https://pinboard.in/u:jm/public/ recent bookmarks from jm 2026-06-19T14:43:13+00:00 https://blog.includesecurity.com/2026/06/the-smart-tv-in-your-livingroom-is-a-node-in-the-aiscraping-economy/ jm Petflix, a Roku app documented by The Verge, is a representative case. Its opt-in screen reads: “To enjoy Petflix for free with fewer ads, you are allowing Bright Data to occasionally use your device’s free resources and IP address to download public web data from the internet. Bright Data will only use your IP address for approved business-related use cases. None of your personal information is accessed or collected except your IP address. Period.” [...] At least three CTV-focused entities (PlayWorks, CloudTV, Longvision) monetized their user’s devices as residential proxy exit nodes. PlayWorks in particular reports CTV distribution across major TV platforms and ISPs, with reach figures in the hundreds of millions of households per its own marketing materials. ]]> proxies residential broadband scraping internet tv smart-tv roku petflix android ios mobile brightdata https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:636c8af749ac/ 2026-05-12T08:56:13+00:00 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/20563051261437487 jm When practitioners used the term “social media” to describe the internet tools that emerged in the mid-aughts, they were giving a name to the kinds of platforms and protocols that allowed people to socialize with friends and communities of interest by using digital technologies. Twenty years later, users of social media are far more likely to scroll than post – and the content that they consume is often strategically produced and algorithmically curated. In this essay, I argue that the very essence of social media has changed. To more effectively interrogate what we are witnessing, we need to stop presuming that these tools are “social media” and begin recognizing that they are now “parasocial media.” ]]> parasocial social-media social-networking web internet https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:6887bec56f56/ 2026-01-26T12:03:59+00:00 https://restofworld.org/2026/iran-blackout-tiered-internet/ jmGovernment spokesperson Fatemeh Mohajerani confirmed international access will not be restored until at least late March. Filterwatch, which monitors Iranian internet censorship from Texas, cited government sources, including Mohajerani, saying access will “never return to its previous form.” The system is called Barracks Internet, according to confidential planning documents obtained by Filterwatch. Under this architecture, access to the global web will be granted only through a strict security whitelist. The idea of tiered internet access is not new in Iran. Since at least 2013, the regime has quietly issued “white SIM cards,” giving unrestricted global internet access to approximately 16,000 people, while 85 million citizens remain cut off. ]]> barracks-internet iran censorship internet networking https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:d680eaa84ade/ 2025-10-17T11:23:02+00:00 https://www.heise.de/en/background/Obituary-Farewell-to-robots-txt-1994-2025-10766991.html jmIt is with deep sorrow that we announce the end of robots.txt, the humble text file that served as the silent guardian of digital civility for thirty years. Born on February 1, 1994, out of necessity when Martijn Koster’s server crashed under a faulty crawler named “Websnarf,” robots.txt passed away in July 2025, not by Cloudflare’s hand, but from the consequences of systematic disregard by AI corporations. The protocol taught us that technology can be based on human values like ethics and morality. It showed that voluntary compliance works when all parties benefit. Its greatest achievement was perhaps preserving the internet for three decades from what it has become today – a soulless extraction machine. ]]> internet history robots.txt crawlers web obituaries protocols ai via:mariafarrell https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:47ac122b3070/ 2025-08-25T16:20:35+00:00 https://lobste.rs/s/gvtlpo/email_is_easy_email_address_quiz#c_vkssdf jm email history 1970s via:fanf smtp ietf standards internet https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:219e04c983b2/ 2025-07-11T09:31:22+00:00 https://onlinesafetyact.co.uk/in_memoriam/ jm regulation uk internet shutdown censorship daily-mail via:mattround osa https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:d260c648f41b/ 2025-02-13T12:33:41+00:00 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/epub/10.1177/09637214221121570 jm Low-quality and misleading information online can hijack people’s attention, often by evoking curiosity, outrage, or anger. Resisting certain types of information and actors online requires people to adopt new mental habits that help them avoid being tempted by attention-grabbing and potentially harmful content. We argue that digital information literacy must include the competence of critical ignoring—choosing what to ignore and where to invest one’s limited attentional capacities. We review three types of cognitive strategies for implementing critical ignoring: - self-nudging, in which one ignores temptations by removing them from one’s digital environments; - lateral reading, in which one vets information by leaving the source and verifying its credibility elsewhere online; - and the do-not-feed-the-trolls heuristic, which advises one to not reward malicious actors with attention. We argue that these strategies implementing critical ignoring should be part of school curricula on digital information literacy. Good to give names to these practices, since we're all having to do them nowadays anyway... (Via Stan Carey)]]> psychology trolls media kids internet literacy attention critical-ignoring ignoring papers via:stancarey https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:44249586bf57/ 2025-01-10T10:48:08+00:00 https://www.waveform.com/tools/bufferbloat jm bufferbloat internet networking optimisation performance testing tools https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:93a6fb532124/ 2024-04-24T12:05:17+00:00 https://danluu.com/slow-device/ jmCPU performance for web apps hasn't scaled nearly as quickly as bandwidth so, while more of the web is becoming accessible to people with low-end connections, more of the web is becoming inaccessible to people with low-end devices even if they have high-end connections. For example, if I try browsing a "modern" Discourse-powered forum on a Tecno Spark 8C, it sometimes crashes the browser. Between crashes, on measuring the performance, the responsiveness is significantly worse than browsing a BBS with an 8 MHz 286 and a 1200 baud modem. ]]> dan-luu performance web bloat cpu