erinptah: Vintage screensaver (computing)

Via Gary Wong on Mastodon: “I have performed extensive research to classify every byte, and I can now share this summary of the purposes of all the year’s traffic.

A bar graph titled 2024 Internet traffic in zettabyes, portraying 12 categories:0.04 Actual user-generated payload0.11 Accidental layer 2 forwarding loops0.17 Intelligence agencies collecting Tor exit node traffic0.23 Automatic updates to software we never wanted in the first place0.26 438 Javascript frameworks per average web page0.56 IoT devices forever calling out to discontinued servers0.61 Data we would've kept locally but the vendor imposed a cloud subscription model0.78 LLM bot training and autogenerated nonsense0.92 Botnet C&C and attack traffic0.96 RTB auctions1.09 Advertising, spam, phishing, and other scams1.18 Telemetry and other personal information the user had no idea was being collected

Links from 2024:

January: “Impressively, these posts span from three years before the account was created to a year after the account was last logged into. And, as the icing on the cake, ravenprp is prescient enough that he can joke about being a language model developed by OpenAI, seven years before OpenAI was even founded; evidently he should have joined PsychicsForums instead.”

July: “If you believe that reCAPTCHA is securing your website, you have been deceived. Additionally, this false sense of security has come with an immense cost of human time and privacy.

September: “Of course though, because the Internet is joined together by literal string and hopes/wishes at this stage, somebody had neglected to renew the old domain at dotmobiregistry.net meaning it was up for grabs by anyone with $20 and an ill-advised sense of exploration.”

November: “Massachusetts housing voucher recipients and the Community Action Agency of Somerville sued the company, claiming SafeRent gave Black and Hispanic rental applicants with housing vouchers disproportionately lower scores. The tenants had no visibility into how the algorithm scored them. Appeals were rejected on the basis that this was what the computer output said.

“Naftali and digital workers like him, spent eight hours a day in front of a screen studying photos and videos, drawing boxes around objects and labeling them, teaching the AI algorithms to recognize them. […] ‘I was basically reviewing content which are very graphic, very disturbing contents. I was watching dismembered bodies or drone attack victims. You name it. You know, whenever I talk about this, I still have flashbacks.'”

December: “You are the victim of a con — one so pernicious that you’ve likely tuned it out despite the fact it’s part of almost every part of your life. It hurts everybody you know in different ways, and it hurts people more based on their socioeconomic status. It pokes and prods and twists millions of little parts of your life, and it’s everywhere, so you have to ignore it, because complaining about it feels futile, like complaining about the weather.” (Ed Zitron channels the anger for all of us.)

a not so small guide on how to use my “yuu’s AI Warner” and “yuu’s AI Hider” skins on ArchiveOfOurOwn so you can avoid anything related to generative AI.”

And from this year:

“So [photographer Matthew Raifman] put [a seagull photo] into Adobe Lightroom, marked the areas to fix with generative autofill … and Adobe’s Firefly image model replaced one area with an image of a bitcoin?! […] [Jaron Schneider] attempted to remove a person from a photo of an amphitheater. Firefly regenerated a new person — but this time with two heads.

“FactFinderAI […] responds to random tweets by repeating some part of the original tweet and then adding a pro-Israeli sentiment. It works a bit like the polite disagreement bots on Bluesky. But instead of supporting pro-Israeli talking points, FactFinderAI began to undermine them.”

“New BBC research published today provides a warning around the use of AI assistants to answer questions about news […]

erinptah: (daily show)
Resources:

"A simple page builder app: Design your own personal page and find tools to host it online for free." Not my creation, but if you use it to make something, drop me a link, I'd love to see.

Would be easy to find this again if it was on Picrew, but I'm saving the link from itch.io: Stardew Valley Character Portrait Maker

"I'm putting [storefronts and subscriptions] together because the options for services that let you exchange currency for adult goods are very limited. There is also some overlap regarding the options that they provide and what someone might need them for. Because I am both a writer and illustrator, my focus is on storefronts that cater to that. [...] (I also have lists of other 18+ services such as Art Galleries, Social Media, and Mailing Lists.)"

Also not mine, but fingers crossed it goes somewhere: "Patreon, Squarespace, Gumroad. My hand slipped and I contacted the ACLU and the MA Bar Association for legal assistance. If you’ve been fucked over by draconian nsfw bans please join my Mastercard Injury Mailing List."

Discord PSA:

"i am talking about "clips", an exciting new [Discord] feature /s that allows people to record you in voice chat without your knowledge or consent!" It's enabled by default, here's how you can turn it off.

DW + AO3 fandom stuff:

This past month had Moon Knight recs on [community profile] fanart_recs (art) and [community profile] fancake (fic)!

Some behind-the-scenes from the OTW that will, for once, make you feel good about the work they put in to protect users: "When we started changing platforms for the donor database, I kept telling them that yes I was aware we already had an account for the volunteer database, and no that could not be connected to the donor database. And they said yes fine sure and then connected them anyway. [...] And I said, last year someone used our volunteer email list to commit approximately one thousand felonies. [...] And they emailed me two hours later and said, you can have two separate databases."

And some that was worrying in the moment, but seems to have worked out by now: "We later found out that the attack had actually peaked at 65 million requests per second. For context, the largest publicly announced HTTP DDoS attack by Cloudflare at the time was a 71 million request per second attack. [...] However, Cloudflare did its job well and we saw very little, if any, impact." The AO3 July/August DDoS Attacks: Behind the Scenes.
erinptah: Vintage screensaver (computing)

My purpose in gathering this informal, conversational feedback is to bring voices into the “how should Mastodon be” conversation that don’t otherwise get much attention—which I do because I hope it will help designers and developers and community leaders who genuinely want Mastodon to work for more kinds of people refine their understanding of the problem space.”

ActivityPub, the protocol that powers [the Fediverse/Mastodon], is not private. It is not even semi-private. It is a completely public medium and absolutely nothing posted on it, including direct messages, can be seen as even remotely secure. Worse, anything you post on Mastodon is, once sent, for all intents and purposes completely irrevocable.” Important to know!

In light of Substack’s official stance being “we have to keep the Nazis, and also keep paying them,” time to point out WordPress has a full-fledged newsletter service. Any readers who’ve given it a try and want to report back?

(A regular free WordPress.com blog isn’t too far from this already! Checked recently, and my generic WP blog has 300+ followers, even though I have literally never mentioned it as a subscribeable service before now.)

Hearing good things about the Reeder 5 app for following RSS feeds. Any readers who’ve given that a try and want to report back…? (No need here, I still use Dreamwidth as my RSS reader, and it works great.)

RSS Parrot is an ActivityPub bot that makes RSS feeds into Mastodon-followable accounts! Haven’t tried this either, but if you have Masto and don’t want to download a new app at all, give it a look.

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humorist + humanist

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