HAVE been told that, contrary to what two people told me, Tor is not blocked by this server. As I blog a lot more here these days, and as the target audience is reasonably technical and not “everyday people”, it’s important to not discriminate against people who value their privacy. I didn’t think that (ever) my own blog posts would become inaccessible to users of Tor. The cause remains unknown or unclear.

The host says Tor is definitely not blocked and I’m told by a friend that maybe they outsource the blocking to a third party (or some list/blacklist which covers exit nodes). The latest reply that I got was: “The way Tor works is you can’t select which exit node you use. It is randomly selected for anonymity reasons. The way to test in practice is to open the Tor browser, load the page, see it fails to load, and then do Ctrl + Shift + L. This will change your Tor circuit for the site. Please note [host] does not block Tor connections, and due to Tor’s unreliable nature, it’s likely not an issue with the hosting but an issue with the way Tor works.”

AM trying to allow Tor users to access this site again. I’ve only just found out that they’re blocked. The webhost changed something and I’m not sure when this was done, I can guess guess why.

The latest press coverage about (or which mentions) Daniel Pocock is useful because he’s invited to comment on ethical and technological issues, such as social control media.

Like me, he quit all those things and will not ever bother with them. They’re a total waste of time and potential cause for problems.

first created a site in Geocities. It was around 1997. It was my first site. It wasn’t until the early 2000s (some time around 2001) that I began developing something about myself, back then a Software Engineering student. It was modeled after the academic page of a lecturer whom I respected.

The Web is waning for many reasons (not just slop), but people still read, some watch videos (usually short ones), and there’s no sign that people will quit caring about literature altogether.

So we all carry on.

don’t think the quote above has anything to do with Snowden and an actor claiming to be Snowden is just a for-profit Hollywood production.

Unverified quotes are not a new problem. It’s not an LLM slop issue, wherein they call it “hallucination”. Even decades ago one could easily find false “wisdoms” and fake (or misattributed) quotes online. Those were not satires, though sometimes people passed off satires sans the disclosures.

The best solution is to check the credibility of the sources or trace quotes back to their source.

Crossposted from Techrights

HREE years ago we abandoned WordPress. It was a much-belated success story as for reasons specified a decade earlier we had long planned to abandon WordPress. More and more reasons added up, even before WordPress and especially WordPress.com became slop-ware (LLM integration that users mostly loathed; data was also being passed for training plagiarism).

Read on

ver two years ago Rianne and colleagues celebrated her site that she curates turning 20. Back then the site and its community were besieged by American aggressors. The aggression did not end well. Rianne and the site received more publicity, more people offered to help/contribute, and last month we all celebrated in northern England as the site turned 22.