Nostr notes by Julian Oliver

A profound late-winter dawn hike, out to see if we could find an ...

2026-08-27T05:34:57Z

A profound late-winter dawn hike, out to see if we could find an elusive giant Rata (fwiw my #1 native tree species) deep in the Akatarawa rainforest, & considered to be Aotearoa New Zealand's largest.

We had found her sister prior, but not this giant.

Today we had the privilege, & I'm still feeling it. Estimated by botanists to be between 1000 and 1500 years old, we measured her girth with paracord to be ~16m.

To stand at her base was to be at the foot of a living cliff face.

#trees

When a Wellington bookseller realises that a mysterious and ...

2026-08-11T02:39:37Z

When a Wellington bookseller realises that a mysterious and avaricious foreign buyer is AI giant Anthropic:

https://www.rnz.co.nz/life/books/wellington-second-hand-book-store-s-mysterious-orders

"Our role is to keep books alive, to keep them in the world."

No undo for climate change. It's a bit like trauma - no ...

2026-08-01T05:38:27Z

In reply to nevent1q…0mz7
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No undo for climate change. It's a bit like trauma - no longer is the person the same.

However, after some hundreds or thousands of years atmospheric CO2 levels could return to pre-industrial, but not after the oceans have warmed considerably, and the face of whole continents changed forever.

I do rainforest conservation when I can. You can help, but never return it to how it was.

We're in it now. IMO we only have preparation and mass damage minimisation, at this stage

I largely agree, however for me to reply to you right now a data ...

2026-08-01T02:35:06Z

In reply to nevent1q…wz3k
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I largely agree, however for me to reply to you right now a data center is involved! AI data centers, those that don't run on traceable renewables, & without a commitment to recycling, are a key problem. I deploy in 'certified green' data centers that are committed to lowering impacts.

Tree planting is important yes, however which species matters, & where. Gum-rich Pinus Radiata crops are a tinderbox & often the source of fires that burn into native forests. A problem where I live.

This needs to be said in a loop until it sticks. "What people ...

2026-08-01T01:11:16Z

This needs to be said in a loop until it sticks.

"What people are not getting is that we can’t turn this back – the CO2 to a large part remains in the air for thousands of years,” said Rahmstorf. “Some people think we can wait and, when it gets too bad, then we reduce emissions and things will get better again. People don’t realise that we can’t make it get better again. We can only prevent it from getting much worse.”

- Stefan Rahmstorf, Climatologist.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jul/30/europe-wildfires-climate-crisis-heat-summer

#climate

Cognitive offloading risks a population scale developmental ...

2026-07-31T23:38:53Z

Cognitive offloading risks a population scale developmental crisis in children.

If you are worried about your local school conforming to the 'inevitablism' and mania around AI, send them this article and explain that the less time kids spend with AI in the classroom, the more they'll have the edge in years to come (an edge they'll need given the future(s) they face).

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-algorithmic-mind/202603/adults-lose-skills-to-ai-children-never-build-them

#education #childdevelopment #psychology #ai

Who remembers these slides leaked by Snowden back in 2013, ...

2026-07-25T01:23:34Z

Who remembers these slides leaked by Snowden back in 2013, detailing how big players were working as actual "providers" for the US NSA's PRISM program. Not via warrants, but as data sharing partners.

I remember in the 4 yrs before, when Danja V. (npub1ypm…8mdx) & I were lecturing on precisely this, privacy workshops, making interventions to alert people to the risks, we'd be scowled at, sometimes even angrily. Told we were being doomer.

A shiny-eyed tech optimism that aged badly, then forgot about it all

Just a reminder that when you are using the built-in VPN feature ...

2026-07-15T06:57:40Z

Just a reminder that when you are using the built-in VPN feature in Firefox, you are opting to route your traffic through Mullvad. Mozilla does not make this clear in the interface.

Mullvad is co-owned by a man whom privately donated 5M Swedish kronor (presumably from company earnings) to a populist, ultra-nationalist & racist political party advocating for forced repatriation of immigrant populations.

To use is to support. Things can cost $0 but be ethically expensive

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/legal/terms/subscription-services/

Overlooked as the obituaries come in is Sam Neill's fight ...

