Max-Ganz-II

Interesting, so the spoofing is only active during attacks? That explains the short duration.

As far as I know, only during.

I am wondering what changed though, since this hasn't happened before in the previous 4 years. More spoofing installations maybe? Higher radio transmitter power?

No clue about changes. All I can say is I never saw it when I was here last, mid-2022 for about nine months.

I'm also very curious, do you have any technical mitigations for this to be able to use your GPS devices? Or is it now just a fact of life?

Technical mitigations? read the road signs and figure out where you are :-)

I did read about someone having trouble with scooter apps, where the app was very confused to find the scooter now in Lima.

Sorry for what you are going through.

Thank you.

Speaking as someone living in Kyiv, I experience this first hand, on my phone, when a raid is on.

Yes, you're right.

Works as current readership is very small, about 20 or 30 people.

User has to email me for access.

I put my site behind a username/password wall, to block LLM bots.

Same problem on my web-site, where I research Amazon Redshift.

I've put up a username/password firewall - free, but blocks AI bots.

This has led the site to be almost wholly deranked by Google, but this is in effect what happened anyway, since the AI summaries were absorbing so much traffic.

This in turn leads to the next problem, which is that it seems now uneconomic for me to research Amazon Redshift. If I allow the site to be searched, AI bots will copy it. If I do not, Google will make the site disappear from search. At no point do I see a return on my work.

This means there will be no research in the first place, for the AIs or for normal people. The parasite has killed the host.

Yes.

Over the last month I contacted Support for the first time in many years.

This was for a question about how billing works.

It went like this;

1. Case created.

2. Unassigned for seven days.

3. Open real-time chat, talk for 25 or so minutes where I guide a first-line Indian chap who plainly doesn't know about the subject in hand and who is as we talk reading the AWS docs I've already read. At the end, just as I couldn't find an answer, he couldn't - which is good, he didn't try to give me the wrong answer - he escalates. That's fine - a lot of questions are simple and even silly, and first line support is there to handle them - but they could have done all this without me, if they'd opened the ticket themselves rather than me having to chase.

4. Eleven days later, comes back with exactly the wrong answer. In the meantime, I had figured out the correct answer, and reply, explaining it to him.

5. Next day, I get a wall of plainly AI generated text telling me my answer is correct.

It seems to me a key issue here relating to AI generated text, is a misunderstanding on the part of AWS that I as a consumer will value that answer exactly (or indeed, even remotely) as I would value the answer from a human.

I do not. I almost ignore AI generated text, as I think it as unvalidated response.

The authentic spelling and grammar errors :-)

To stop this, I a month or two ago put most of my Amazon Redshift research web-site behind a basic auth username/password wall.

It all remains free, but you need to email me for a username and password.

If I put in time and effort to make content and OpenAI et al copy it and sell it through their LLM such that no one comes to me any more, then plainly it makes no sense for me to create that content; and then it would not exist for OpenAI to take, or for anyone else to read. We all lose.

It seems parasitic, and on the face of it, acting to kill the host.

In fact, it essentially seems like abrogation of the concept of private property.

The AI companies can take what I make, without my consent, which they sell for profit, where that profit it seems to be was formerly substantially coming to me, the return on my efforts.

I had a look for ways to indicate to AI companies to remove my content. The methods provide are a fig leaf and put the onus on me, and in any event in a way which can never be known to have removed my content - "if you can show your content from a prompt, we will take steps to try to prevent that content from showing".

As a consequence of putting up a username/password wall, Google has profoundly de-ranked the site, and I believe it is basically not being found on search any more.

I'm about to ask IA to remove my content!

The reason is that I expect LLM bots to be crawling IA.

To stop this, I today put most of my Amazon Redshift research web-site behind a basic auth username/password wall.

It's all remains free, but you need to email me for a username and password.

If I put in time and effort to make content and OpenAI et al copy it and sell it through their LLM such that no one comes to me any more, then plainly it makes no sense for me to create that content; and then it would not exist for OpenAI to take, or for anyone else. We all lose.

It seems parasitic.

The people who live here, who've been here the whole time, and they can't in practical terms leave, are those who endure.

I'm not a local, and I was lucky in life and work in a profession which pays well enough, so I could go if I wished, and I've only been back here now for about a month.

Your words are right and proper for the locals; let us think of it to them.

Supporting evidence, please. So far you've made claims only - "everyone knows".

Kyiv Independent, who are pretty good at this and are on the spot, do not report large scale or significant military corruption. They have found and report on pretty corruption (individuals selling personal weapons). I note EU and US are very interested in keeping track of where the money is going.

Not willing to start any discussion on the matter, but you may want to know about massacres ukraine did in it's eastern side.

This is a Russian narrative.

After all, the russian invasion wasnt that unprovoked at all

This also is a Russian narrative.

It seems to me you have been from some source been absorbing Russian material.

Putin is a dictator. A few years after he came to power in 2000, Russia was once again living in fear; you did not speak out. If you did, fines, prison, penal colonies with death and violence, or now and then being thrown out of windows.

