No “manners” anymore

ots and scrapers are ruining the Internet, not just the Web. Today I read that Geminispace too is targeted by them (the LLM plagiarism engines). Earlier today they engaged in de facto DDoS against us, though it’s hard to know what those rogue bots are actually for and who runs them. Maybe their purpose is purely malicious.

Either way, Web traffic will become meaningless without some further context.

In today’s Web, like with E-mail, it is about merely surviving online (because of the many predators online).

Who will be left to clean up the mess?

Nor improve mood

erman cars are notoriously expensive to repair, but they are seen as reliable and cars in general are perceived to be time savers that simplify life and increase mobility.

But that assumes everything works smoothly all the time and that “third parties” don’t damage you, your day, your car, or even your life (fatality)

I’ve only just returned home from a run and a car near us got ‘knocked’ quite badly. It’ll probably cost a grand to fully repair/undo the damage. When I left there was no incident in sight, so it must have happened in the past 15 minutes or so. I saw another such incident near the same place only months ago. They put speed bumps, but they’re too low and don’t seem to be effective.

Optics at best.

I suppose the owner of the car will be one of two owners impacted by this collision, whose fault is probably one of them, not both of them. Now come a series of long tasks for both of them and probably no car for a week.

How does that translate into peace of mind and time savings?

What AWstat sees

raphs that say “traffic” can be misframed, as there are slop bots (scrapers) and all sorts of non-human activity in today’s Web. In relative terms, however, actively blogging this year has paid off and this domain rose in terms of reach. AWstat claims it can tell apart human from non-human, but its heuristics are outdated.

It says 1,336 people accessed this album this month (it is over a decade old!) and OS breakdown for August is as follows:

Remember “Pep”?

onight at 8PM BST we’ll know if Arsenal “goes top” or lags behind “City”. The “protege” of “Pep” (Arteta) had a strong start this season after winning last season and “Pep” is gone, he’s definitely not coming back.

It feels kind of odd, still, walking past the building with the face of “Pep” knowing he’s just some historical face like a long-gone dictator or dead war hero.

We really hope that Enzo will maintain the momentum and win again this coming weekend. The first season or “Pep” at “City” was a disappointment.

Last night I saw Ferguson in the United game (video of course, not in person). He’s alive in spite of lingering health issues (occasional hospitalisation), he looks a lot older than when I last saw him. Unlike “Pep”, he hasn’t got decades left.

Enzo is even younger, he’s about the same age and Carrick and not much older than myself.

It’s a choice

et up and do activism. The world needs it more than ever, as our downward trend towards oppression is very apparent and visible not just in the digital domain.

When I grew up I never knew and never planned to do activism. It just sort of happened.

Reading about (or from) other activists, it seems apparent they too had no such plans and activism was somewhat outlandish to them.

Saying stuff like “well, I’m not an activist” is a shoddy excuse. Did you even try?

Our vacation comes to an end

his morning we published this latest part in a long series, explaining why – as our Jewish solicitor at the time might put it – Garrett ended up in a broch. His online behaviour for many years made this inevitable – he was mingling with the wrong people to cause trouble to people more far qualified than himself.

There’s a lesson somewhere in all this.

They pretend to

ids of the 1980s did not have computers at home, except those born in the late 80s or mid 80s. People born in the early 80s seldom had a PC at home unless a parent needed one for work or was working in the “IT” or similar industry/occupation. Mobile phones did exist, but very few people had them back then. To us, the kids, phones were “on the hook” and TV was the thing to watch things on (with a remote control; some TVs didn’t have that yet).

Now, by contrast, kids grow up with skinnerboxes and computers, such as tablets. They’re being spied on, they get exposed to loads of rubbish, and politicians who grew up in the 60s get to decide if it’s OK or not OK.

Politicians don’t represent the public interest.