2026-07-14T02:42:04Z

Overlooked as the obituaries come in is Sam Neill's fight against a goldmine project in Central Otago, South Island, a few clicks from his home. The mine would make a hole 1km long & 300m deep, and risk poisoning surrounding ecosystems.

Referring to the Māori concept of kaitiakitanga (to be a custodian for future generations) he said:

"I own land, but I’m not a land owner. The land is part of me, and I’m a part of the land".

https://invidious.nerdvpn.de/watch?v=UNung9Gw5MQ

R.I.P

#conservation #aotearoa

A great article on Microsoft's shady GDID, a device ...

2026-07-13T11:35:06Z

A great article on Microsoft's shady GDID, a device fingerprint snuck into Windows 11 that can and has already been used to track with precision, activity reports sent back to the mothership indefinitely.

https://www.windowslatest.com/2026/07/10/you-cant-fully-disable-microsofts-gdid-windows-11-tracker-but-these-settings-limit-what-it-captures/

A curious irony in the fact a great many of the free and open ...

2026-07-13T03:11:30Z

A curious irony in the fact a great many of the free and open source platforms championing digital sovereignty are themselves utterly infrastructurally dependent on big tech apparatus GitHub, itself owned (and mined) by the ruthless and closed source market monopolist Microsoft.

We're gaining ground fast, but we've still got a way to go in the truly sovereign platform space. To use is to support, and that means any point along the supply chain.

#bigtech #floss #digitalsovereignty

Manawatia a Matariki! (for those that don't know, it's ...

2026-07-10T05:02:55Z

Manawatia a Matariki!

(for those that don't know, it's the New Year for Māori, and all else whom celebrate it, in Aotearoa New Zealand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matariki)

#matariki

Sad to read Mullvad is a major donor of a fascist, white ...

2026-06-27T06:14:37Z

Sad to read Mullvad is a major donor of a fascist, white supremacist party.

While awful, no commercial VPN provider can be trusted to be in alignment with your values, not in the long term.

The fix? Decentralise!

Run your own VPN, handing out configs to your community, on your terms.

Done right, a self-hosted VPN is fast, very secure & low-maintenance. A ~EUR10/month server can support 100's of people.

Here's a course fully supporting folk to do exactly this:

https://courses.nikau.io/tunnel/

Sure there's a lot of healthy skepticism around productivity ...

2026-06-24T13:07:25Z

In reply to nevent1q…ndre
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Sure there's a lot of healthy skepticism around productivity & AI, but what of reputational damage from using it?

It's surely a thing in the arts, where the ballooning distaste around genAI is making it a risk to use in your practice (bit like NFT's, who remembers).

In my own arcane tech circles I'm starting to see murmurs of the same, where to do vibe coding is to mark yourself, tainting trust of peers.

I'll guess we'll see what the 'costs' are of the broader cultural fallout.

It is good to hear this from a well studied and celebrated ...

2026-06-24T12:13:09Z

In reply to nevent1q…ta0k
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It is good to hear this from a well studied and celebrated economist.

It reminds us that what you are doing when you are letting 'agenticAI' etc into your workplace, community spaces, culture at large, is helping extend (US) corporate power (and in so doing, the US gov).

While you have been engineered by the market to believe otherwise, you are not necessarily better off using these tools. You have instead been tooled, and you're not getting paid for it.

Big AI is first and foremost a trojan

TBH the 'revolution risk' he talks about sounds pretty ...

2026-06-24T11:36:23Z

In reply to nevent1q…p4lu
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TBH the 'revolution risk' he talks about sounds pretty good around about now. Bring it on I reckon.

We keep hearing we can't be 'competitive' without ...

2026-06-24T11:35:30Z

We keep hearing we can't be 'competitive' without hugging AI, & yet a growing body of research asserts this is in fact bovine manure.

Check out this steely take from Nobel Laureate (Econ) Daron Acemoglu:

"[...]roughly 0.55% in total factor productivity gains is what AI will actually deliver over the next decade, a fraction of Wall Street’s euphoric projections."