It looks from material being produced by Putin, the State and the military Russia by about 2010 was looking to take Ukraine.

Putin had his man running Ukraine - into corruption and thuggery - until Euromaiden. He fled to Russia. Literally immediately after that, plan B - the small war began. Finally, 2022, the big war.

There is nothing here where we go "it was not that unprovoked".

Ukraine wanted, and wanted, freedom. To be itself, and not to live in a hell-hole dictatorship. Putin wants to possess Ukraine, because that's how he and it seems a good part of Russian State culture sees the world; in terms of power, conquest and territory.

Russia invaded Ukraine, inflicting untold horror, and Russia is a threat to Europe.

In the circumstances of early 2022, I would have expected a way to be found, in the knowledge that such an action - telescope held to blind eye - would be condoned.

It was possible to make transfers to the military support account for about two weeks after war started; then it was blocked.

Transfers to other accounts were still possible.

Back in early 2022, a little after the war started, TransferWise blocked transfer (i.e. donation) to the account run by the National Bank of Ukraine for support of the Ukrainian military.

I have and never will forgive them for this.

Your body will move to middle age when you're about 31, 32.

There's a lot of things you can only do when you're physically young.

Get them done now, while you can, because it will go away.

The instant I dropped this on HN, gptbot was scanning the site.

(Updated robots.txt, this site https://robotstxt.com/ai to the rescue. I had to update robots.txt on the Amazon Redshift site fairly recently - I had gone from something like 10mb of log file per day to something like 50mb of log file per day, from LLM crawlers.)

She's on BlueSky, which is where I came to know of her.

She has been essential to keeping up to date with developments in the USA regarding Donald.

I subscribed to her newsletter last month.

It seems to me mainstream media doesn't really cut the mustard.

I get most of my information these days from specialist blogs, run by individuals.

My account on Reddit, and so as I was the founder also the sub r/AmazonRedshift, was in Sep 2023 banned by an automated system.

The sub was working normally, I posted about the Amazon Redshift Serverless PDF, and then Reddit began behaving oddly.

After some investigation, and some guesswork, I concluded my account had been silently shadow-banned, and the sub banned (and then shortly after, deleted).

Two years of posts and the sub disappeared, instantly, abruptly, without warning, reason, appeal process or notification, and Reddit was trying by shadowbanning to lead me into thinking my account was still active.

I used a utility to scramble (you can't delete) all the posts I'd ever made to Reddit, and closed my account.

(There's a bit of a happy ending - about a year later someone who was doing work with Reddit and had an archive of all my poss sent them to me, as a thank you. I processed the JSON and put them up on my Redshift site.)

Yes.

Thank you.

Don't worry - I'm going to court.

The poison pill is unconscionable, and the action of termination is in bad faith.

Similar problem.

Just worked for six months for a client.

Contract is one month of monthly savings made in AWS bill.

They have not paid, and in fact terminated the contract early to avoid payment - "the savings do not occur until AWS reservations end, contract has been ended now, so savings have not occurred". The savings are going to occur, and then the client will keep those savings.

Turns out the contract also contains what looks like a poison pill, to prevent the counter-party (me) having recourse to court at all, no matter what the client does.

Also the entire contract is confidential, so I in theory can't say a word about any of it.

I started working on these back in 2017.

About 780 views at the moment.

Building a set of replacement system tables for Amazon Redshift.

Not out yet, but the GitHub page is here, and will point to them in due course.

https://github.com/MaxGanzII/redshift-observatory.ch

I've not watched the video, but going on the title, I have to say, I have my Framework, and I absolutely love it to bits.

It was relatively expensive, but in absolute terms the difference is minor; and now I have something where I don't have to worry about Samsung/Sony/ASUS/etc accidentally or even deliberately installing a back door, which I can repair at will (and I have - a key failed and I changed keyboard), which I can upgrade over time, where the keyboard is heaven to type on, where I can easily fit and change memory, disk and the battery, the hot-swappable external post interfaces are particularly noteworthy in their usefulness, I have full support for Linux from the get-go, and where I have actual real Support on the odd occasion I've needed it (and boy, have I not had that from Sony and Samsung in the past, when I've owned their products - in fact, I had one of the worse customer support experiences, beyond imagination, with Sony and their Vaio, back in the day).

It puts me in mind of a recent experience with our ISP. We had a five day outage. No notification that it had occurred, no notification when it ended, no explanation, no ETA, nothing. Radio silence. Also the customer support phone number wasn't working, as we discovered.

That's the Big Company experience.

If we had a local ISP we could use, you wouldn't even see me move.

With Framework, I have that, but for my laptop. It's been a God-send.

Replacement system tables for Amazon Redshift.

Thinking a free and paid version.

Free is everything, but runs on the existing system tables; so it's slow, and so a six day history only.

Paid has a system table archiving mechanism, so you have before-and-after when something goes wrong, and where the tables are in Redshift proper, not the leader node, it's fast.

I assume the exploit only takes down your own instance, not the whole AWS redshift service.

First yes for this.

If it's the latter, it should obviously be rewarded with big $.

Second yes for this.

:-)