Mallows marshed.

Sosij

Mmmm fire. Soon there will be sausage and then marshed mallows.

A modest proposal from Reddit: In light of the silly new porn laws, get Monty Python's "Sit On My Face and Tell Me That You Love Me" to the Christmas number one.

(long one, I am sorry)

Reading around the internet I see a lot of people expressing their extreme displeasure at how everything on the internet now seems to show a "verifying your browser" type page, and while this is extremely annoying I assure you from the web sites point of view this is basically existentially required.

Allow me to go into more detail from the point of view of the company that I run, and I'm sure the story is similar in many different places.

On an average day bgp.tools gets about 500~ users or so actively using the website at any given time, and let's assume this results in a request rate of ~10 RPS of dynamic requests (this is not the actual number but it's easier to just provide round benchmark numbers), so basically this excludes CSS/JS/Images/etc.

At the time of writing bgp.tools is "shooting down" about ~40 bot scraper connections _per second_, and the connection attempts the do get through tend to go on to each try and perform ~5 RPS until stopped. To add on top these things continuously do cache misses, which makes sense given at that point is to try and extract as much information from you, for no cost, and as much/fast as possible.

This is very quickly unsustainable.

The problem is that these scrapers are aware that they are unwelcome, and so they will happily do things like: (listed in the order of most commonly done)

A) Use normal browser user agent strings so it's not obvious from basic access.log files

B) Emulate real browser TLS handshakes to evade JA-3 and similar mitigations

C) Use proxies that have lease lines with popular eyeball ISP providers and rented IP space, so that AS blocks do not work

D) Use entire botnets of smart TVs and other compromised devices, mostly sitting behind "normal" networks

E) Use free mobile phone app/games with a "special" SDK as proxies

F) Run entire browser stacks purely to load pages in the most "authentic" way possible

With C+D+E traits combined, IP/Subnet/ASN blocks no longer work, with A+B you cannot easily identify what is what, so this leaves you in a dilemma:

If you run a website which serves information anonymously for free, you have a choice of three options:

1) Put everything behind a log-in barrier (this might destroy your business)

2) Purchase/rent more infrastructure purely for the purpose of serving bots, and at a significant multiplier of your existing infrastructure (this might destroy your business)

3) Use a "verify your browser" step to cut out 90%+ of this mess at the cost of annoying users a bit

(3) is the only really viable option for a lot of people, the pure scale of the scraping problem for some website is just not survivable at most peoples current scales.

Ok, I've seen others try this so lets give it a go :-

Would anyone know of any available remote-only jobs for a Linux System Administrator in the UK?
I've worked with machines in VMware DCs, over many timezones, Debian/Ubuntu/CentOS, IaC managed in git, bash scripting/automation. Deliving into system and application logs. Docker/docker-compose/Kubernetes. Some Ansible and Puppet. VPNs (OpenVPN, StrongSwan, IPSec etc). routing, dhcp et al.

Shout at me for more info.

#GetFediHired
#FediHire

Glad to see this reporting from the BBC: when the AI bubble bursts, companies that have gone bust will sell your data. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20261029-the-ai-bubble-could-expose-your-deepest-secrets

#RAM #LowEffortMeme

this writeup is excellent — https://blog.nns.ee/2026/11/02/renault-hack/

been a while since I’ve seen such a nice, classic exploit, and no slop either

(“Jailbreaking my car's navigation system just so I can change the time” by Rasmus Moorats @nnsee )

Gonna catch me a techbro

A stealth game in which you play Sam Altman sneaking into people's homes to steal their RAM. Each time you succeed, game performance degrades a little. Eventually, the game becomes impossible to play.

I never saw Patrick Stewart at a convention and didn't come with him into direct contact in any way when working on #StarTrekPicard but there's one Patrick Stewart/Jean-Luc Picard related achievement that only I have ever made - find proof that Patrick Stewart exists in the #StarTrek universe. 1/10

Anthropic Visual Studio Claude Code extension on Cursor has malware in it, which creates a remote access Trojan to desktops.

https://phorion.io/blog/offical-claude-code-vsx-compromise/

Gutted at the loss of Patrick Stewart. Growing up as a young sci-fi fan Captain Picard showed the sort of person it was possible to be, and I was delighted to learn as an adult that he was just as great in real life.

Picard management tip: Time is the rarest commodity. Manage yours wisely.

#books #heists #library #DeweyDecimal

Anthropic’s SEC filing is amazing. It describes itself as the most important company in human history, then if you keep reading it’s like

RE: https://kolektiva.social/@grumble209/117514452069542363

Yeah. Anthropic spell it out, in bold, as a risk.

Are companies who are outsourcing thinking and processes to a small number of GenAI companies managing their risks properly? I don’t think so.

What the slop-generated nightmare-fuel is this new plusnet branding? Someone looked at that and thought they'd done a good job, then someone else signed off on it. https://www.plus.net/content/dam/plusnet/images/plusso-rebrand-2026/broadband/bbdeals-background-supermarket.png

Ellen (or Ripley)
By The Beatles

Ellen (or Ripley)
Picks up the guts from the guy whose chest just burst to bits
What is this shit

Waits in the silence
Aiming the flamethrower right at the Xenomorph’s face
No screams in space

#AlienSongPoemOrLimerick
#HashTagGames