hardware internet profiling https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:1adc3a4e17f6/ 2024-02-22T14:24:38+00:00 https://housefresh.com/david-vs-digital-goliaths/ jm Google has a clear bias towards big media publishers. Their Core and Helpful Content updates are heavily focused on something they call E-E-A-T, which is an acronym that stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. The SEO world has been obsessed with E-E-A-T for a few years now, to the point where there is always someone on X (formerly Twitter) discussing how to show experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. Many of the examples come from dissecting big media publishers like the ones we’ve been discussing in this article. The reason why SEOs look up to these sites is that Google rewards those sites. ]]> enshittification internet google reviews seo eeat content publishing bias search-engines https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:7029fee5b580/ 2023-12-19T11:01:42+00:00 https://vicki.substack.com/p/whats-up-with-russias-internet jm Unix was smuggled into Russia by scientists who translated parts of it into Cyrillic and adapted it for the Soviet Union’s ancient computers, creating the operating system DEMOS. In 1990, programmers from Moscow’s Kurchatov Institute (Russia's leading nuclear energy research and development institution) managed to access the internet, register their domain (.su) and quietly, without trumpeting their presence, sign up to a number of Usenet groups. A couple of weeks later Vadim Antonov, the first Soviet internet user, posted a joke about socialism, capitalism and communism in a meat queue, a ubiquitous phenomenon of the time. It was a decisive moment for Muscovites. It runs from there to Чебурнет, Cheburnet, a Russian take on the "Great Firewall" concept.]]> censorship community computing history russian soviet-union cheburnet demos usenet internet https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:f6fb446f4201/ 2023-10-12T17:21:00+00:00 https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/client-side-scanning-dutch-parliament/ jmnow we are talking about 500 million Europeans, and saying, “Let’s just apply those scanners!” That is incredible. ... If we approve this as a country, if we as the Netherlands vote in favour of this in Europe and say, “Do it,” we will cross a threshold that we have never crossed before. Namely, every European must be monitored with a computer program, with a technology [...] of which the vast, overwhelming majority of scientists have said, “It is not finished.” I mentioned earlier the example that the Dutch National Forensic Institute says, “We cannot do this by hand.” The EU has now said, “Our computer can do that.” 420 scientists have signed a petition saying, “We know this technology, some of us invented it, we just can’t do it.” We can’t even make a reliable spam filter. Making a spam filter is exactly the same technology, by the way, but then much easier. It just doesn’t work that well, but the consequences aren’t that scary for a spam filter. Nevertheless, there are now MPs who say, “Well, I feel this is going to work. I have confidence in this.” While the scientists, including the real scientists who came here tonight, say, “Well, we don’t see how this could work well enough”. And then government then says, “Let’s start this experiment with those 500 million Europeans.” ]]> eu scanning css chatcontrol internet monitoring surveillance bert-hubert https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:b8823261c362/ 2023-02-01T10:19:49+00:00 https://www.airwire.ie/index.php/avail/main/ jm via:itc ftth broadband internet networking fibre siro openeir https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:f3d376b1b0c6/ 2022-08-29T10:43:59+00:00 https://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/interviews-and-profiles/2022/08/online-lives-marie-le-conte-generation-broke-internet jm“There were 15 years on the internet that were unlike anything else, and that I don’t think you’ll be able to really get unless you were there,” Le Conte tells me. The world she outlines was one inhabited by loners and misfits, where awkward teenagers could go to find themselves, reach out to people across the world with shared interests, create their own communities, forge new identities – anonymously and without adult supervision. It was dangerous, yes – she admits that young people probably should never have been given that much freedom – but also liberating and, above all, fun. So much fun, in fact, that soon it wasn’t just the weird kids who wanted to be part of it. She compares what happened next to a group of children building a treehouse to play in. “And then all their parents joined in and were like, ‘Hello, we hear you have a treehouse. We live here as well now.’” ]]> marie-le-conte internet web history online https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:9f7d42425436/ 2022-08-23T16:52:20+00:00 https://www.nperf.com/en/map/IE/2964574.Dublin/5328.eir-Mobile/signal/?ll=53.04596042811769&lg=-7.870416976511479&zoom=7 jm country ireland rural internet network coverage 3g 4g 5g nperf crowdsourced maps via:itc https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:9e88543878ed/ 2022-05-10T08:41:10+00:00 https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1523791050313433088.html jmUkraine's 'GIS Art for Artillery' app combined with Starlink actually gives the Ukrainian military measurably better than US Military standard artillery command and control. The Ukraine War is the first Starlink War & the side with Starlink is beating the side without. This is pretty nuts. On the other hand, though, Starlink's operational security is now critically important, and doubtless being heavily targeted by Russian hackers, and Ukraine's tactics are reliant on the vagaries of Elon Musk... Source twitter thread: https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1523791050313433088]]> starlink artillery internet gis elon-musk warfare tech gis-art https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:40748bc13e4f/ 2022-04-13T14:10:53+00:00 https://nogalliance.org/our-task-forces/keep-ukraine-connected/ jmWe are creating a platform so that we can collect what our colleagues in Ukraine need to keep the internet up and running. We will be the link between the tech community, manufacturers, whoever else wants to get involved and Ukraine. Where absolutely necessary we can even transport the required hardware from Europe to the Ukraine. The aim of the “Keep Ukraine Connected” task force is not only to mediate, but also to actively help the Ukrainian internet stay up. ]]> inog nogs networking internet ukraine https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:72791fb4d8fa/ 