Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

IronEar: the privacy-first audio sensor that recognises 500 sounds on-device - https://www.open-electronics.org/ironear-the-privacy-first-audio-sensor-that-recognises-500-sounds-on-device/ #opensource

It should be clearer than ever to lawmakers that Americans want them to do their jobs.

It's a great time to tell them to support legislation to protect journalists and whistleblowers.

Use our action center to do just that — it's fast and easy!

https://freedom.press/action/

Trans Rights Protesters Crash Grand Opening of U.K.’s Largest ‘Harry Potter’ Store
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/trans-rights-protest-harry-potter-store-jk-rowling-1236747607/?utm_source=flipboard&utm_medium=activitypub

Posted into Top Stories in Celeb @top-stories-in-celeb-thenewsdesk

@lwriemen @ludicity the onion has you covered:

https://theonion.com/why-hasnt-abdul-el-sayed-accomplished-any-of-his-campaign-goals-since-winning-2-minutes-ago/

(long one, I am sorry)

Reading around the internet I see a lot of people expressing their extreme displeasure at how everything on the internet now seems to show a "verifying your browser" type page, and while this is extremely annoying I assure you from the web sites point of view this is basically existentially required.

Allow me to go into more detail from the point of view of the company that I run, and I'm sure the story is similar in many different places.

On an average day bgp.tools gets about 500~ users or or actively using the website at any given time, and let's assume this results in a request rate of ~10 RPS of dynamic requests (this is not the actual number but it's easier to just provide round benchmark numbers), so basically this excludes CSS/JS/Images/etc.

At the time of writing bgp.tools is "shooting down" about ~40 bot scraper connections _per second_, and the connection attempts the do get through tend to go on to each try and perform ~5 RPS until stopped. To add on top these things continuously do cache misses, which makes sense given at that point is to try and extract as much information from you, for no cost, and as much/fast as possible.

This is very quickly unsustainable.

The problem is that these scrapers are aware that they are unwelcome, and so they will happily do things like: (listed in the order of most commonly done)

A) Use normal browser user agent strings so it's not obvious from basic access.log files

B) Emulate real browser TLS handshakes to evade JA-3 and similar mitigations

C) Use proxies that have lease lines with popular eyeball ISP providers and rented IP space, so that AS blocks do not work

D) Use entire botnets of smart TVs and other compromised devices, mostly sitting behind "normal" networks

E) Use free mobile phone app/games with a "special" SDK as proxies

F) Run entire browser stacks purely to load pages in the most "authentic" way possible

With C+D+E traits combined, IP/Subnet/ASN blocks no longer work, with A+B you cannot easily identify what is what, so this leaves you in a dilemma:

If you run a website which serves information anonymously for free, you have a choice of three options:

1) Put everything behind a log-in barrier (this might destroy your business)

2) Purchase/rent more infrastructure purely for the purpose of serving bots, and at a significant multiplier of your existing infrastructure (this might destroy your business)

3) Use a "verify your browser" step to cut out 90%+ of this mess at the cost of annoying users a bit

(3) is the only really viable option for a lot of people, the pure scale of the scraping problem for some website is just not survivable at most peoples current scales.

UK Officials Said #AI Would Add £400 Billion to the Economy. That Figure Mainly Came From Google - https://www.wired.com/story/uk-officials-said-ai-would-add-400-billion-to-the-economy-that-figure-mainly-came-from-google/

I do NOT want "compromise" with the corrupt fash bootlickers and psychopaths. I do not want "bipartisanship". I want consequences for the cruel, nasty weirdos who cheated, lied, stole, killed, and impoverished everything they touched. I want them stripped of all power and influence.

