Where did you read that all employed members of the discord group were identified by a single mole? I must have missed that in the article. I myself suspect a combination of techniques was used, one of which was one or more moles.

Nah, they’re saying a member of the discord group might know the other members of the discord group. That member might rat out the other members.

Do you remember when rumor had it that fever reliever A made you more vulnerable to covid, so the stocks of fever reliever B were emptied?

We did lose power for a week and that both sucked and helped inform my preparations going forward.

I have prepper leanings that I satisfy by knowing my neighbors, having multiple ways to start a fire, a good supply of bottled water, and enough shelf stable food for a few months. I keep enough gas in my car to get me to Canada, have an overnight bag with a change of clothes, toiletries, and my passport. I could go more into prepping, but this is where the balance lies between my anxiety (over being in multiple politically disfavoured groups) and my partner’s differently flavored anxiety (over getting things we don’t need.)

It’s nice to be able to call your parents when you’re bleeding out in the school atrium.

Latest version of Anubis has a JavaScript-free verification system. It isn’t as accurate, so I allow js-free visits only if the site isn’t being hammered. Which, tbf, prior to Anubis no one was getting in, JS or no JS.

Yay! I won’t edit my comment (so your comment will make sense) but I checked and they also list they/them on their github profile

That makes sense. I was raised Southern [USA], so I can fake polite conversation with the best of them. If anything, I’m too chatty if the checkout clerk gives the slightest sign of talkativeness.

same. The local self checkouts are a sensory nightmare for me. There’s blinking lights I can’t avoid, a camera+screen I can’t ignore… I just can’t deal with it.

local home depot only has self checkout. I don’t go there any more.

I’ll say the developer is also very responsive. They’re (ambiguous ‘they’, not sure of pronouns) active in a libraries-fighting-bots slack channel I’m on. Libraries have been hit hard by the bots: we have hoards of tasty archives and we don’t have money to throw resources at the problem.

The second. John 3:16 is a very popular verse in the Baptist crowd I grew up around in the 90s. I don’t think it’s any more a fascist dog whistle than a Jesus fish. YMMV on how christofascist that is.

Like, I never went to church and it’s ingrained in my brain from my classmates and reading bumper stickers.

I’m with Great Aunt whomever. Flying sucks.

Plus, you could make it an event or party car. Imagine a traveling bachelorette party with a murder mystery dinner, karaoke, no flying, no driving, and you end up somewhere cool and can nap on the way back.

(100% of the pre-wedding parties I’ve been to have had karaoke and a murder mystery dinner. Sample set of one.)

I mean, I enjoy linux sysadmining, but fighting bots takes time, experimentation, and research, and there’s other stuff I should be doing. For example, accessibility updates to our websites. But, accessibility doesn’t matter a lick if you can’t access the website anyway due to timeouts.

Yep, they’ll just burn taxpayer resources (me and my poor servers) because it’s not like they pay taxes anyway (assuming they are either a corporation or not based in the same locality as I am).

There’s only one of me and if I’m working on keeping the servers bare minimum functional today I’m not working on making something more awesome for tomorrow. “Linux sysadmin” is only supposed to be up to 30% of my job.

Fair! Yellow as anonymizer makes sense. I tend to use emojis in forms of communication where people already know me, like on discord and professional channels.

Like I said, [edit: at one point] Facebook requested my robots.txt multiple times a second. You’ve not convinced me that bot writers care about efficiency.

[edit: they’ve since stopped, possibly because now I give a 404 to anything claiming to be from facebook]

I just looked at my log for this morning. 23% of my total requests were from the useragent GoogleOther. Other visitors include GPTBot, SemanticScholarBot, and Turnitin. That’s the crawlers that are still trying after I’ve had Anubis on the site for over a month. It was much, much worse before, when they could crawl the site, instead of being blocked.

That doesn’t include the bots that lie about being bots. Looking back at an older screenshot of a monitors—I don’t have the logs themselves anymore—I seriously doubt I had 43,000 unique visitors using Windows per day in March.

Timing and request patterns. The increase in traffic coincided with the increase in AI in the marketplace. Before, we’d get hit by bots in waves and we’d just suck it up for a day. Now it’s constant. The request patterns are deep deep solr requests, with far more filters than any human would ever use. These are expensive requests and the results aren’t any more informative that just scooping up the nicely formatted EAD/XML finding aids we provide.

And, TBH, I don’t care if it’s AI. I care that it’s rude. If the bots respected robots.txt then I’d be fine with them. They don’t and they break stuff for actual researchers.

You’re right. AI didn’t just triple the traffic to my tiny archive’s site. It way more than tripled it. After implementing Anubis, we went from 3000 ‘unique’ visitors down to 20 in a half-day. Twenty is a much more expected number for a small college archive in the summer. That’s before I did any fine-tuning to Anubis, just the default settings.

I was getting constant outage reports. Now I’m not.

For us, it’s not about protecting our IP. We want folks to get to find out information. That’s why we write finding aids, scan it, accession it. But, allowing bots to siphon it all up inefficiently was denying everyone access to it.

And if you think bots aren’t inefficient, explain why Facebook requests my robots.txt 10 times a second.

I use them because I want to push back against the assumption that white is the default. If not-white people pick a skin tone and white people stay yellow, then yellow gets read as white, not color-neutral.

And yes, it felt so awkward to choose the white emoji at first.