He insists what we should really b focusing on is that AI is simply about vastly extending corporate power

https://fortune.com/2026/06/21/nobel-laureate-daron-acemoglu-ai-productivity-capitalism-democracy/

Almost too bleak to post. "The Guardian’s examination of ...

2026-06-24T07:51:13Z

Almost too bleak to post.

"The Guardian’s examination of data-collection practices across six factories in five states found that workers wearing devices ranging from meta smart glasses to head-mounted cameras received no compensation for generating footage that would later be sold to technology companies."

... to build robots to take their jobs.

""Sometimes they give us a soft drink,” says Lalita, who earns about $200 a month at the factory."

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2026/jun/24/indian-factory-workers-told-film-themselves-for-ai-robots

#ai #noai #luddite

Setting up a desktop system today for some remote work and in the ...

2026-06-23T06:22:08Z

Setting up a desktop system today for some remote work and in the 30mins before installing an adblocker I see how intolerable the www has become. On several sites the content was swarmed upon to the point of being almost imperceptible. Packs of autoplaying attention-leeches, popups of video with over-gesticulating wow-faced cruft, floating footers swollen with ticker-tape inanity.

The CO2e & cognitive-load savings provided by a simple extension like uBlockOrigin are not to be underestimated.

"Dear customer portal team, Your support chatbot is ...

2026-06-17T03:07:30Z

"Dear customer portal team,

Your support chatbot is alienating and awful. The patronising simulation of human care, the self-reflexive "I" and "me", and the use of an AI-generated human face stereotyping young Asian women as tech-native and servile is a stain on your brand.

If you cannot budget for a human to take support requests, may I suggest significantly boosting customer morale by switching to a paperclip with dancing eyebrows. Other animated stationery products may work too."

A great piece calling out the desperate lack of ambition, vision ...

2026-06-15T06:54:20Z

A great piece calling out the desperate lack of ambition, vision and rigour in the EU's new digital sovereignty package.

"Brussels fails to recognise that digital sovereignty isn’t just about who owns or controls your technology. It’s also about having an independent vision for how that technology is designed, developed and deployed. If Europe really wants to be sovereign, it needs to free itself from Silicon Valley’s ideology, not just its tech."

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jun/15/europe-us-big-tech-silicon-valley-european-commission

#sovereignty

A bit disappointed to see ISRG/LetsEncrypt fall inline with the ...

2026-06-11T12:11:21Z

A bit disappointed to see ISRG/LetsEncrypt fall inline with the US's punitive sanctions, now effectively illegal for use by any in the long list of territories the US gov seeks to push down.

That's a lot of people and NGOs doing good work in places that need it, and for whom commercial SSL/TLS certs may be prohibitively expensive.

Screenshot from the new Subscriber Agreement, shared to me by themadhatter (npub1a0g…mzku), whom alerted me to this change.

https://linuxiac.com/lets-encrypt-certificate-rules-now-include-u-s-sanctions-warranties/

V happy with today's #meshtastic node build. I took my ...

2026-06-07T06:45:05Z

In reply to nevent1q…t9p0
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V happy with today's #meshtastic node build. I took my original case design & minified it. Just as waterproof & rugged, but only 1.65Kg. Tiny wee thing.

I went with the low power RAK Wisblock this time; those 18650 LiPo's will give it ~8 full blackout days so no need for solar.

I threw in an old & light Samsung with app all setup, attached to the case with a harvested tripod phone holder.

It's powerful, in part thanks to the beloved VERT900 antenna, seeing dozens of nodes within minutes.

Still no sign of it slowing down. None of the big crawlers have ...

2026-06-06T10:53:10Z

In reply to nevent1q…cekk
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Still no sign of it slowing down. None of the big crawlers have dropped off since April 9.

3,602,589 hits yesterday, 187G, almost all HTTP 200 (success) on GET requests, a fraction of a percent is non-crawler traffic.

With the enormous amount of resources they have thrown at my own tarpit, one would expect someone doing periodic QC, checking content for sanity, perhaps an automated flagging system.

This level of hands-off automation feels genuinely AWOL, and doesn't bode well in itself.

Server gardener Firmware noodler Radio tuner Infosec researcher ...