Hey, #noAI #cybersecurity folks, recently, when I've come across devs who are pro-AI, I see them arguing about how hackers and bad actors will inevitably use AI to find critical vulnerabilities in important code, and as such (regardless of the ethics of LLMs), developers have a (moral) responsibility to use AI to check their code, have it ingest it and find vulnerabillities before the bad actors do. Is this true? Would developers really not be able to keep up their security against attacks made with the help of AI discovered vulnerabilities? I feel this is fishy/contentious but I don't have the knowledge to say anything (as I'm not a dev myself).

#AskFedi

Members of our Working Groups and the Organizing Circle invite all community members to consider volunteering with Social.Coop's #governance https://www.loomio.com/d/wc1IRz4b/seeking-volunteers-to-run-social-coop-

@loppear @ansate @pjw @ammaratef45 @edumerco @dphiffer @3wordchant @CaitlinWaddick @andrewe @flancian @arod. @MarieVC @ktoddbrown @Matt_Noyes @emi @hollie

No War But Class War. Solidarity Forever.
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U.S. border protection has been searching a record number of electronic devices in its 2026 fiscal year, per data obtained by CBC News. So before traveling, harden your devices.

Read our newsletter to learn more — and subscribe!

https://freedom.press/digisec/blog/us-border-device-searches-near-record-high/

AI is not sentient. It is not a person. It is not a ghost in a machine. It is Clippy with a GPU, Autocorrect with a venture capital fund, and a statistical prediction engine dressed up in Silicon Valley mythology.

And that distinction matters.

AI is not going to rise up and overthrow humanity. The people pushing AI are trying to. And they are sentient. They are people. They have names, bank accounts, political influence, and an alarming number of GPUs.

We do not have a *Rise of the Machines* scenario.

We have a *Rise of the Techbros* scenario.

And unlike Skynet, they can vote, lobby, exploit workers, dismantle regulations, and buy politicians.

The real threat isn't "artificial intelligence" (respectively: statistical word-arrangement). It's capitalism wielding "artificial intelligence" as another weapon to concentrate wealth, privatise knowledge, deskill labour, and turn human creativity into an extractive resource.

The machines aren't coming for us. Instead, the billionaires are already here, trying to make us pay rent on our own future.

But that future isn't theirs to own. We are not passive spectators in our own history. We can organise, resist, build alternatives, and reclaim the tools and knowledge that belong to us all.

The question isn't what machines will do to humanity. It's what we, as human beings, choose to do together. 🐙

You can swing and election more than a billionaire buying ads by manning the snacks table at phone bank night.

They spent SO MUCH MONEY and lost lost lost. The money doesn't work, so there is no need to chase and be polite to the people to hand it out.

Maybe be nice to Shirley at the snacks table instead. How about that?

Masterclass in defanging conservative BS, imho:

...The exchange continued, with Flint saying that Forstag wanted to “create special rights for men who think they are women,” to which Forstag responded by pointing out how Flint’s attacks were just meant to distract voters from Flint’s support of data centers and AI companies, stating, “Yeah, there was not a lick of truth to anything that Aaron just said. What I want to do is actually make sure that parents are able to make decisions for their own kids, that patients are able to make their own private personal decisions. Because parents know what’s best for their kids. The sports leagues know how to best run those leagues. And this fear-mongering from Aaron is to distract from the fact that he does not have any solutions to make working people’s lives better because Aaron’s not going to be working to make our lives better. Aaron’s going to be working to, well, serve those AI companies.”

https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/keep-politics-the-heck-out-of-it

RE: https://social.coop/@CaitlinWaddick/117553760199512639

Are you a member of social.coop? We'd love to have you join one of the groups that keep things running smoothly here - I've had a great first year in the Organizing Circle, helping coordinate with the fine folks taking care of our Tech, Community, and Finance efforts. Jump in, this place is made by good people!

@drahardja
Fortunately, there is a better way, for both makers and customers.

https://artisans.coop/

Everybody hates me and my sponsors and everything i post positive takes on. Here's why that's good news for us actually.

https://stratechery.com/2026/ai-on-the-ballot/
archive: https://archive.ph/d0erz