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Trap Naughty Web Crawlers in Digestive Juices with Nepenthes


In the olden days of the WWW you could just put a robots.txt file in the root of your website and crawling bots from search engines and kin would (generally) respect the rules in it. These days, however, we have especially web crawlers from large language model (LLM) companies happily ignoring such signs on the lawn before proceeding to hover up every scrap of content on websites. Naturally this makes a lot of people very angry, but what can you do about it? The answer by [Aaron B] is Nepenthes, described on the project page as a ‘tar pit for catching web crawlers’.

More commonly known as ‘pitcher plants’, nepenthes is a genus of carnivorous plants that use a fluid-filled cup to trap insects and small critters unfortunate enough to slip & slide down into it. In the case of this Lua-based project the idea is roughly the same. Configured as a trap behind a web server (e.g. /nepenthes), any web crawler that accesses it will be presented with an endless number of (randomly generated) pages with many URLs to follow. Page generating is deliberately quite slow to not soak up significant CPU time, while still giving the LLM scrapers plenty of random nonsense to chew on.

Considering that these web crawlers deemed adhering to the friendly sign on the lawn beneath them, the least we can do in response, is to hasten model collapse by feeding these LLM scrapers whatever rolls out of a simple (optionally Markov-based) text generator.


hackaday.com/2025/01/23/trap-n…



L’incontenibile forza della gentilezza. Il romanzo di Ottavio Olita


@Giornalismo e disordine informativo
articolo21.org/2025/01/lincont…
“Gentilezza come sinonimo di tante altre parole che rappresentano i veri valori dell’umanità: accoglienza, incontro, integrazione, solidarietà, disponibilità. Questo l’uso






An Electric Converted Tractor CAN Farm!


Last October we showed you a video from [LiamTronix], in which he applied an electric conversion to a 1960s Massey-Ferguson 65 which had seen better days. It certainly seemed ready for light work around the farm, but it’s only now that we get his video showing the machine at work. This thing really can farm!

An MF 65 wasn’t the smallest of 1960s tractors, but by today’s standards it’s not a machine you would expect to see working a thousand acres of wheat. Instead it’s a typical size for a smaller operation, perhaps a mixed farm, a small livestock farm, or in this case a horticulture operation growing pumpkins. In these farms the tractor doesn’t often trail up and down a field for hours, instead it’s used for individual smaller tasks where its carrying or lifting capacity is needed, or for smaller implements. It’s in these applications that we see the electric 65 being tested, as well as some harder work such as hauling a trailer load of bales, or even harrowing a field.

In one sense the video isn’t a hack in itself, for that you need to look at the original build. But it’s important to see how a hack turned out in practice, and this relatively straightforward conversion with a DC motor has we think proven itself to be more than capable of small farm tasks. Its only flaw in the video is a 30 minute running time, something he says he’ll be working on by giving it a larger battery pack. We’d use it on the Hackaday ancestral acres, any time!

The video is below the break.

youtube.com/embed/6tH0DZVYvVY?…


hackaday.com/2025/01/23/an-ele…



This QR Code Leads To Two Websites, But How?


QR codes are designed with alignment and scaling features, not to mention checksums and significant redundancy. They have to be, because you’re taking photos of them with your potato-camera while moving, in the dark, and it’s on a curved sticker on a phone pole. So it came as a complete surprise to us that [Christian Walther] succeeded in making an ambiguous QR code.

Nerd-sniped by [Guy Dupont], who made them using those lenticular lens overlays, [Christian] made a QR code that resolves to two websites depending on the angle at which it’s viewed. The trick is to identify the cells that are different between the two URLs, for instance, and split them in half vertically and horizontally: making them into a tiny checkerboard. It appears that some QR decoders sample in the center of each target square, and the center will be in one side or the other depending on the tilt of the QR code.

Figuring out the minimal-difference QR code encoding between two arbitrary URLs would make a neat programming exercise. How long before we see these in popular use, like back in the old days when embedding images was fresh? QR codes are fun!

Whether it works is probably phone- and/or algorithm-dependent, so try this out, and let us know in the comments if they work for you.

Thanks [Lacey] for the tip!


hackaday.com/2025/01/23/this-q…



Watch the Trump administration play DEI whac-a-mole on this government agency's GitHub page.

Watch the Trump administration play DEI whac-a-mole on this government agencyx27;s GitHub page.#Github #DonaldTrump #Trumpadministration



This Home Made Laptop Raises The Bar


With ready availability of single board computers, displays, keyboards, power packs, and other hardware, a home-made laptop is now a project within most people’s reach. Some laptop projects definitely veer towards being cyberdecks while others take a more conventional path, but we’ve rarely seen one as professional looking as [Byran Huang]’s anyon_e open source laptop. It really takes the art to the next level.