2026-06-03T08:49:53Z

Server gardener
Firmware noodler
Radio tuner
Infosec researcher
Network builder
UNIX hoarder
Polyglot coder

Call me Luddite, I feel seen

Researchers found that writers using biased AI agents to ...

2026-06-02T21:38:20Z

Researchers found that writers using biased AI agents to auto-complete suggestions had their sociopolitical values shifted without their knowledge it was happening.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adw5578

We worry about cognitive capture, what the LLMs of big tech are doing to our ability to identify and think through problems. We should be equally worried about them making a grab for our ethos, what we care about, and at population scales.

#ai #bigtech #ethics

Of the many crawlers, the 3 most misbehaved - so far as basics ...

2026-06-02T01:48:15Z

In reply to nevent1q…ajsr
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Of the many crawlers, the 3 most misbehaved - so far as basics like honouring HTTP 429 - are in order:

meta-externalagent/1.1
Applebot/0.1
Amazonbot/0.1

That last line, for today in CEST, is just 35mins of traffic. 87G ...

2026-06-01T22:42:18Z

In reply to nevent1q…nv9m
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That last line, for today in CEST, is just 35mins of traffic. 87G in a bit over half an hour. And still all the usual suspects trapped, Claude, Amazon, Meta, Apple, Google, ChatGPT. None have left.

The parasites.txt is currently 6900 lines long.

I'm limiting rate back to 2/s for each endpoint. The crawlers ...

2026-06-01T22:39:17Z

In reply to nevent1q…3xv2
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I'm limiting rate back to 2/s for each endpoint. The crawlers have been swarming for days now & my carefully threaded backend cannot keep up, throwing 499's for some

Even more traffic than a month ago

│2026/05/28│1,234,069│ 77G│██▌ │
│2026/05/29│1,137,188│ 64G│██▍ │
│2026/05/30│2,686,003│ 128G│█████▌ │
│2026/05/31│2,520,473│ 122G│█████▏ │
│2026/06/01│2,766,402│ 136G│█████▋ │
│2026/06/02│ 86,906│ 3.6G│▏

This article shared by @npub1v3r…3ft7 has some strongly-related ...

2026-05-26T08:57:44Z

In reply to nevent1q…eqzc
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This article shared by slackline :emacs: :orgmode: (npub1v3r…3ft7) has some strongly-related fight in it https://www.theringer.com/2025/08/20/pop-culture/em-dash-use-ai-artificial-intelligence-chatgpt-google-gemini

What an insightful take, thank you. I had not considered this as ...

2026-05-26T07:10:48Z

In reply to nevent1q…fjcr
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What an insightful take, thank you. I had not considered this as a marker/indicator. This makes sense.

I heard from someone near me today that to make your work appear ...

2026-05-26T06:55:58Z

In reply to nevent1q…rp67
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I heard from someone near me today that to make your work appear less like it was machine-generated the emerging rule is that you should not use the 'em dash', nor write in paragraphs, rather one text block.

I have prior heard another say that text summaries at the end of an article are seen as indication of genAI use, as is text free of typos.

Has anyone heard of other references to behaviour-change born of such anxiety?

Do we need a term (probably German) for the anxiety that ...

2026-05-26T06:40:37Z

Do we need a term (probably German) for the anxiety that one's work might look like it was generated by machines?

Roman Empire feelings, sun never sets sort of thing. It's ...

2026-05-20T06:24:08Z

In reply to nevent1q…grt9
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Roman Empire feelings, sun never sets sort of thing. It's more than 'digital imperialism'. This is cognitive, cultural and ontological - at the hand of white, anglo-centric, US mega corporations, their interests and agendas.

To use is to support.

We knew this was coming. Probably the move that will begin the ...

2026-05-20T05:33:38Z

We knew this was coming. Probably the move that will begin the end of traditional search for all but the staunchest alternatives, & hyper-normalise 'AI' at scale.

With the exception of those few countries that cannot reach such services, it will make 'AI' endemic, & give these tech oligarchs profound control.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-ai-search-box-with-agents-more-upgrades/

One of those days where once again I have to recommit to keep up the fight, and not pivot to making longbows, growing artisanal potatoes, Or similar.