2022-04-01T11:39:06+00:00 https://www.theguardian.com/media/2022/mar/04/bot-holiday-covid-misinformation-ukraine-social-media jm internet bots russia propaganda misinformation disinformation covid-19 ukraine-invasion https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:fd727f6fce37/ 2022-02-08T16:41:45+00:00 https://www.vox.com/the-goods/22922511/crypto-nfts-sports-betting-money-hobby jmJeff, like most skeptics for whom the system has actually worked pretty well, is eager to cash out once the price of ethereum goes back up. But talking to him, and to the rest of the (almost entirely) men who’ve turned money into a hobby, made me more than anything feel like I was too late to something that hadn’t even really happened yet. Because of course it isn’t “too late” to become an overnight crypto millionaire or to cash out on an incredibly lucky bet; it’s just highly unlikely that that person will be you. Nobody wants to be a cynical spoilsport, stewing in resentment of these men who have won and will probably keep winning, who look a lot like the ones who have always won: the men who have the time, the knowledge, the energy, and, most importantly, the money to turn “having money” into its own hobby. ]]> crypto finance gambling internet nfts ethereum scams hobbies betting https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:a1178dd9e620/ 2021-10-04T10:12:26+00:00 https://chaoyang.substack.com/p/wanghong-urbanism jmAt the simplest level, [wanghong] means “internet famous,” referring in its earliest iterations to viral personalities or social media influencers. The word has since mutated, expanding and venn-diagramming with a particular hipster aesthetic, strands of urban design and kinds of tech platform architecture. ]]> celebrity china photography internet neologisms wanghong instagram fame viral internet-famous https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:7cf2fa6fee5e/ 2021-09-09T14:44:40+00:00 https://www.irishwireless.net/metrolinq-60-outdoor-unit-60ghz-ptmp-18dbi-bracket-not-included-3533 jm hardware 4g internet lte6 lte remote rural-internet https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:2d950491cbb1/ 2021-05-27T10:00:50+00:00 https://fly.io/docs/introduction/ jm cdn serverless docker containers fly.io hosting internet ops platforms https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:f9434d355348/ 2021-05-18T22:04:37+00:00 https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/boosting-dropbox-upload-speed jmnetsh trace [...] correlates events on the wire with events that happen on the TCP layer, timers, buffer management, socket layer, and even the Windows asyncio subsystem (IOCP). ]]> windows tools cli networking dropbox iocp tcp ip internet kernel https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:9b45779da44f/ 2021-04-12T10:09:57+00:00 https://wiki.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Parental_control jm dd-wrt networking parenting parental-controls kids internet home https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:034169cdf375/ 2021-04-08T10:42:54+00:00 https://www.waveform.com/tools/bufferbloat?test-id=e2656f6c-bebe-44c7-8005-c7fdfe013678 jm bufferbloat buffering internet networking isps congestion https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:17562d7c6f19/ 2021-04-06T10:03:30+00:00 https://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/jdk-updates-dev/2021-April/005577.html jm The short version is this: we think about 1% of applications and traffic "out there" are still using TLS1.0/TLS1.1. Given where browsers are at, I think this percentage is an under-estimate of the usage on Java applications - I suspect it's even higher there. When we dig in with customers "Why are you still using TLS1.0 or TLS1.1" the most common reasons are legacy appliances and applications. Think of hardware load balancers that were never updated, or can't be, to support TLS1.2 or better. Compliance mandated traffic inspection devices that force TLS1.0 in certain industries are another reason. For these applications, the change will break them, and they'll get a low-level exception. The users can re-enable TLS1.0 and TLS1.1, but they may suffer an outage because they likely weren't expecting a breaking change low in the networking stack. ]]> colmmacc java jdk tls ssl versioning backwards-compatibility internet https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:7e92ac9a3e78/ 2021-03-12T10:23:07+00:00 https://nelsonslog.wordpress.com/2021/03/11/speedify-and-multipath/ jm speedify multipath vpn vpns internet networking via:nelson https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:b11da9b67abb/ 2020-07-31T10:32:56+00:00 https://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-tells-app-devs-to-use-ipv6-as-its-1-4-times-faster-than-ipv4/ jm"when IPv6 is in use, the median connection setup is 1.4 times faster than IPv4. This is primarily due to reduced NAT usage and improved routing." This is counterintuitive?]]> ipv6 ipv4 networking apple internet performance https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:2c0b2ebac997/ 2020-04-28T15:55:43+00:00 https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/04/27/1000658/google-medical-ai-accurate-lab-real-life-clinic-covid-diabetes-retina-disease/?truid=8c8f2699f50eb3b9985a111121cfee47 jmWhen it worked well, the AI did speed things up. But it sometimes failed to give a result at all. Like most image recognition systems, the deep-learning model had been trained on high-quality scans; to ensure accuracy, it was designed to reject images that fell below a certain threshold of quality. With nurses scanning dozens of patients an hour and often taking the photos in poor lighting conditions, more than a fifth of the images were rejected. Patients whose images were kicked out of the system were told they would have to visit a specialist at another clinic on another day. If they found it hard to take time off work or did not have a car, this was obviously inconvenient. Nurses felt frustrated, especially when they believed the rejected scans showed no signs of disease and the follow-up appointments were unnecessary. They sometimes wasted time trying to retake or edit an image that the AI had rejected. Because the system had to upload images to the cloud for processing, poor internet connections in several clinics also caused delays. “Patients like the instant results, but the internet is slow and patients then complain,” said one nurse. “They’ve been waiting here since 6 a.m., and for the first two hours we could only screen 10 patients.” The Google Health team is now working with local medical staff to design new workflows. For example, nurses could be trained to use their own judgment in borderline cases. The model itself could also be tweaked to handle imperfect images better.  ]]> google health medicine ai automation software internet developing-world real-world images scanning https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:5622d91f3d62/ 2020-02-26T11:49:09+00:00 https://www.carbonbrief.org/factcheck-what-is-the-carbon-footprint-of-streaming-video-on-netflix jmDrawing on analysis at the International Energy Agency (IEA) and other credible sources, we expose the flawed assumptions in one widely reported estimate of the emissions from watching 30 minutes of Netflix. These exaggerate the actual climate impact by 30- to 60-times. ]]> datacenters internet streaming netflix carbon climate-change iea energy emissions video https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:4093c9cbb08f/ 2020-01-27T16:15:05+00:00 https://the-beam.com/energy/how-weve-made-the-web-dirty/ jmThe tech sector is responsible for 2% to 4% of global emissions today. That’s less than all automobile transport, but roughly comparable to the global emissions of all shipping, or aviation. [....] The problem is that even as our electricity grids transition to more sustainable sources of energy, by dropping coal in favour of renewables, for instance, this doesn’t automatically mean we’re getting a much greener internet. That’s partly because the internet, while distributed around the world, is not evenly distributed. If you were to look at a map of all the major infrastructures of the internet, you’d see that it clusters around a number of geographic features. The reason behind this is that there is a cost, both in time and money, to move data around the world, and even though that cost dropped over time, the rate that we generate and use data for processing has grown faster than this cost has dropped. This creates incentives to increase the amount of infrastructure in a few places, rather than distribute it evenly. So, where we’ve previously seen data centres built in places with good access to fossil fuel energy, and in a regulatory environment that favours established fossil fuel industries over renewables, you’ll often see even more internet infrastructure being built, often using the same kinds of ‘grey’ power mixes. The best example of this is the Data Centre Alley in North Virginia, USA. Here, the county of Loudoun boasts that 70% of the world’s internet traffic passes through its digital infrastructure. With 13.5 million square feet of data centres in use, and another 4.5 million planned or developed, it’s the largest concentration of infrastructure in the world. Most of the power needed for this data centre comes from a single company, Dominion Energy, which runs a particularly dirty energy mix, with most of its energy coming from fracked gas, coal and nuclear power. Less than 5% comes from renewables, and this figure will barely pass 10% by 2030. ]]> green climate-change datacenters energy power renewables north-virginia internet carbon https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:daaeab141b45/ 2019-12-17T16:45:55+00:00 https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/josephbernstein/in-the-2010s-decade-we-became-alienated-by-technology jmLooking back from the shaky edge of a new decade, it’s clear that the past 10 years saw many Americans snap out of this dream, shaken awake by a brutal series of shocks and dislocations from the very changes that were supposed to "create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace.” When they opened their eyes, they did indeed see that the Digital Nation had been born. Only it hadn’t set them free. They were being ruled by it. It hadn’t tamed politics. It sent them berserk. And it hadn’t brought people closer together. It had alienated them. ]]> alienation wired future 2010s america tech silicon-valley internet history digital cyberspace https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:57bf04285ab2/ 2019-12-11T16:28:22+00:00 https://gen.medium.com/the-decade-the-internet-lost-its-joy-4898c2c44cb4 jmon a systemic level, it’s impossible to ignore the immense effect of capitalistic forces on how we experience the internet today. The pockets of fun will continue to erode until we are all flattened into a single pancake of behavioral data. To rediscover joy on the internet will mean reforming it entirely. When Deadspin was shuttered by its private equity-instilled bosses earlier this year, I blogged that instead of looking backward, we needed to imagine something entirely different. The same goes for the internet as a whole — we need a digital world that is built to take care of us instead of profit from us. ]]> culture internet future capitalism web nostalgia joy fun silicon-valley https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:e413c009af96/ 2019-12-09T11:43:44+00:00 https://onezero.medium.com/now-any-government-can-buy-chinas-tools-for-censoring-the-internet-18ed862b9138 jm“Autocracy as a service” lets countries buy or rent the technology and expertise they need, as they need it. It gets around the problem that being able to censor and surveil the internet isn’t just a technology challenge, but a management and human resource one. China offers a full-stack of options up and down the layers of the internet, including policies and laws, communications service providers with full internet shutdown options pre-installed, technical standards, satellites, cables, and infrastructure. This is possible because China has developed its own indigenous internet stack, sometimes copying the foreign technology it sought to replace. China even offers training in governance and strategy, consulting on writing a national strategy, and help building smart cities with its own full surveillance stack, euphemistically called “safe cities.” ]]> grim-meathook-future china censorship future internet surveillance autocracy repression https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:dd8e396503c2/ 2019-11-11T12:14:45+00:00 https://www.theguardian.com/media/2019/nov/08/confusion-after-bbc-podcasts-attempt-to-define-shitposting-laura-kuenssberg jm bbc shitposting internet fail bbclaurak boomer-memes memes shitposts https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:0714aa076eeb/ 2019-10-10T15:30:13+00:00 https://mashable.com/article/party-parrot-creator/?europe=true jm... just this week, I got an email from a Florida man claiming to be the person I had been looking for. What's more, he says he made the original emoji in December 2009 and uploaded it to Something Awful, a website popular in the 2000s for its comedic blog posts and forums. He had no idea his work had turned into a meme until he read my story on Tuesday.  ]]> something-awful memes history party-parrot emoticons internet https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:09b51c958f87/ 2019-09-12T15:54:03+00:00 https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/dnsop/ch3dM6_y2FSBVnSfwvA09nnVXIo jm no. nor ip itself, or ncp which preceded it, or tcp, or udp, or icmp, or smtp, ot http. it was insecure because it evolved in a safe, germ free academic bubble. absolutely none of it was designed with billions of people in mind, or the full cross section of humanity which would include criminals and national intelligence services. the world of the internet in 2019 would have been seen as a total freak show by the community who deployed dns in the 1980's. nothing that can be abused won't be. you may or may not believe this; it's considered controversial, and there are arguments being had about it today. but noone considered that now-controversial near-truism at all when the core internet protocols were first designed and implemented. the idea of abuse was considered novel in the 1990's when commercialization and privatization brought abuse into the internet world and burst the academic bubble. a lot of old timers blamed AOL and MSN and even Usenet for the problems, but in actuality, it's what humans _always_ do at scale. putting the full spectrum of human culture atop a technology platform designed for academic and professional culture should have been understood to be a recipe for disaster. ]]> ietf computers abuse internet security dns paul-vixie history scale culture https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:1b1ad7b60bf8/ 2019-08-29T11:54:08+00:00 https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/1166946106321670144 jmDear Hong Kong friends: as people are worried about an internet shutdown, do not be afraid to make plans now. Find a VPN that you like and test it out. If Telegram is unusable, use Signal or WhatsApp (both are safe). If LIHGK is not usable, use Reddit or Facebook groups. Above all, please remember that one of the biggest enemies you face are rumors. These will get worse if Internet access is curtailed; be careful about unverified news. As a general rule, you are best served by using a very big site (like Facebook or Google) than something small. The very big sites are harder to shut down and to attack. They also have security teams that make it harder for people to interfere with them. Whatever backup plan you have, test it while things are still working, so you don't have to learn it when under lots of stress. Twitter is another good choice for sharing information quickly. Google is also a safe option for chat/messages. All of these companies have experience fighting Chinese interference and will fight for you in case there is an effort to limit internet access in Hong Kong. My biggest piece of advice: do not forget to look at cat pictures once in a while to reduce anxiety and stress! VPN recommendations, via Zeynep Tufekci: 'the three I heard most about were: @getcloak (now encrypt.me), @theTunnelBear (PAID) and @FreedomeVPN. Don't use free ones.']]> security privacy internet shutdown via:pinboard via:zeynep hong-kong https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:852e7f16b3ba/ 2019-06-24T13:35:15+00:00 https://www.tuppenceworth.ie/blog/2019/06/24/why-the-bai-is-not-the-body-to-regulate-the-internet/ jm bai ireland regulation internet web messaging crypto privacy https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:57a707f19abe/ 2019-06-18T11:27:34+00:00 https://blog.cloudflare.com/a-free-argo-tunnel-for-your-next-project/ jmArgo Tunnel lets you expose a server to the Internet without opening any ports. The service runs a lightweight process on your server that creates outbound tunnels to the Cloudflare network. Instead of managing DNS, network, and firewall complexity, Argo Tunnel helps administrators serve traffic from their origin through Cloudflare with a single command. [....] Starting today, any user, even those without a Cloudflare account, can try this new method of connecting their server to the Internet. Argo Tunnel can now be used in a free model that will create a new URL, known only to you, that will proxy traffic to your server. We’re excited to make connecting a server to the Internet more accessible for everyone. ]]> cloudflare internet tunnel servers ports tunnelling ops free https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:151704816f99/ 2019-06-05T10:01:42+00:00 https://www.wired.com/story/existential-crisis-plaguing-online-extremism-researchers/?fbclid=IwAR21A3r5QnFl1PZg2jNmidfV6x2BvkI9Nw3MmBS-dfY2ABX8gpgj4GTPnmo jmMany researchers in the field cut their teeth as techno-optimists, studying the positive aspects of the internet—like bringing people together to enhance creativity or further democratic protest, á la the Arab Spring—says Marwick. But it didn’t last. The past decade has been an exercise in dystopian comeuppance to the utopian discourse of the '90s and ‘00s. Consider Gamergate, the Internet Research Agency, fake news, the internet-fueled rise of the so-called alt-right, Pizzagate, QAnon, Elsagate and the ongoing horrors of kids YouTube, Facebook’s role in fanning the flames of genocide, Cambridge Analytica, and so much more. “In many ways, I think it [the malaise] is a bit about us being let down by something that many of us really truly believed in,” says Marwick. Even those who were more realistic about tech—and foresaw its misuse—are stunned by the extent of the problem, she says. “You have to come to terms with the fact that not only were you wrong, but even the bad consequences that many of us did foretell were nowhere near as bad as the actual consequences that either happened or are going to happen.” [.....] “It's not that one of our systems is broken; it's not even that all of our systems are broken,” says Phillips. “It's that all of our systems are working ... toward the spread of polluted information and the undermining of democratic participation.” (via Paul Moloney)]]> future grim dystopia tech optimism web internet gamergate wired via:oceanclub https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:d6f23e41a4fd/ 2019-05-27T23:17:01+00:00 https://onezero.medium.com/the-dark-forest-theory-of-the-internet-7dc3e68a7cb1 jmThe internet of today is a battleground. The idealism of the ’90s web is gone. The web 2.0 utopia — where we all lived in rounded filter bubbles of happiness — ended with the 2016 Presidential election when we learned that the tools we thought were only life-giving could be weaponized too. The public and semi-public spaces we created to develop our identities, cultivate communities, and gain knowledge were overtaken by forces using them to gain power of various kinds (market, political, social, and so on). [...] The dark forests grow because they provide psychological