The quality is immediately apparent in the custom CNC-machined anodised aluminium case, and upon opening it up the curious user could be forgiven for thinking they had a stylish commercial machine in their hands. There’s a slimline mechanical keyboard and a glass trackpad, and that display is an OLED. In fact the whole thing had been built from scratch, and inside is an RK3588 SoC on a module sitting on a custom-designed motherboard. It required some effort for it to drive the display, a process we’ve seen cause pain to other designers, but otherwise it runs Debian. The batteries are slimline pouch cells, with a custom controller board driven by an ESP32.

This must have cost quite a bit to build, but it’s something anyone can have a go at for themselves as everything is in a GitHub repository. Purists might ask for open source silicon at its heart to make it truly open source, but considering what he’s done we’ll take this. It’s not the first high quality laptop project we’ve seen by any means, but it may be the first that wouldn’t raise any eyebrows in the boardroom. Take a look at the video below the break.

youtube.com/embed/fks3PBodyiE?…

byran.ee/posts/creation/


hackaday.com/2025/01/23/this-h…




La proposta della Lega: “L’Italia si ritiri dall’Oms come hanno fatto gli Usa di Donald Trump”


@Politica interna, europea e internazionale
La Lega ha depositato al Senato una proposta di legge per ritirare l’Italia dall’Organizzazione mondiale della Sanità (Oms), come deciso in settimana dal presidente degli Stati Uniti Donald Trump. L’Oms è stato definito un “carrozzone” che più



Sono passati già tre giorni dalla cerimonia di insediamento di Donald Trump eppure le testate italiane che si occupano di esteri continuano a inseguire quello che ha fatto, detto o pensato il nuovo presidente degli Stati Uniti, o in alternativa quello che ha fatto, detto, pensato, il proprietario di Space X.

Ieri ci sono stati due importanti discorsi pronunciati da Donald Tusk, che ha presentato le priorità del semestre polacco di presidenza del Consiglio Ue, e della presidente della Commissione Ursula Von der Leyen. Se ne è parlato pochissimo, per non dire per niente.

Non è che in Europa non accadono le cose, è che non le raccontiamo. E siamo per primi noi che ci occupiamo di informazione che dovremmo ricalibrare la narrazione.

in reply to FabioTurco

il problema é che un conto é fare proclami, altro é che 27 governi differenti, molto differenti, dicano che sono tutti d'accordo . Se poi nemneno lo rispettano. La dichiarazione di oggi di Presidente Metzola é grave ma vera: una volta raggiunto un difficile compromesso, vari stati non lo applicano,....
in reply to lucabianciardi

@lucabianciardi Sì, questo è un grosso problema. Il percorso per arrivare a una voce unica è molto complicato, a volte (spesso) semplicemente non ci si riesce, e questo indebolisce molto l'Unione sia all'interno, ma soprattutto all'esterno.
in reply to FabioTurco

È la dura legge della caccia al click. Un Donald vale più dell'altro o degli altri.


È uscito il nuovo numero di The Post Internazionale. Da oggi potete acquistare la copia digitale


@Politica interna, europea e internazionale
È uscito il nuovo numero di The Post Internazionale. Il magazine, disponibile già da ora nella versione digitale sulla nostra App, e da domani, venerdì 24 gennaio, in tutte le edicole, propone ogni due settimane inchieste e approfondimenti sugli affari e il potere in



After Trump signed an unscientific, transphobic executive order deeming there to be "two sexes," several informational websites about gender identity went offline.#DonaldTrump #Gender #government


A Firenze l’iniziativa “Voci nella cura – esperienza e scienza nella terapia psichedelica” 


Si terrà a Firenze l’evento Voci nella cura – esperienza e scienza nella terapia psichedelica promosso da SIMEPSI Società Italiana di Medicina Psichedelica, in collaborazione con Centro Culturale The Square, Associazione Luca Coscioni e Psychedelicare.

L’appuntamento è per Sabato 1 febbraio alle ore 18:00, presso il Teatro del Centro Culturale The Square, a Firenze, in Via Domenico Cirillo, 1/r, 50133 Firenze FI.


Sarà l’occasione per firmare per l’appello italiano al parlamento e per l’ICE Psychedelicarepresso il banchetto della Cellula Coscioni Firenze.