Temperature check for some on-prem #selfhosting training. Please ...

2026-05-15T05:04:25Z

Temperature check for some on-prem #selfhosting training.

Please nerdboost.

With Gemini being forced on the next update of Android, by now ...

2026-05-14T22:34:25Z

With Gemini being forced on the next update of Android, by now the most used computer operating system in the world, many are rightly looking for a way off the demoralising and life-scraping AI conveyor belt.

Here's one.

I've been running custom Android ROMs on 2nd hand smartphones for years. Cyanogen, then LineageOS, a few other experiments too, but the last few yrs I've settled on GrapheneOS, run on refurbished Pixel phones.

This I do without a Google account

https://grapheneos.org

The Stratos AI datacenter in Utah got the go-ahead. 2x the size ...

2026-05-13T21:26:06Z

The Stratos AI datacenter in Utah got the go-ahead. 2x the size of Manhattan, & at 9GW, it will consume more electricity than Utah itself. It's also likely to directly imperil the Great Lakes, due to the ridiculous amount of water needed for cooling.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/may/13/utah-approves-datacenter-backlash

If you use BigAI, you are driving up demand for such computational obscenities, projects whose sole purpose is to mal-distribute wealth, power & control to those that already have far too much of it.

To use is to support.

Status: 9M hits from AI crawlers, <0.1% human. --- My first ...

2026-05-13T01:28:04Z

In reply to nevent1q…t52v
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Status: 9M hits from AI crawlers, <0.1% human.
---

My first server was Apache on Suse Linux, in yr 2000. I've since deployed numerous webservers, many high traffic

Never guessed I'd one day be deploying a web project almost entirely for bots.

This is a view under the hood; the web is now more bot than human.

Our ideas, expressions, work, are being stolen for simulation & profit by a handful of companies, & at a scale comparable to deep-sea trawling.

It is our moral imperative to fight back.

Worth mentioning Tarpit TV should also work for every domain on ...

2026-05-12T08:17:02Z

In reply to nevent1q…9802
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Worth mentioning Tarpit TV should also work for every domain on the https://scienceispoetry.net landing page (RIP geocities).

For instance:

rtmp://dreckiger.schleimpilz.ch/live/tarpit

rtmp://tender.horse/live/tarpit

rtmp://sales.luddite.academy/live/tarpit

Pleased to share Tarpit TV. Now you can tune in to all the good ...

2026-05-12T06:03:58Z

In reply to nevent1q…uwfj
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Pleased to share Tarpit TV. Now you can tune in to all the good work that your contributed domains are doing, as countless trapped AI crawlers eat model-noodling trash served from your domains, line by line, and in shiny Technicolor (TM)

rtmp://scienceispoetry.net/live/tarpit

You can use VLC or any other stream player.

If not CLI shy, with ffmpeg installed & on Unix:

`ffplay rtmp://scienceispoetry.net/live/tarpit`

Alas I've not been able to keep up with the replies, losing ...

2026-05-12T02:35:45Z

In reply to nevent1q…fvqs
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Alas I've not been able to keep up with the replies, losing track of a few domain donations across the various threads.

These new domains were added today:

doofenshmirtz-evil-incorporated.com feedme.newflesh.art science.commune.tel science.emenel.ca fragilealliance.org teslagraf.com terminalsciences.com cardboardprogrammer.com book.players1715.com

Thanks a lot for these contributions, they join the others in significantly increasing the haul size and resilience

To celebrate, here's some log output during the siege, this ...

2026-05-10T07:05:57Z

In reply to nevent1q…4mm7
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To celebrate, here's some log output during the siege, this time in colour.

Why? Because coloured logs is one of the nice things we can actually have.

As of today, AI crawlers from Apple, Anthropic, OpenAI, Amazon, ...

2026-05-10T06:38:33Z

In reply to nevent1q…3wz4
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As of today, AI crawlers from Apple, Anthropic, OpenAI, Amazon, Meta, ByteSpider and Google are all still feeding manically on the endlessly generated babble, totally captive to it.

They could stop, but are instead dedicating an enormous amount of resources. They show no signs of slowing, with the exception of Apple whom had a pathological day 1 honeymoon period, before settling in with the others.

