That won't stop the company asking/using this as a method to gather more personal info. Case in point, I have a twitter handle I created a long time ago - I'd have had to be 4 at the time to be underage now - but that hasn't stopped twitter blocking me unless I supply a date of birth (for targeted marketing, sorry, security) And ironically if i ask for it to be deleted, I only get a boilerplate response saying they need my dob.

Ugh, it stripped the link: https://ub.uni-koeln.de/en/research-publishing/open-science-usb/research-data-management

Yes, I work at an R1, and I do know that we have a lot more support in areas like this than many universities. But UoC absolutely does -- they have a research data management center with training, consultations, etc.:

"The user can do no wrong" is just as stupid as "everything is the user's fault" â" I'm not taking either of those positions. If you actually read what I wrote, you'll notice I am not blaming him for his IT skills or making a mistake with the software he was using. I'm blaming him for not meeting his responsibilities as a researcher, or taking advantage of the teams of people he had access to help him meet those responsibilities. He had a responsibility to preserve his data and working materials, he had the resources and support to do that, and he just failed to do it. Nobody else could have made him.

I'm not denying that there is a ton of terrible software out there â" I've been in the business long enough to see many horrors, and have written plenty of terrible interfaces myself. But this is like saying that a doctor who failed to wash their hands because of a shitty sink design wouldn't responsible for giving someone an infection with their dirty hands. Professionals with training and support have certain obligations, and they are responsible for the bad outcomes when they fail to meet them.

No, this is not some random user who was farting around with a chatbot. This was a researcher at a major research university. He has access to probably a dozen options for local and cloud storage that he could have used to backup his important data, and he chose not to. He has a grants office, and access to data management instruction and support. He chose not to use it or follow their advice.

I work at a US research university, and I know that we have several units on campus providing this kind of support, encouraging best practices at data organization and preservation. But there are always people who don't listen. It is 100% this guys fault. He had a responsibility to manage his data more responsibly, and resources at his disposal to help him do that. If he didn't bother and something bad happened, it's on him.

the parent wasn't talking about "Cloudflare" and neither was i — we were talking about turnstile.

Blame AI.

Everybody that I know who has implemented Turnstile (or similar things like Anubis) has done so because they are getting absolutely pounded by bots scraping content to feed their LLMs. Reasonably-well-behaved bots used to be 20-30% of my traffic, but that's surged to over 70% recently. Several of my sites were DOSed on multiple occasions until we got Turnstile setup.

Like almost everything in the US, it's up to the state. New Jersey has annual inspections, but other states I've lived in don't.

Of course people just starting their careers shouldn't ask their parents for career advice — it's very unlikely they have relevant, current knowledge and much more likely they'll draw from 20+ year old info that worked for them.

That said, parents are great for doing a "smell test" on an email, a resume, on an outfit, or on anything really. Hiring managers are likely to be closer to parents' age, so it's good to get feedback. Parents are also going to have much stronger professional networks that can help even if you're in an entirely different field — colleagues' spouses might work in the right industry, or someone else might have a good connection. Just a small example that happened to me recently — my daughter was on a group trip that was getting screwed by their hotel, and one of the parent chaperones happened to be an ex-VP of a credit card company, and could make a call to the right person to get the problem resolved.

In short, think carefully about how people can help you and have an open mind about things they might know or connections they might have — you might be surprised.

FWIW, we tried fail2ban and the bots circumvented it in days - instead of dozens of requests coming from one IP, they went down to one request from each IP, and swarms of IPs coming from all over the place (not within an easy-to-define CIDR range).

The first thing that's been effective for us is Turnstile. A colleague of mine wrote up a general approach in Rails https://bibwild.wordpress.com/... and we wrote up our version of that using Trafik https://github.com/pulibrary/p...

I agree that Trump is once again guilty of treason.