and reputational cover. They allow us to be ourselves because we know who else is there. Compared to the free market communication style of the mass channels — with their high risks, high rewards, and limited moderation — dark forest spaces are more Scandinavian in their values and the social and emotional security they provide. They cap the downsides of looking bad and the upsides of our best jokes by virtue of a contained audience. ]]> culture internet dark-forests future web privacy abuse community https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:4ad4627f2fe1/ 2019-04-15T12:00:22+00:00 http://jamesbridle.com/new-ways-of-seeing jm seeing vision machine-learning james-bridle internet digital future art https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:df41fb60972d/ 2019-04-01T21:12:47+00:00 https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/mikemonteiro/we-built-a-broken-internet-now-we-need-to-burn-it jmThe promise of the internet was that it was going to give voice to the voiceless, visibility to the invisible, and power to the powerless. That’s what originally excited me about it. That’s what originally excited a ton of people about it. It was supposed to be an engine of equality. Suddenly, everyone could tell their story. Suddenly, everyone could sing their song. Suddenly, that one weird kid in Helena, Montana, could find another weird kid just like them in Bakersfield, California, and they could talk and know they weren’t alone. Suddenly, we didn’t need anybody’s permission to publish. We put our stories and songs and messages and artwork where the world could find them. For a while it was beautiful, it was messy, and it was punk as fuck. We all rolled up our sleeves and helped to build it. We were the ones who were supposed to guide it there, and we failed. We failed because we were naive enough to believe everyone had the same goals we did. We failed because we underestimated greed. We failed because we didn’t pay attention to history. We failed because our definition of we wasn’t big enough. We designed and built platforms that undermined democracy across the world. We designed and built technology that is used to round up immigrants and refugees and put them in cages. We designed and built platforms that young, stupid, hateful men use to demean and shame women. We designed and built an entire industry that exploits the poor in order to make old rich men even richer. ]]> design ethics internet web twitter social-media https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:4b0be05e86cf/ 2019-03-15T17:00:45+00:00 https://twitter.com/AyoCaesar/status/1106484542058180609 jm alt-right fascism media politics internet social-media twitter reddit ash-sarkar https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:f02ead9b62c7/ 2019-02-17T12:23:54+00:00 https://www.wired.com/story/soothing-promise-our-own-artisanal-internet/ jm facebook twitter internet web social-media mastodon fediverse anil-dash https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:43e0287d8d85/ 2019-02-07T09:31:08+00:00 https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/eve-online-bgp-internet jm via:fanf bgp networking internet routing london-underground trains https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:c84d01a61942/ 2018-11-14T11:27:31+00:00 https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/9wncor/httpoverquic_to_be_renamed_http3/ jm ip protocols http http3 quic networking internet newsy https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:0194d098183b/ 2018-11-08T11:55:12+00:00 https://www.quantamagazine.org/sci-fi-writer-greg-egan-and-anonymous-math-whiz-advance-permutation-problem-20181105/ jmOn September 16, 2011, an anime fan posted a math question to the online bulletin board 4chan about the cult classic television series 'The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya'. Season one of the show, which involves time travel, had originally aired in non-chronological order, and a re-broadcast and a DVD version had each further rearranged the episodes. Fans were arguing online about the best order to watch the episodes, and the 4chan poster wondered: If viewers wanted to see the series in every possible order, what is the shortest list of episodes they’d have to watch? In less than an hour, an anonymous person offered an answer — not a complete solution, but a lower bound on the number of episodes required. The argument, which covered series with any number of episodes, showed that for the 14-episode first season of Haruhi, viewers would have to watch at least 93,884,313,611 episodes to see all possible orderings. “Please look over [the proof] for any loopholes I might have missed,” the anonymous poster wrote. The proof slipped under the radar of the mathematics community for seven years — apparently only one professional mathematician spotted it at the time, and he didn’t check it carefully. But in a plot twist last month, the Australian science fiction novelist Greg Egan proved a new upper bound on the number of episodes required. Egan’s discovery renewed interest in the problem and drew attention to the lower bound posted anonymously in 2011. Both proofs are now being hailed as significant advances on a puzzle mathematicians have been studying for at least 25 years. ]]> mathematics internet math anime bizarre 4chan superpermutation permutation proofs greg-egan https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:49d7ce501f75/ 2018-09-27T09:10:23+00:00 https://triplebyte.com/blog/how-triplebyte-solved-its-office-wifi-problems jm internet networking wifi ethernet routers ops https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:94b781f9c525/ 2018-09-11T20:49:16+00:00 https://www.troyhunt.com/the-effectiveness-of-publicly-shaming-bad-security/ jmNow I don't know how much of this change was due to my public shaming of their security posture, maybe they were going to get their act together afterward anyway. Who knows. However, what I do know for sure is that I got this DM from someone not long after that post got media attention (reproduced with their permission): Hi Troy, I just want to say thanks for your blog post on the Natwest HTTPS issue you found that the BBC picked up on. I head up the SEO team at a Media agency for a different bank and was hitting my head against a wall trying to communicate this exact thing to them after they too had a non secure public site separate from their online banking. The quote the BBC must have asked from them prompted the change to happen overnight, something their WebDev team assured me would cost hundreds of thousands of pounds and at least a year to implement! I was hitting my head against the desk for 6 months before that so a virtual handshake of thanks