Cambiano le condizioni meteo e in poche ore si passa da temperature roventi a un caldo in linea con le temperature stagionali: lo conferma l'ultimo bollettino sulle ondate di calore del ministero della Salute, che per oggi indica un solo bollino ross…
"Including children’s images in datasets has raised ethical concerns, particularly regarding privacy, consent, data protection, and accountability. These datasets, often built by scraping publicly available images from the Internet, can expose children to risks such as exploitation, profiling, and tracking. "
#MeTooPolice : Après les révélations de Disclose, l’association NousToutes lance un vaste appel à témoignages pour les femmes et hommes victimes de violences sexistes et sexuelles commises par des membres des forces de l'ordre 👉 form.typeform.com/to/OVQKAFso
We present Mercury, a new generation of commercial-scale large language models (LLMs) based on diffusion. These models are parameterized via the Transformer architecture and trained to predict multiple tokens in parallel.
Da Muggiò a Nova: la fiaccolata dell’#Anpi per la pace a #Gaza.
La #manifestazione ha ottenuto numerose adesioni dal territorio: ARCI Nova, CGIL Monza e Brianza, SPI CGIL Monza e Brianza, PD Monza Brianza, AVS Monza e Brianza, M5S Monza e Brianza, PRC Monza e Brianza, PCI Monza e Brianza, Emergency Monza e Brianza, Libera Monza e Brianza, ACLI Muggiò, Desio Città Aperta, Comunità Pakistana Desio, Casa delle Donne Desio e Monza per la Pace.
Chad’s former Prime Minister and opposition leader, Succès Masra, is appealing to French President Emmanuel Macron for support after spending two months in pre-trial detention.
The Ukrainian General Staff has officially confirmed a strike on the Krasnozavodsky Chemical Plant in Russia’s Moscow region. The facility produces pyrotechnics and munitions, including thermobaric warheads for Shahed-type drones. A series of explosions were recorded near Krasnozavodsk, with fire crews responding in nearby towns. Damage assessments are ongoing.
> Alla viglia della presentazione della nuova relazione sullo Stato di diritto dell’Unione europea, l’associazione Articolo 21, che si occupa di libertà di informazione e tutela del pensiero critico, segnala alla Commissione e in specie al Commissario europeo per la democrazia, la giustizia, lo stato di diritto e la tutela dei consumatori che neppure uno dei […]
Alla viglia della presentazione della nuova relazione sullo Stato di diritto dell’Unione europea, l’associazione Articolo 21, che si occupa di libertà di informazione e tutela del pensiero critico, segnala alla Commissione e in specie al Commissario …
Critics accuse Museveni of ruling with an iron fist. Uganda’s constitution has been changed twice to remove term and age limits, allowing him to remain in power.
Protip: For all of you vibe coders out there using macOS, you can ask Claude Code to send you a notification when it's finished implementing the task you asked it to do.
I've tried in many different ways and it keeps failing inconsistently. Not sure if it's a MacOS settings issue, an iTerm 2 issue or what... I gave up for now!
Shellter Project, the vendor of a commercial AV/EDR evasion loader for penetration testing, confirmed that hackers used its Shellter Elite product in attacks after a customer leaked a copy of the software.
Police in Nairobi blocked major roads into the Kenyan capital on Monday ahead of planned anti-government protests. Private and public vehicles and most pedestrians were barred from accessing the city center, and many businesses remained closed.
"One year on and #Labour finds itself amid the aftermath of a bruising rebellion over welfare reforms, cratering approval ratings, and the spectre of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK waiting in the wings. Well, no one ever said governing was easy.
"However, when it comes to Europe — and the importance of our largest and closest trading partner to the UK’s economic prosperity — the government, quietly and unobtrusively, has so far ticked most of the boxes."
Springer Nature published a $169 machine learning textbook in April containing citations that appear to be largely fabricated, according to an investigation by Retraction Watch.
As more people look to AI to learn about the world, the people who control how it's trained and how it responds will control our prevailing narratives. That's wildly dangerous. #AIwerd.io/improved-grok-criticiz…
As more people look to AI to learn about the world, the people who control how it's trained and how it responds will control our prevailing narratives. That's wildly dangerous.
of course. just like corporate social media algos give us much of what we are interested in to keep us using their service, but also direct us towards what serves their interests.
yea don't be cynical but people need to be a lot more skeptical than the typical American who reads the NYT and votes Dem. most can't see how the assumptions of capitalism bias US culture.
Russian Transport Minister Roman Starovoit has reportedly been found dead in Odintsovo, Russian media report. His dismissal earlier today was reportedly linked to the ongoing transport collapse at Russian airports. Cause of death remains unclear.
Ti piacciono i vecchi forum, ma vorresti che fossero collegati ai social network e ai blog? Ecco citiverse.it, la città dei social liberi e l'alternativa ai gruppi locali Facebook!
Abbiamo bisogno di un'alternativa ai gruppi Facebook per gli utenti italiani, in particolare i gruppi locali; ma non potendo competere con Meta, dobbiamo fare in modo che gli utenti del forum non siano da soli...
