Cool project: "Nepenthes" is a tarpit to catch (AI) web crawlers. "It works by generating an endless sequences of pages, each of which with dozens of links, that simply go back into a the tarpit. Pages are randomly generated, but in a deterministic way, causing them to appear to be flat files that never change. Intentional delay is added to prevent crawlers from bogging down your server, in addition to wasting their time. Lastly, optional Markov-babble can be added to the pages, to give the crawlers something to scrape up and train their LLMs on, hopefully accelerating model collapse."
Nepenthes - ZADZMO.org
Making web crawlers eat shit since 2023
"Free Our Feeds" surely is a campaign. But what exactly and who is it for? (Original title: But does it “Free our Feeds”?)
Smashing Frames
But does it "Free our Feeds"?
The “Free Our Feeds” campaign was launched today and something about it is off. It’s trying to raise money (at least 4 Mio and up...
Like they could have made this a "let's get the decentralized social web funded" thing and actually put money and resources towards making ATproto and ActivityPub interoperable. Could have funded Mastodon development (or the development of a new ActivityPub platform). But they just wanna funnel money into one protocol claiming that that will somehow "save" things.
tldr.nettime
tante (@tante@tldr.nettime.org)
Dunno, something about the "FreeOurFeeds" campaign is off. (https://freeourfeeds.com/) It's basically trying to raise money for AT Proto so "the c...
Dunno, something about the "FreeOurFeeds" campaign is off. (
Free Our Feeds
Free Our Feeds
) It's basically trying to raise money for AT Proto so "the community" can standardize the thing and "build stuff" and they wanna run a second "relay" (which is the chokepoint that centralizes Bluesky ATM). I mean okay, but it feels a bit ... isn't that what the Bluesky Corporation wanted to enable/do? They already got millions in funding. Now some external entity collects more from people who for their investment get no stake in the corporation actually owning the whole thing... The 9 custodians consist of a whole bunch of AI people, some Mozilla folks (same thing) and the director of the Social Web foundation. But the already existing standard ActivityPub is just an entry in the FAQ: "ActivityPub is a W3C standard that enables interoperability between platforms like Mastodon, Flipboard, Ghost, Threads and others. AT and ActivityPub should not be either/or options. Our vision is that interoperability between open social media platforms is achieved through collaboration. This campaign can organize developer communities, fund product development, support testing that improves bridging and native protocol interoperability." It can, but will it? Who knows? It's just presented in a weird way with a whole lot of "give us a lot of money and we'll make amazing stuff happen" and in the end a bunch of AI grifters get some startups "that build upon AT proto" funded.
I used to judge people for this because obviously and clearly it's wrong. But this is how we have to live now, otherwise the cats annihilate every roll of TP within minutes. It pains me every day. image
The Vulture article on Neil Gaiman's decades of rape and abuse is chilling. What a fucking monster. Given his influence the bravery of the women he attacked cannot be overstated.
Vulture
There Is No Safe Word
How the best-selling fantasy author Neil Gaiman hid the darkest parts of himself for decades.
It's super revealing that Zuckerberg basically equates "lack of masculine energy" and "female energy" which then he calls "neutered". Not great to kinda imply women are neutered men. His world view is basically at pickup-artist/incel levels.
"Meta already was doing a very bad job with content moderation, and that its policies and actual enforcement already disproportionately affected LGBTQ people. Monday’s changes, then, have cruelty in their specificity and seem like an overt attempt to kiss Donald Trump’s ring." (Original title: ‘It’s Total Chaos Internally at Meta Right Now’: Employees Protest Zuckerberg’s Anti LGBTQ Changes)
404 Media
‘It’s Total Chaos Internally at Meta Right Now’: Employees Protest Zuckerberg’s Anti LGBTQ Changes
Meta's decision to specifically allow users to call LGBTQ+ people "mentally ill" has sparked widespread backlash at the company.
Matt Mullenweg is still in his midlife crisis, 2025 edition: Automattic publicly announces it will massively reduce its contributions to the WordPress open source project and focus on their proprietary offerings.
Aligning Automattic’s Sponsored Contributions to WordPress – Automattic
And people wonder why I am not a big fan of the EFF. When any moderation or defense of the dignity and rights of marginalized people are "censorship" we are in right wing territory.
Mastodon
Electronic Frontier Foundation (@eff@mastodon.social)
We applaud Meta’s efforts to try to fix its over-censorship problem but will watch closely to make sure it is a good-faith effort and rolled out ...