è possibile visualizzare la locandina completa a questo link.

L'articolo A Firenze l’iniziativa “Voci nella cura – esperienza e scienza nella terapia psichedelica” proviene da Associazione Luca Coscioni.



Nach Amtsantritt von Trump: Transatlantisches Datenabkommen bekommt erste Risse


netzpolitik.org/2025/nach-amts…



Caso Najeem Almasri, il ministro degli Interni Piantedosi: “Arresto irrituale. Espulso subito perché pericoloso”


@Politica interna, europea e internazionale
Il generale libico Najeem Osama Almasri Habish, capo della Polizia giudiziaria di Tripoli ricercato dalla Corte penale internazionale (Cpi) con l’accusa di crimini di guerra e contro l’umanità per le torture inflitte ai

reshared this



Palestinian Journalist DESTROYS Western Media's Complicity In Genocide


youtube.com/watch?v=SwAE8jif_v…


"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."#AI #AIbots #Robotstxt


#NoiSiamoLeScuole, grazie al #PNRR due nuove scuole e laboratori per le nuove professioni a Grosseto.
Il video racconto del #MIM questa settimana è dedicato alla Scuola primaria “Enrico Toti”, dell’IC Grosseto 6 e alla Scuola primaria “Gianni Rodari…


Shellcode over MIDI? Bad Apple on a PSR-E433, Kinda


If hacking on consumer hardware is about figuring out what it can do, and pushing it in directions that the manufacturer never dared to dream, then this is a very fine hack indeed. [Portasynthica3] takes on the Yamaha PSR-E433, a cheap beginner keyboard, discovers a shell baked into it, and takes it from there.

[Portasynthinca3] reverse engineered the firmware, wrote shellcode for the device, embedded the escape in a MIDI note stream, and even ended up writing some simple LCD driver software totally decent refresh rate on the dot-matrix display, all to support the lofty goal of displaying arbitrary graphics on the keyboard’s dot-matrix character display.

Now, we want you to be prepared for a low-res video extravaganza here. You might have to squint a bit to make out what’s going on in the video, but keep in mind that it’s being sent over a music data protocol from the 1980s, running at 31.25 kbps, displayed in the custom character RAM of an LCD.

As always, the hack starts with research. Identifying the microcontroller CPU lead to JTAG and OpenOCD. (We love the technique of looking at the draw on a bench power meter to determine if the chip is responding to pause commands.) Dumping the code and tossing it into Ghidra lead to the unexpected discovery that Yamaha had put a live shell in the device that communicates over MIDI, presumably for testing and development purposes. This shell had PEEK and POKE, which meant that OpenOCD could go sit back on the shelf. Poking “Hello World” into some free RAM space over MIDI sysex was the first proof-of-concept.

The final hack to get video up and running was to dig deep into the custom character-generation RAM, write some code to disable the normal character display, and then fool the CPU into calling this code instead of the shell, in order to increase the update rate. All of this for a thin slice of Bad Apple over MIDI, but more importantly, for the glory. And this hack is glorious! Go check it out in full.

MIDI is entirely hacker friendly, and it’s likely you can hack together a musical controller that would wow your audience just with stuff in your junk box. If you’re at all into music, and you’ve never built your own MIDI devices, you have your weekend project.

youtube.com/embed/u6sukVMijBg?…

Thanks [James] for the gonzo tip!


hackaday.com/2025/01/23/shellc…



Spese militari, gli Usa di Trump spingono verso il 5%

@Notizie dall'Italia e dal mondo

Con l’insediamento ufficiale di Donald Trump alla Casa Bianca, il dibattito sulle spese militari degli Stati membri della Nato entra in una nuova fase. Benché l’invasione dell’Ucraina del 2022 sia effettivamente risultata in un aumento complessivo delle spese, finora l’idea di alzare ufficialmente la soglia




Ecco la Type 054B “Luhoe”, la nuova fregata della Marina Cinese

@Notizie dall'Italia e dal mondo

Poche ore fa una nuova fregata di generazione avanzata, la Type 054B “Luhoe”, è ufficialmente entrata in servizio presso la People’s Liberation Army Navy (Plan); il varo è avvenuto presso la città portuale di Tsingtao, nella Cina orientale, dove è stanziata la Flotta Settentrionale della Plan.




Leggo con piacere che a Davos 370 milionari e miliardari hanno firmato una lettera aperta ai governi del G20 per chiedere che i superrichi vengano tassati di più.
Dai, non sono tutti psicopatici. Un minimo di speranza di questi tempi non guasta.