Ti piacciono i vecchi forum, ma vorresti che fossero collegati ai social network e ai blog? Ecco citiverse.it, la città dei social liberi e l’alternativa ai gruppi locali Facebook!
Abbiamo bisogno di un’alternativa ai gruppi Facebook per gli utenti italiani, in particolare i gruppi locali; ma non potendo competere con Meta, dobbiamo fare in modo che gli utenti del forum non siano da soli…
Abbiamo bisogno di un'alternativa ai gruppi Facebook per gli utenti italiani, in particolare i gruppi locali; ma non potendo competere con Meta, dobbiamo fare…
@Giacomo Tesio al momento (in questa prima fase, solo per una questione nostra gestionale) ti serve un invito via email se vuoi aprire un account sul NodeBB di citiverse.it; se invece vuoi partecipare alle discussioni nelle comunità eistenti, puoi anche usare il tuo account Federato. Al momento abbiamo visto che alcuni software, come Go To Social, non funzionano. Non so se SNAC sia compatibile con NodeBB federato
@giacomo al momento (in questa prima fase, solo per una questione nostra gestionale) ti serve un invito via email se vuoi aprire un account sul NodeBB di citiverse.it; se invece vuoi partecipare alle discussioni nelle comunità eistenti, puoi anche usare il tuo account Federato. Al momento abbiamo visto che alcuni software, come Go To Social, non funzionano. Non so se SNAC sia compatibile con NodeBB federato
KDE devs have been quietly working on Plasma Keyboard, a new on-screen keyboard for desktop and mobile part of the “We Care About Your Input” KDE Goals initiative. Although not ready for texting yet, it has been making progress. Hopefully it'll be in a screen near you soon. Join the effort!
``` QT_IM_MODULES=qtvirutalkeyboard ./bin/plasma-keyboard Failed to initialize input panel-shell integration, possibly because compositor does not support the layer-shell protocol ASSERT failure in Q_UNREACHABLE(): "Q_UNREACHABLE was reached", file /home/pak0stpc/Projects/plasma-keyboard/src/main.cpp, line 292 Aborted (core dumped) QT_IM_MODULES=qtvirutalkeyboard ./bin/plasma-keyboard ``` I would like to give it a shot on my system
Dancing tree roots. Another from my portfolio on display at the Saatchi Gallery for the RHS Botanical Art and Photography Show. The exhibition runs until July 27th and is free to enter. #newforest #photography #blueskymonday
The Open-Source Software Saving the Internet From AI Bot Scrapers
For someone who says she is fighting AI bot scrapers just in her free time, Xe Iaso seems to be putting up an impressive fight. Since she launched it in January, Anubis, a “program is designed to help protect the small internet from the endless storm of requests that flood in from AI companies,” has been downloaded nearly 200,000 times, and is being used by notable organizations including GNOME, the popular open-source desktop environment for Linux, FFmpeg, the open-source software project for handling video and other media, and UNESCO, the United Nations organization for educations, science, and culture.
Iaso decided to develop Anubis after discovering that her own Git server was struggling with AI scrapers, bots that crawl the web hoovering up anything that can be used for the training data that power AI models. Like many libraries, archives, and other small organizations, Iaso discovered her Git server was getting slammed only when it stopped working.
“I wasn't able to load it in my browser. I thought, huh, that's strange,” Iaso told me on a call. “So I looked at the logs and I figured out that it's restarted about 500 times in the last two days. So I looked in the access logs and I saw that [an] Amazon [bot] was clicking on every single link.”
Iaso knew it was an Amazon bot because it self identified as such. She said she considered withdrawing the Git server from the open web but that because she wants to keep some of the source code hosted there open to the public, she tried to stop the Amazon bot instead.
“I tried some things that I can’t admit in a recorded environment. None of them worked. So I had a bad idea,” she said. “I implemented some code. I put it up on GitHub in an experimental project dumping ground, and then the GNOME desktop environment started using it as a Hail Mary. And that's about when I knew that I had something on my hands.”
There are several ways people and organizations are trying to stop bots at the moment. Historically, robots.txt, a file sites could use to tell automated tools not to scrape, was a respected and sufficient norm for this purpose, but since the generative AI boom, major AI companies as well as less established companies and even individuals, often ignored it. CAPTCHAs, the little tests users take to prove they’re not a robot, aren’t great, Iaso said, because some AI bot scrapers have CAPTCHA solvers built in. Some developers have created “infinite mazes” that send AI bot scrapers from useless link to useless link, diverting them from the actual sites humans use and wasting their time. Cloudflare, the ubiquitous internet infrastructure company, has created a similar “AI labyrinth” feature to trap bots.
Iaso, who said she deals with some generative AI at her day job, told me that “from what I have learned, poisoning datasets doesn't work. It makes you feel good, but it ends up using more compute than you end up saving. I don't know the polite way to say this, but if you piss in an ocean, the ocean does not turn into piss.”
In other words, Iaso thinks that it might be fun to mess with the AI bots that are trying to mess with the internet, but in many cases it’s not practical to send them on these wild goose chases because it requires resources Cloudflare might have, but small organizations and individuals don’t.
