This is CrowdStrike admitting they haven't used staggered rollouts or canaries -- techniques to limit outage blast radius, both of which are now well over a decade old. Total ineptitude!
Earlier this month, MTV News abruptly pulled their site off the web without warning, eliminating a virtual archive of pop culture news stories that date back to 1997.
Excuse me we are now living in a time where search engines strike exclusivity deals with websites to exclusively show results of these websites on the one search engine?? Will I need to go with Google to look up reddit posts, Bing to see movie information, and DuckDuckGo for info on ducks now?
Google Is the Only Search Engine That Works on Reddit Now Thanks to AI Deal
“They’re [Reddit] killing everything for search but Google,” Colin Hayhurst, CEO of the search engine Mojeek told me on a call.
We really fucking need a community owned search engine index that fucks the corporate rules (but still respects personal websites' indexing preferences) that's federated and independent. YaCy exists but it's really old and slow and meh, we need a big new thing.
Common Crawl is the closest thing we have to an open index, though it doesn’t meet your requirement of ignoring robots.txt for corporate websites while obeying it for personal sites. Unfortunately, being open and publicly available means that people use it to train LLMs. Google did this for initial versions of Bard, so a lot of sites block its crawler. Most robots.txt guides for blocking GenAI crawlers include an entry for it now.
OWS.EU constantly thrives to move forward with more transparent, self-determined web search. With the aim to build a Europe-based Open Web Index, choosing trustworthy, powerful crawling partners is key.
@hook CC is an index for anybody to use. This reduces the barrier to create alternatives to other indexes, like those owned by Google/Bing/Yandex. On one hand, this makes upstart engines and research like the Web Data Commons possible; on the other hand, it allows all sorts of bad actors (non-consensual GenAI, for instance) to index your pages easily. If Common Crawl embedded information from the upcoming W3C TDM Reservation Protocol in each site/page, this would be partially resolved; bad actors could ignore this but well-behaved actors would at least know what they’re welcome to do with each page. Right now, they don’t even know so they can’t comply with your preferred rules easily; all they have are X-Robots tags, which are a bit limited.
I think that the CC does more good than harm on my site, so I allow it. I can’t speak for everyone else.
@iacore federated search indexing is a thing (YaCy is one attempt, but results are mixed), as is distributed crawling with a centralized search index (mwmbl).
@lispi314 @Jessica @404mediaco @Mojeek @privateger Brave Search (I know…) follows rules for GoogleBot in robots.txt if Brave’s robots.txt entry isn’t explicitly defined. I know it’s not the only engine to do this, but it’s the only one I recall off the top of my head. I imagine that this is the direction more engines are heading in.
Discover the top back-to-school checklist by 1Password for students and parents. Learn how to manage digital identities and passwords effortlessly, simplify logins, and ensure online security.
AbilityNet's Head of Digital Inclusion, Robin Christopherson explores the cutting-edge technologies enhancing the abilities of assistance dogs, showcasing the incredible synergy between traditional
«Google Is the Only Search Engine That Works on Reddit Now Thanks to AI Deal»
We move to the next level of information feudalism: some of the few bits of human-generated things left on the internet are now blocked off from being openly searchable…
Another reason to use ALT text which some people might not have considered: it benefits people who are not visually impaired as well.
As #Mastodon is #decentralized there is no central network hosting all of the images. Should the admin of a server decide to purge old images to save space, users accessing older posts will not know what an image was without an ALT text.
Donating through this link also gently encourages the Harris campaign to have a Fediverse presence of some kind (specifically not Threads, by the way).
The "Mastodon for Harris" campaign's original target was $1000, but after just two days it's already on $144,000 😮
The campaign is run by @heidilifeldman who is a law professor and long time Fediverse user.
* TaskLabAct: save and sync on your git server a TODO list and shareable links * Fossify Calculator: Simple and open-source calculator for quick and easy calculations – and app number 12 in your green collection. One app for each month now!