PerplexityBot has dropped off for now. I'd really like to know why, but figure I never will.

For those curious, here's a line from the logs from one of ...

2026-05-10T06:27:17Z

In reply to nevent1q…vyeq
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For those curious, here's a line from the logs from one of the endpoints in the mysterious Singapore swarm:

---

47.79.192.138 - - [10/May/2026:07:23:11 +0200] "GET /noodles/polycladose/some_unyouthful HTTP/1.1" 200 13906 "https://www.google.com/"; "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/132.0.0.0 Safari/537.36" "-"

---

That is one of 1,993,530 hits from that 47.79.0.0/16 network, in those 24hrs.

EDIT: GG url in string wants to preview.

I'm glad to share the traffic summary from the 1st month of ...

2026-05-10T06:20:10Z

In reply to nevent1q…7n6p
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I'm glad to share the traffic summary from the 1st month of Science is Poetry. It has been wild, & I've learned a lot!

Things started to get quite silly on the 7th, when AppleBot (Siri, other products) joined the fray, adding 2k+ endpoints to the list & feeding so fast I had to shape them down to keep the server up.

Then came the 8th, which legit looked like DoS from a network in Singapore sending a 'www.google.com' UA, despite evidently not being GG. 3.8M page requests in one day, gulp.

A fairly profound photograph of the galaxy we are in, taken by a ...

2026-05-09T00:42:39Z

A fairly profound photograph of the galaxy we are in, taken by a young Kiwi Tom Rae, from up high in the Southern Alps

https://www.rnz.co.nz/life/culture/starry-eyed-photographer-wins-milky-way-photo-contest-for-third-time

#photography #aotearoa #astronomy

I've done the log analysis and the two biggest contributors ...

2026-05-08T08:36:38Z

In reply to nevent1q…ckww
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I've done the log analysis and the two biggest contributors that brought the AI crawler hits up to 2 million in a day, a 4x increase on a week prior, are ByteSpider (Singapore networks) and especially AppleBot (used for Siri and other Apple products).

The parasites.txt is now >4500 lines long:

https://scienceispoetry.net/files/parasites.txt

I've added these kindly donated new domains to the ridiculous ...

2026-05-08T08:05:22Z

In reply to nevent1q…ac6s
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I've added these kindly donated new domains to the ridiculous landing page at https://scienceispoetry.net/

- poesie.kornshell.xyz
- whatthefuckisgoingonwithmyhorroscope.today
- poetry.danielarmengol.com
- poetry.usolab.com
- poetry.pinchito.com
- poetry.interactionphilia.com

Ye gads it's gone absolutely silly. I spent a good part of my ...

2026-05-08T07:46:05Z

In reply to nevent1q…atyt
_________________________

Ye gads it's gone absolutely silly.

I spent a good part of my morning trying to work out if it was a veiled DoS or actual harvesting while keeping the thing up. Status codes are good, 96.5% are real page reads from the usual AI crawler suspects.

A big network in Singapore with "www.google.com" (but not GoogleBot) User Agent string is responsible for some of it. But the rest is just frantic feeding.

Server is running hot. To keep it up I'm having to further tune ratelimiting, bursts etc.

For any naysayers out there as to how effective all this is, or ...

2026-05-07T07:46:45Z

In reply to nevent1q…75vg
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For any naysayers out there as to how effective all this is, or could be, some recent research shows you can do a lot with a little:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.07192

Researchers found that a very small corpora of poison content has largely the same impact, regardless of the size of the data in the model itself:

"We find that 250 poisoned documents similarly compromise models across all model and dataset sizes, despite the largest models training on more than 20 times more clean data."

Nearly a month later you would've thought that the crawlers ...

2026-05-07T06:38:30Z

In reply to nevent1q…eehd
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Nearly a month later you would've thought that the crawlers would've given up by now, dropped off, blacklisted the IPs, or perhaps even the domains themselves.

And yet no. As I tentatively guessed, thanks to your donated domains (and the people linking them in their sites) it has only grown.

I don't expect it to run this hot for the long term, but yesterday's hit count (these are almost 100% reads of randomly generated pages by AI crawlers) was near 1M.