“Anubis is an uncaptcha,” Iaso explains on her site. “It uses features of your browser to automate a lot of the work that a CAPTCHA would, and right now the main implementation is by having it run a bunch of cryptographic math with JavaScript to prove that you can run JavaScript in a way that can be validated on the server.”
Essentially, Anubis verifies that any visitor to a site is a human using a browser as opposed to a bot. One of the ways it does this is by making the browser do a type of cryptographic math with JavaScript or other subtle checks that browsers do by default but bots have to be explicitly programmed to do. This check is invisible to the user, and most browsers since 2022 are able to complete this test. In theory, bot scrapers could pretend to be users with browsers as well, but the additional computational cost of doing so on the scale of scraping the entire internet would be huge. This way, Anubis creates a computational cost that is prohibitively expensive for AI scrapers that are hitting millions and millions of sites, but marginal for an individual user who is just using the internet like a human.
Anubis is free, open source, lightweight, can be self-hosted, and can be implemented almost anywhere. It also appears to be a pretty good solution for what we’ve repeatedly reported is a widespread problem across the internet, which helps explain its popularity. But Iaso is still putting a lot of work into improving it and adding features. She told me she’s working on a non cryptographic challenge so it taxes users’ CPUs less, and also thinking about a version that doesn’t require JavaScript, which some privacy-minded disable in their browsers.
The biggest challenge in developing Anubis, Iaso said, is finding the balance.
“The balance between figuring out how to block things without people being blocked, without affecting too many people with false positives,” she said. “And also making sure that the people running the bots can't figure out what pattern they're hitting, while also letting people that are caught in the web be able to figure out what pattern they're hitting, so that they can contact the organization and get help. So that's like, you know, the standard, impossible scenario.”
Iaso has a Patreon and is also supported by sponsors on Github who use Anubis, but she said she still doesn’t have enough financial support to develop it full time. She said that if she had the funding, she’d also hire one of the main contributors to the project. Ultimately, Anubis will always need more work because it is a never ending cat and mouse game between AI bot scrapers and the people trying to stop them.
Iaso said she thinks AI companies follow her work, and that if they really want to stop her and Anubis they just need to distract her.
“If you are working at an AI company, here's how you can sabotage Anubis development as easily and quickly as possible,” she wrote on her site. “So first is quit your job, second is work for Square Enix, and third is make absolute banger stuff for Final Fantasy XIV. That’s how you can sabotage this the best.”
"Nepenthes generates random links that always point back to itself - the crawler downloads those new links. Nepenthes happily just returns more and more lists of links pointing back to itself."
Questa è una edizione speciale della newsletter. È l’ultima prima delle vacanze (ma sul sito Guerredirete.it troverete ancora articoli). Per questo ho deciso di fare una lista di letture per l’estate. Ho selezionato solo ed esclusivamente libri in stile “guerre di rete” per temi e taglio, usciti nel 2025 o al massimo alla fine del 2024 (qualche eccezione per testi stranieri fondativi, cioè che aiutano a inquadrare alcuni dei temi trattati, ma in ogni caso si va indietro giusto di un paio di anni).
Ho letto interamente buona parte dei libri citati. Tutti quelli che cito li ho comunque consultati/esplorati. Alcuni li ho adorati, altri non mi trovano sempre allineata sulle loro premesse, tesi o conclusioni, o sulla loro prospettiva, ma ho deciso di metterli perché li reputo importanti o utili per l’attuale dibattito sui temi tech. Alcuni sono in conflitto o acceso dialogo fra loro. Altri sono un uno-due pugilistico, se letti assieme (come la trilogia luddista, che sferra anzi tre colpi all’immagine di senso comune ed errata dei luddisti). Soprattutto, ci sono libri molto diversi: giornalistici, accademici, storici. Prima di prenderne uno in base al titolo vi consiglio di consultarlo, perché a seconda dei vostri interessi o studi potreste trovarlo o difficile o non abbastanza tecnico. Sono scritti da autori diversi per pubblici diversi.
Ciò detto, non ci ho messo poco a fare questa lista, e soprattutto a leggerli, cercarli, conoscere e soppesare gli autori. In pratica vi ho aperto il mio blocco note digitale. Se lo apprezzate, e se lo usate, fatemelo sapere o, anche meglio, fatelo sapere al mondo.
Se invece volete discutere di alcuni di questi libri, la mia mail è sempre aperta (basta rispondere).
Se non ho messo qualche libro che secondo voi avrei dovuto mettere (ma con quei presupposti che ho scritto all’inizio eh, non qualsiasi libro tech), fatemelo sapere, ma abbiate anche clemenza, non sono (ancora) un robot e faccio quel che posso (vi dico solo che spesso in newsletter mi dimentico di segnalare cose mie: e dall’information overload, è tutto).
E buone, serene, felici vacanze! Non scordate il libro in valigia!
Giacomo Tesio
in reply to Bruce Lawson ✅ ♫ ♿ ✌️♂️✊ • • •