This is a repository of apps to be used with F-Droid. Applications in this repository are official binaries built by the original application developers, taken from their resp. repositories (mostly Github, GitLab, Codeberg).
X (fka Twitter) has quietly redesigned its 🔫 Water Pistol emoji to display as a firearm. This diverges from the cross-platform conversion of this emoji from firearm to water pistol from 2016 to 2018.
CrowdStrike is offering its partners a $10 Uber Eats gift card as an apology for crashing millions of computers around the world due to a defective software update.
“To express our gratitude, your next cup of coffee or late night snack is on us!,” says the email from CrowdStrike's chief business officer Daniel Bernard.
But some found that the gift card didn't work, while others got an error message saying the voucher had been canceled.
Switzerland passes law requiring #OpenSource software in the public sector. "All public bodies must disclose the source code of software developed by or for them, unless precluded by third-party rights or security concerns" Well done @maemst, great work!
Switzerland has enacted the "Federal Law on the Use of Electronic Means for the Fulfilment of Governmental Tasks" (EMBAG), establishing a mandatory requirement for open source software within public sector bodies.
🚨 New pre-print – dark times for privacy. Not only announced Google yesterday to continue allowing cross-site cookies. We find that Android's central privacy options are ineffective and arguably misleading for consumers.
For 10+ years, Google has allowed #Android users to limit data sharing for online ads. We find that this setting does... NOTHING much. The same goes for Californians, when they exert their LEGAL right to limit sale or sharing of their data. #GPC
Apps and their integrated third party libraries often collect a variety of data from people to show them personalized ads. This practice is often privacy-invasive.
When people start popping off with their opinions about how the world should work, one of my favorite questions to ask is "who is we?" Let's start to unpack who we're talking about, and what we're talking about in terms of changes in their words and actions. social.polotek.net/@polotek/11…
More importantly though, every actor in this dynamic feels that it's not their own actions that need to change. It's always somebody else that needs to change.
That's why I end up poking people about this. Even though I know it often just makes them defensive. Each of us has to understand that we don't have any control over what other people do. The only thing we can actually make a decision about is whether our own actions in the system match up with our stated values.
"Testes à covid-19. Autoridade da Concorrência condena laboratórios por "envolvimento num cartel""
"em setembro de 2020, o valor os testes covid em Portugal estavam ao nível dos preços na Europa, em junho de 2021 Portugal era o país europeu com o preço por teste mais elevado."
A Autoridade da Concorrência (AdC) condenou uma associação empresarial e cinco dos principais grupos laboratoriais a operar em Portugal ao pagamento de coimas superiores a 48 milhões de euros por "envolvimento num cartel que operou no mercado portugu…
Skeletor (born Simon Keldor, 1955-2005; 2008-present) was an American actor who enjoyed brief success in his eponymous role in the Masters of the Universe cartoon in the 1980s.
wow, you can tell someone really put a lot of work into it and wrote it in one cohesive voice, and then a bunch of other people came across the article and added some bad jokes afterwards that don't fit at all
Beyond parody. To quote Penny Arcade, how do you make fun of a clown? Insult his big shoes, his red nose?
CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity firm that crashed millions of computers with a botched update all over the world last week, is offering its partners a $10 Uber Eats gift card as an apology, according to several people who say they received the gift card, as well as a source who also received one.
This summer, #Kdenlive is all about the ASS. Yup you heard it right, .ass subtitle support is coming along with some nifty other features like multiple subtitle tracks. Stay tuned for more.