from my behalf! Thanks! ]]> business internet security social-media shame troy-hunt bad-press spin shaming https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:cc9320f3797b/ 2018-09-05T09:19:01+00:00 https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/28/17777330/internet-of-garbage-book-sarah-jeong-online-harassment jm dystopia fake-news internet spam harrassment abuse twitter gamergate politics books free to-read https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:1fa9b11841c6/ 2018-08-24T11:09:17+00:00 https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/23/health/russian-trolls-vaccines.html jmBut instead of picking a side, researchers said, the trolls and bots they programmed hurled insults at both pro- and anti-vaccine advocates. Their only intent, the study concluded, seemed to be to raise the level of hostility. “You see this pattern,” said David A. Broniatowski, a computer engineer at George Washington University and lead author of the study, which was published Thursday in the American Journal of Public Health. “On guns, or race, these accounts take opposite sides in lots of debates. They’re about sowing discord.” So the Russian strategy is basically more of a "Hail Eris" than a "Hail Mary"?]]> russia trolls discord vaccination health internet https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:8a6fb5b38d35/ 2018-05-05T23:17:14+00:00 https://melmagazine.com/the-south-asian-men-sliding-into-your-dms-in-hopes-of-fraandship-2faca1162da5 jmManish is definitely aware of how he and his other fraandship-seekers are perceived by Western women. But he says, “It’s a difficult problem to solve because men speaking to women they aren’t married to — or who aren’t in their families — isn’t usually allowed.” In fact, he later tells me that he’s spoken to very few women in his life, and that the internet has finally allowed him and others like him to speak to women without being worried about their parents or family finding out. It’s this inexperience with women that leaves them defaulting to what they know best: “What we see in movies, [especially] Western movies.” “We think if we talk about sex, or we try to act like people we see in films, we will be like them,” Manish explains. “So then, we get [upset] and confused when we’re blocked, or when these girls don’t talk back to us.” Still, Manish and his friends are undeterred. Blocked or not, rejected or not, they continue to spend hours on other people’s Facebook and Twitter profiles, imagining what their lives are like — and how those lives could be theirs one day. “I will still go to America, or maybe London!” he says as we finish up our Skype call. “Soon, I will go. I do not want to stay here. I want to see the world. By [talking] to you, I’m already doing that.” ]]> fraandship fraands south-asia india pakistan internet chat dms https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:03212493d681/ 2018-04-26T13:44:51+00:00 https://github.com/keiichishima/yacryptopan jmThis package provides a function to anonymize IP addresses keeping their prefix consistency. This program is based on the paper "Prefix-Preserving IP Address Anonymization: Measurement-based Security Evaluation and a New Cryptography-based Scheme" written by Jun Xu, Jinliang Fan, Mostafa H. Ammar, and Sue B. Moon. The detailed explanation can be found in [Xu2002]. This package supports both IPv4 and IPv6 anonymization. (via Alexandre Dulaunoy)]]> via:adulau anonymization ip-addresses internet ipv4 ipv6 security crypto python crypto-pan https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:602049d20f11/ 2018-04-26T13:20:04+00:00 https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/988818797086871558.html jmFor the past little while, I've been working on a piece about Toronto's relationship to the alt-right, especially the "manosphere." Unfortunately that research has become relevant. I'm going to share as much as I can here for people who may not be familiar with these movements. ]]> incels manosphere 4chan hate internet pua kill-all-normies https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:cac2a39d9304/ 2018-04-10T10:26:23+00:00 https://twitter.com/gravislizard/status/983368802992668683 jmWe know that no company, regardless of size, can be trusted with this information. We KNOW it will not stay private, our photos of our partners genitals and tax documents will become public either deliberately or accidentally. We know that any company that tries to buck this trend can't be trusted, and even if they are completely, absolutely transparent, it doesn't matter because we will wake up one day to discover they were purchased at 2 AM and the data transfer /already started/ We represent billions in revenue but they hold our info in escrow and that means we don't have enough money to buy their loyalty, because a business considers business money more real than person money. ]]> money funding capitalism silicon-valley internet web google facebook banks banking https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:42bd6abc8970/ 2018-03-19T21:31:51+00:00 https://blog.acolyer.org/2018/03/19/a-quantitive-analysis-of-the-impact-of-arbitrary-blockchain-content-on-bitcoin/ jm blockchain bitcoin ledger immutability internet law crime papers https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:b05bc0380cd4/ 2017-11-20T23:07:03+00:00 https://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/telecom/internet/tech-leaders-dismayed-by-weaponization-of-social-media jm“We have passed the fail-safe point,” McNamee said. “I don’t think we can get back to the Silicon Valley that I loved. At this point we just have to save America.” ]]> propaganda fake-news facebook twitter social-media us-politics brexit internet russia silicon-valley usa https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:c3eb69f3b256/ 2017-11-06T21:19:41+00:00 https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-internet-c39c471271d2 jm internet youtube children web automation violence horror 4chan james-bridle https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:1fb2f7c526d7/ 2017-10-09T10:28:29+00:00 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15428432 jm marketing isps internet speed measurement ofcom uk https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:44ee162fffe3/ 2017-09-19T13:41:52+00:00 https://newsocialist.org.uk/normietivity-a-review-of-angela-nagles-kill-all-normies/ jmDue to a persistent vagueness in targets and refusal to respond to the best arguments presented by those she loosely groups together, Nagle does not provide the thoroughgoing and immanent treatment of the left which would be required to achieve the profound intervention she clearly intended. Nor does she grapple with the difficult