way different. We moved just before covid hit. Driving lessons and license testing were difficult / near impossible to get - and with very long wait times. So it was her only form of transportation for quite a long time.

She was doing cleaning at various businesses around the area as well, so again she would take the bike to those locations every day with her little cargo trailer and cleaning supplies. She'd come home after dropping our son off at school, charge the bike, eat a snack, change trailers and head back out, then repeat when it was time to pick him up.

She quite easily spent 3-4 hours on the bike everyday. Just getting to school and back for our son was about 45 minutes one way. He wasn't in the closest school because of things the further school offered (nature school), another 30 minutes each way to the local shopping centre, and then wherever she needed to go for work.

We went through a lot of tires and brake pads, but other than general maintenance the bike held up great and is still going strong.

She has a good job and nice little car now, so the bike is seeing a lot less use this year.

She is as tough as nails. :)

There are almost certainly aggregate sites that will share the new domains, messages boards, social media, instant messaging, etc. Word of the new domains will travel very quickly.

Hell, they could setup their own public DNS outside of France and suggest users use that. Users already switched from local/ISP DNS to Cloudflare / Google because of the previous law so that is not a big hurdle (ignoring the obvious security problem - many users won't care they just want to watch the game).

My point though is that these laws will be very easy to bypass just like most anti piracy laws before it. Note that The Pirate Bay is still up and running.

Or just footybite.cc will become footybite1.cc, then footybite2.cc... so on. The people writing these laws are seemingly clueless about the internet. Or perhaps, the lawyers just don't care as they are getting paid.

I haven't even thought of Berkeley DB in years. Used to use it quite a bit but most notably perhaps with apache mod_auth_db to handle authentication and subscriber information on a fairly high traffic site (yes, this was long long ago ;) ).

Anecdotally, my wife's Magnum Premium 2 has held up well for 4 years of all weather use in west coast Canada. This includes pulling a cargo trailer or kids trailer year round - salty and sandy slushy snow, pouring rain, sun...

For two of the years she hauled him to school everyday, in all weather, and did all of her shopping and errands with the bike. About 100km every weekday. I'll have to look at the odometer sometime and see what it's at.

I believe it has a Bafang motor and I think we paid about C$2200 as it was in clearance.

No, but Google will find and spider the URLs found from at least two sources:

1) Users may (inevitably will) share links to the URLs on social media / wherever, and Googlebot et al will find those links and spider them.

2) The URLs will be sent to Google for any Chrome user with "Make searches & browsing better" setting enabled.

https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/13844634?#make_sear...

>Command line interfaces don't fit modern application usage.

I guess you and I have different use cases and definition of "modern application usage". I assume you spend most of your day in a GUI, while I spend most of mine in a terminal.

Pipes can handle binary data and sure you could pipe Skypes output through sed or awk... Though something like ffmpeg is more likely, and it will happily take stdin as input.