lm411

"Attempt at a coup"? I assure you if those folks had attempted a coup they most likely would have succeeded.

Those folks were there to make a statement and have the best party since before covid.

It is yes - in situations like that, your best bet is to view the SSL cert details. Of course, only if you trust the issuer. ;)

Not really the Pi's fault - really it's AI causing the massive increase in HW prices (notably RAM in this case) that has really destroyed the market for the Pi's.

Same thing happening for servers, gaming PC's, cell phones, so on.

This is kind of ridiculous. The fields are geographical areas, not political or cultural entities, and most of the pople living within a certain field don't have the slightest idea what or if any field they live in.

Surmountable - "possible to deal with or solve successfully".

Does not mean "easy". It means they can be overcome.

Many in the west certainly wouldn't agree with you now, or 100+ years ago.

https://xcancel.com/DonBraid/status/1187052993788559360

This is about more than just money though.

Politically the west is underrepresented and the cultural difference between the West and the rest of Canada is very significant - unless you ask folks from Ontario who have never been to AB. In my opinion, Canada is too geographically and culturally diverse for a central government to have so much power.

Discussing separation is okay when QC threatens it - hence the clarity act. But when AB wants to do it, they are just a bunch of redneck traitors according to the rest of Canada.

(Cue the "AB is nothing", "AB has no culture", folks that don't have a clue what they are talking about).

Of these, I really only see "indigenous rights/claims" as a particularly difficult issue.

For currency, The Maldives, with a relatively small population and tiny GDP has their own currency. What is the difficulty in currency? Ignoring the fact that AB would probably just use the greenback.

All of these of these issues are surmountable.

Incorrect. If you've ever been through Alberta you'd already know that though.

Oil & gas fields, and wells, are distributed over much of Alberta.

https://static.aer.ca/prd/documents/catalog/Map90_Oil_Gas_Fi...

When the AI scrapers were just getting started, that is basically what I thought - their plan was to scrape / suck up everything they possibly could before people realized what was happening and blocked them.

The rate at which they were spidering and scraping was so far beyond what any other supposedly legit spider was doing, it seemed like the logical explanation.

The quality difference between various fans is absolutely huge.

I can put in a few Noctua fans and be confident they are going to last 5+ years of running 24x7. Or I can put in 25% cheaper fans and be pretty much guaranteed one or more is going to fail within the first couple years.

In my opinion, fans are never a place to cheap out when building a PC - server or desktop, whatever.

I've experienced similar with some Southeast Asian cultures as well.

I'm a patient person, but it can be frustrating to have to endure 10 minutes of verbal diarrhea that eventually results in a "no" or "I don't know".

the idea of attending public protests/riots, particularly any directed against the governments that issued me my student visas, sounds like possibly the stupidest move

You'd get a real kick out some of the protests in Canada then.

How does one feel bad for a corporation, especially of this size? Double so for one that quite literally removed "Don't be Evil" as its motto and from its code of conduct.

The corporation has no feelings and I don't imagine the board members or shareholders are feeling bad about this.

Please don't twist my words.

I've lived in these families and communities on both sides. I clearly said it was anecdotal.

I think you missed the whole point of my comment.

Personal anecdote, having lived in a few very poor countries and a few relatively very wealthy ones:

1) In the poor countries, I find people are generally quite happy living their day to day lives but rate their happiness low - because they think people in wealthy countries have it so much better. I.e. they underrate their happiness because they think wealthy people must be so much happier.

2) Vice versa in the wealthier countries - so many miserable people, but, they feel that they can't complain because they see how bad things are in the poor countries.

I think these "happiness ratings" are a bunch of bullshit. Some of the happiest families and communities I've seen are in the poor countries while so many people are miserable and lonely in the wealthy countries.

I believe it is very very hard for a person to subjectively rate their own happiness. (Edit to add, especially when they are comparing their own happiness against cultures and people they have mostly only seen on TV).

Dude had to rewrite traceroute to discover what the first line of the man page description says.

traceroute tracks the route packets taken from an IP network on their way to a given host. It utilizes the IP protocol's time to live (TTL) field and attempts to elicit an ICMP TIME_EXCEEDED response from each gateway along the path to the host.

I disagree, obscurity wastes attacker resources and easily fools a lot of simple vulnerability scanners.

Obscurity is totally underrated. Attacker resources are limited.

Yep. I just bought a Pi CM5 for my son, for his ClockworkPi uConsole. CAD $200 for the 8GB module. I bought a whole Pi5 16GB not long ago for under CAD $200.

I will not be buying any more SBC's at this price point. I wonder if Raspberry PI will survive.

Yeah the SDK updates... For sure. Another pain in the ass.

The whole Google Play experience is awful.

Recent things I've had to do:

1) Re-submit an app after it was rejected and labelled a gambling app (it wasn't even close - a 15 second look by a real human would have seen that. This one was even appealed and the support was utterly useless. I ended up changing one word and re-submitting the app, approved no problem.

2) An existing app, in the Play store for years but a nice app - only about 500 installs. I had to submit a new version for no reason whatsoever... Except to keep the customers developer account active.

Those are just issues I've dealt with in the last month or two.

Every single time, Google Support is completely useless - including the appeals process, which is an absolute joke.

That's not Cloudflare trying to make your life hard.

It's the reality of how bad the bots have become.

"Integrity at OpenAI"

Basically an oxymoron at this point.

Also the fucking ignorance assuming it's "static content" and not something needing code running

Wild eh.

If it's not ai now, it's by default labelled "static content" and "near-zero marginal cost".

Absolutely.

It's so much easier to know the truth when someone else tells me what it is and what to think about it.

How refreshing.

"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.