implications figures like Greer (with her transphobic campaign against a vulnerable colleague) and Milo (with his direct advocacy for the nativist and carceral state) present for free speech absolutists. And indeed, the blurring their specifically shared transphobia causes for distinguishing between left and right wing social analysis. In genre terms, Nagle’s writing is best described as travel writing for internet culture. Kill All Normies provides a string of curios and oddities (from neo-nazi cults, to inscrutably gendered teenagers) to an audience expected to find them unfamiliar, and titillating. Nagle attempts to cast herself as an aloof and wry explorer, but at various points her commitments become all too clear. Nagle implicitly casts her reader as the eponymous normies, overlooking those of us who live through lives with transgenders, in the wake of colonialism, despite invisible disabilities (including depression), and all the rest. This is both a shame and a missed opportunity, because the deadly violence the Alt-Right has proven itself capable of is in urgent need of evaluation, but so too are the very real dysfunctions which afflict the left (both online and IRL). After this book patient, discerning, explanatory, and immanent readings of internet culture remain sorely needed. The best that can be said for Kill All Normies is, as the old meme goes, “An attempt was made.” ]]> angela-nagle normies books reading transphobia germaine-greer milo alt-right politics internet 4chan https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:7fffa96986b7/ 2017-09-12T09:13:53+00:00 http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand-hate.pdf jm In 2015, Reddit closed several subreddits—foremost among them r/fatpeoplehate and r/CoonTown—due to violations of Reddit’s anti-harassment policy. However, the effectiveness of banning as a moderation approach remains unclear: banning might diminish hateful behavior, or it may relocate such behavior to different parts of the site. We study the ban of r/fatpeoplehate and r/CoonTown in terms of its effect on both participating users and affected subreddits. Working from over 100M Reddit posts and comments, we generate hate speech lexicons to examine variations in hate speech usage via causal inference methods. We find that the ban worked for Reddit. More accounts than expected discontinued using the site; those that stayed drastically decreased their hate speech usage—by at least 80%. Though many subreddits saw an influx of r/fatpeoplehate and r/CoonTown “migrants,” those subreddits saw no significant changes in hate speech usage. In other words, other subreddits did not inherit the problem. We conclude by reflecting on the apparent success of the ban, discussing implications for online moderation, Reddit and internet communities more broadly. (Via Anil Dash)]]> abuse reddit research hate-speech community moderation racism internet https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:ef6f30ba49d0/ 2017-08-14T07:40:58+00:00 http://gizmodo.com/godwin-of-godwins-law-by-all-means-compare-these-shi-1797807646 jm mike-godwin nazis shitheads funny godwins-law internet https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:4f2cfb00769e/ 2017-06-14T09:45:11+00:00 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jun/13/mounir-mahjoubi-macron-cyber-attack-en-marche jm As a child, he was into maths and geometry, the middle child with one sister 10 years older and another 10 years younger. “I heard about this incredible new thing called the internet,” he says, adding how, aged 12, he saw an advert for the Paris science museum where you could try the internet for free. “There were 15 computers and you queued to have an hour free if you bought an entry ticket. I bought an annual pass to the museum and every Saturday and Sunday I’d travel from one side of Paris to the other to get on the internet and see what it was about. I’d go on Yahoo, chat with people on the other side of the world. I didn’t speak great English then so it wasn’t brilliant chat ...” (via Niall Murphy)]]> france mounir-mahjoubi internet computers society macron politics security https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:c0f9ded1a39e/ 2017-05-11T10:51:33+00:00 http://www.ikydz.com/ jm filtering security ikydz kids children internet wifi ap hardware blocking https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:de9f1248a02d/ 2017-04-20T20:34:41+00:00 http://idlewords.com/talks/build_a_better_monster.htm jm We built the commercial internet by mastering techniques of persuasion and surveillance that we’ve extended to billions of people, including essentially the entire population of the Western democracies. But admitting that this tool of social control might be conducive to authoritarianism is not something we’re ready to face. After all, we're good people. We like freedom. How could we have built tools that subvert it? As Upton Sinclair said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” I contend that there are structural reasons to worry about the role of the tech industry in American political life, and that we have only a brief window of time in which to fix this. ]]> advertising facebook google internet politics surveillance democracy maciej-ceglowski talks morality machine-learning https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:c885e903fafc/ 2017-02-24T10:41:24+00:00 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/project-zero/issues/detail?id=1139 jm internet security cloudflare caching coding buffer-overflows c data-leak leaks https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:0015afa911e7/ 2017-02-20T10:35:46+00:00 https://medium.com/@DaleBeran/4chan-the-skeleton-key-to-the-rise-of-trump-624e7cb798cb#.qoqw5q8iz jm 4chan 8chan somethingawful boards history internet trump alt-right https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:ea2774135177/ 2017-02-14T10:22:17+00:00 https://esports.clickon.co/2017/02/10/riot-games-seek-court-justice-after-internet-provider-deliberately-causes-in-game-lag/ jmWhen it seemed that the service provider couldn’t sink any lower, they opted to hold Riot to a ‘lag ransom’. Following Riot’s complaints regarding the inexplicable lag the player base were experiencing, TWC offered to magically solve the issue, a hardball tactic to which Riot finally admitted defeat in August of 2015. Before the deal was finalised, lag and data-packet loss for League of Legends players were far above the standards Riot was aiming for. Miraculously, after the two tech companies reached an unpleasant deal, the numbers improved. ]]> ftc fcc twc time-warner cable isps network-neutrality league-of-legends internet https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:7df66fe94b2e/