That was a DDOS Now it's just how international commerce works. I manage an OA platform with 100% human content (cultural heritage images), and we're seeing the same thing: requests from all over the world for every possible iteration of a page. Every other platform like ours has the same problem, and it translates into legitimate users not being able to access our stuff.

I'm convinced it's AI scraping. At least some of the bots were following the Analytics links (Fathom), and I could see them swarm the site. Suddenly 100,000 IPs from China are each grabbing one or two pages.

Aye. I wasted some time with Gemini and ChatGPT today. I fed it a citation from the manuscript of an alleged passage from canon law. Both Gemini and ChatGPT gave me the same initial reference, which had nothing to do with the passage. One of the hilarious painful things you learn is that, in these cases, either your prompt hits a home run or it strikes out. You're not going to refine your way into glory. I enjoyed watching the citations dance and the suggestions be always bizarre BS. I got several citations â" probably a dozen, and none of them came close to reality.

Me too. After fifteen years of use, the outermost trace (left line of the keyboard) broke, rendering the Unicomp M junk. I had to switch to the chiclet keyboards they issue at work. Three days later I came down with tendonitis. So now I have a base Cherry Brown KC MX.

The sticky parts here:
Delta is demanding from its contractor reparations for damages that it's refusing its customers. When they reject claims for which they have responsibility, how can they go after their contractors on the same basis?
Delta is not the only airline to use CrowdStrike, and they all had outages on July 19. Delta, however, is the only one that couldn't recover until July 24.

Crowdstrike's test and deployment processes to me look like gross negligence: their business is having companies entrust them with access to the Kernal and deploying timely and safe updates. Everyone else uses a robust testing process including staggered deployment.
But Delta, in going about a lawsuit, will be required to reveal their own IT processes and shortcomings that led to a five-day collapse.

Or they settle for zero dollars.

I wouldn't even be surprised if the insurers refused to pay out on this one. It's like a fire prevention company deploying a smoke detector that, at the same time around the world, does an auto-test that, due to a design flaw, disables the detector and starts a fire. No amount of "use this device at own risk. We will not cover fire damage costs incurred by using this product" is gonna fly. Liability insurance might cover something, but not a failure to follow basic software security practices. And, even then, who is going to insure them tomorrow? Who is going to go to the boss and say: "well, these guys can't follow the most fundamental rule in keeping their clients' machines secure, let's hire them as our security solution!"? Nothing short of Russian sabotage is going to save them. Good news for competitors: fresh contracts are on the way. Also, you can probably hire some engineers. Just keep an eye on them.

If it decouples the flash from social media, how are people going to find out about it? Once someone starts using it, that person disappears from the major marketing channel of our time. The problem with truly useful tools is that they don't propagate themselves or move as many copies as flashy, trendy crap that breaks or goes obsolete in two years.

So then I see a price of $800 for specs that are a little vague, but which most people are going to associate with a device that costs about $200; of course, those devices are the flashy ones, and they can be churned out for a profit much cheaper, given the economies of scale.

And I'd want to see how this display works before plunking down. So we're doomed as a race.

He has to live with Outlook, which, like other mailing software, scans messages before they are sent for keywords such as "CV", "Resume", "Attachment", and, if it gets a hit, and there's no attachment, reminds the user "would you like to add an attachment?"
Unlike other mailing software, that dictionary includes "Bill". Every email he types his name into generates a "would you like to add an attachment", until he either disables the feature or sets up a signature.
Unlike other mailing software, using / will try to include a file, picking something that resembles the words typed, and by default attaching the file. On the Outlook 365 web client, not even Bill Gates can disable this feature. So, if Mr. Gates ends an email with the signature /Bill on then the helpful Web Client will find a sensitive piece of financial information and automatically attach it to the message.
Unlike other mailing software, Outlook gets bundled into office IT packages for companies around the world, supposedly to offer a comprehensive solution for your basic business infrastructure. Businesses end up including proprietary features and locking their users into Outlook. Sure, you can tell people to set up signature blocks, but you're as likely to get 100% compliance on that as with telling people they shouldn't use tab to indent their paragraphs.

Yeah, they don't see it as useful, but many people do, and it's part of national heritage. Maybe the government should take care of it? After all 4.5 million quid a year is a drop in the bucket compared to the cost of digitization and the recurring cost of ensuring the integrity of the data. Oh, this is the government?

Digitize their whole collection? Okay. How big is that? 8 million objects? So, digitization means what? Full scientific photography of each object? Or are we talking 3D-scans too? Let's assume just the photography part. Each object needs to be signed out, transferred to the digitization center, set up on the digitization apparatus with controlled lighting, color control cards, rulers, whatever other targets you want, and photographed completely, before being returned to storage. Meanwhile the digitization team needs to prepare the metadata, verify the images, archive the images and metadata, as well as generate a reproduction master for use on the website. And you need a long term archival plan, with offline copies being remotely stored and routinely checked/corrected for bitrot. The cost of preparing the metadata alone will exceed $12M. Heck, the cost of having employees move those objects around the museum will cost more than $12M. If digitization only costs $1.50/object, we'd have a lot more digitizations in the world.

You mean the Chinese server farm that can't respect robots.txt and DoS'd my server? They have a social media wing?

How about shooting it through an airlock? Their proof-of-concept model there has a long tube sticking out of the centrifuge. I'd think you'd open the lower aperture, release the projectile, and, when the escape-velocity-traveling projectile is in the tube, close the lower aperture and open the upper one. As a bonus, the projectile might fly through a gradually denser atmosphere. Or it might hit all kinds of turbulence...
The number of ways this can fail is impressive, though.

The four key words. I'm not sure we need to ask, "what part of human psychology can be exploited by this tech to make people miserable and tech companies rich?" But "it just fucking works": yes. Skype doesn't. Teams doesn't. Jitsi doesn't. You watch how Zoom handles goofy bandwidth around the world, how it discriminates between speech and noise, and how it prevents a meeting from dissolving into chaos. That's not a commodity; that's some serious tech with the sole purpose of making things work. And yes, try giving a technical presentation to forty people in a foreign language and having no video reactions. Even bored and surfing the internet, those people on video would help enormously in feeling the crowd. It's harder than being on a well-lit stage, speaking into the black hole.

True, but every bridge in the country can be blown up on short order.

Indeed. Even many researchers think they can just have everybody use their iPhones on the documents they want and digitization is "solved". Certainly, for an individual, those pictures are useful, and I have a HDD with a bunch o' manuscripts that come from digital photos or microfilm scans that works well for my proposes. But a library or archive will want to have scientific photos (go ahead and look up the FADGI guidelines for imagery of two-dimensional objects), taken in controlled lighting, with color reference cards and a means to make measurements. Otherwise, the same object in different photographs does not look the same. And yeah, metadata. The library digitization project next door spends far more per codex on metadata and description encoding than it does on Hasselblads and photographers.