Multiple Subtitle Track I continued to refine the feature proposed in my previous blog. We can now add new layers directly on the timeline by simply dragging the existing …
Sharing my plans for #MastodonForHarris fundraiser: Incredibly, it is now conceivable that we will hit the current target of $125,000 soon, maybe even today. When we do, I will adjust the target. I hope I have been clear from the beginning; each target is a a benchmark, not an endpoint. 1/ secure.actblue.com/donate/mast…
I am continuing my efforts to contact key people in digital, outreach, and elsewhere in the Harris campaign. Eventually, I will get through, I’m sure. I’d like to have a list ready of qualified volunteers who could assist the campaign in understanding Mastodon and the Fediverse, setting up and maintaining an instance, and so forth. If you are interested in being contacted should an opportunity arise, please provide your details here opnform.com/forms/mfh-tech-vol…. 2/ #MastodonForHarris
Every day multiple people sign up for @mastometrics, but hosting is burning a hole in my pocket and I don't have much time to maintain it.
I'm open to cleaning up my code and making it self hostable as well as accepting code contributions. However, I still need donations to fund the free / flagship server.
So here's my pledge and call to you:
Ensure MastoMetrics stays online and help me reach €1500 donations: ko-fi.com/robertvh
Hey, don't use umap for this. You can use mapcomplete.org/benches instead - then you can add more information in a structured way and even add images, and the data will be available in many apps such as OsmQnd, Organic Maps and many more.
A bunch of GNOME devs are currently in a community centre, sitting on couches, drinking beer, and listening to EDM while hacking. We are the embodiment of the old meme: bassi.io/~ebassi/GNOMEvKDE.md.…
@ramin_hal9001 oh, no, that blog post is from a *long* time ago; at some point, GNOME really became the corporate desktop environment, all dull grey and no options. The main issue is that now we're all 40 and 50 somethings with families, and mortgages, so we don't go around raves any more. 😉
Meta has launched the Llama 3.1 AI models, including the massive Llama 3.1 405B, with a 128K context length. These models are open-source and competitive with top AI models like GPT-4, available through various cloud platforms alternativeto.net/news/2024/7/…
daughter of lilith
in reply to daughter of lilith • • •Seirdy
in reply to daughter of lilith • • •Common Crawl is the closest thing we have to an open index, though it doesn’t meet your requirement of ignoring robots.txt for corporate websites while obeying it for personal sites. Unfortunately, being open and publicly available means that people use it to train LLMs. Google did this for initial versions of Bard, so a lot of sites block its crawler. Most robots.txt guides for blocking GenAI crawlers include an entry for it now.
Common Crawl powers Alexandria Search and was the basis of Stract’s initial index, both of which are upstart FOSS engines.
A similar EU-focused project is OpenWebSearch/Owler.
Originally posted on
seirdy.one: See Original (POSSE).Common Goals with Common Crawl - Open Web Search – Promoting Europe‘s Independence in Web Search
ows.eu Team (Open Web Search – Promoting Europe‘s Independence in Web Search)Matija Šuklje
in reply to Seirdy • • •@Seirdy, do you have or know of a more nuanced analysis of Common Crawl (compared with OWS)?
I recently blocked it for my blog togethet with (other) GenAI crawlers, but I'm on the fence and would like to re-evaluate with more info.
@marta
Seirdy
in reply to Matija Šuklje • • •@hook CC is an index for anybody to use. This reduces the barrier to create alternatives to other indexes, like those owned by Google/Bing/Yandex. On one hand, this makes upstart engines and research like the Web Data Commons possible; on the other hand, it allows all sorts of bad actors (non-consensual GenAI, for instance) to index your pages easily. If Common Crawl embedded information from the upcoming W3C TDM Reservation Protocol in each site/page, this would be partially resolved; bad actors could ignore this but well-behaved actors would at least know what they’re welcome to do with each page. Right now, they don’t even know so they can’t comply with your preferred rules easily; all they have are X-Robots tags, which are a bit limited.
I think that the CC does more good than harm on my site, so I allow it. I can’t speak for everyone else.
Seirdy
Unknown parent • • •LisPi
Unknown parent • • •@Jessica @404mediaco @Mojeek @privateger That's pretty much what I expected, yes.
Or for them to completely destroy what remains of old.reddit and only have a captcha-intensive basically mobile-only site.
Seirdy
in reply to LisPi • • •