I have not heard of this would-be relation. Might you have some ...

2026-05-06T06:51:19Z

In reply to nevent1q…9a8f
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I have not heard of this would-be relation. Might you have some research to share? Anecdotally, I am largely and happily surrounded by ND minds and among them is a generally strong critique of AI and wariness of LLM chatbots. For the depressive and grieving however, I have read of high risk of emotional addiction to such software.

We will need to work on bolstering cognitive and ontological ...

2026-05-05T21:15:08Z

In reply to nevent1q…vuut
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We will need to work on bolstering cognitive and ontological immunity to this devourer of minds and meaning, across our communities.

Technical literacy, right down to 'what is an LLM', will be intrinsic to raise defences against mass computational hypnosis.

So it follows that any Luddite resistance will need to be sufficiently technically informed; to help others understand these are predatorial, mind-hunting software products.

Seems this vast planet-heating deception apparatus built atop the ...

2026-05-05T21:02:02Z

Seems this vast planet-heating deception apparatus built atop the rampant theft of human expression, got the better of Dawkins.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/may/05/richard-dawkins-ai-consciousness-anthropic-claude-openai-chatgpt

The fact Turing first called his test the 'Imitation Game' is aging well.

Ah yes, the old trick of warming the public up to something they ...

2026-05-04T02:13:18Z

In reply to nevent1q…a26d
_________________________

Ah yes, the old trick of warming the public up to something they probably don't want by answering questions they didn't ask. That "above board" feeling.

Delighted to report that Amazon has abandoned its plans to build ...

2026-05-04T00:52:32Z

Delighted to report that Amazon has abandoned its plans to build a datacenter here.

The "lease-and-equip" model they're switching to is a lot easier to get rid of, when we eventually kick these digital imperialists out altogether.

I'll raise a sovereign glass of fresh water to that.

https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/business/594164/amazon-takes-45m-hit-abandons-planned-west-auckland-data-centre

#privacy #datasovereignty #imperialism

I went through a bunch of VMs post patch and found one that had ...

2026-05-01T08:38:44Z

In reply to nevent1q…ay3q
_________________________

I went through a bunch of VMs post patch and found one that had algif_aead loaded & so the PoC passed.

If that module is loaded, you're still vulnerable.

EDIT, for Debian family:

Blacklist like so:

```
modprobe -r algif_aead
```
Then put this into a /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-aead.conf:

```
blacklist algif_aead
install algif_aead /bin/false
```
Then:
```
/sbin/update-initramfs -u -k all && reboot -n
```

sent through this helpful update. It appears Ubuntu web infra ...

2026-05-01T07:20:10Z

In reply to nevent1q…7eas
_________________________

sent through this helpful update. It appears Ubuntu web infra might be under DDoS rn https://status.canonical.com/

Debian's patched 6.12.85+deb13-amd64 #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC ...

2026-05-01T06:23:38Z

In reply to nevent1q…ax2w
_________________________

Debian's patched 6.12.85+deb13-amd64 #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC seems GTG with the PoC published here:

https://github.com/theori-io/copy-fail-CVE-2026-31431/blob/main/copy_fail_exp.py

```
root@cake:~# su - eat
eat@cake:~$ vim foo.py
eat@cake:~$ cat foo.py | python3 && su
Password: su: Authentication failure
Password:
```

Bit worried about where Ubuntu is at. Ominously, their own fix announcement page seems down:

https://ubuntu.com/blog/copy-fail-vulnerability-fixes-available

Long fingers today, in many machines. Dozens of services patched, ...

2026-05-01T05:11:57Z

In reply to nevent1q…ex72
_________________________

Long fingers today, in many machines. Dozens of services patched, host machines alongside.

I've typed `uname -a` a great many times in my life, but I don't think as many in one day.

Just kicking trying to manage my CopyFail nausea. #infosec

2026-04-30T21:13:39Z

Just kicking trying to manage my CopyFail nausea.

#infosec

My log analysis shows that what these AI crawlers do is swarm ...

2026-04-28T21:44:03Z

In reply to nevent1q…nhwv
_________________________

My log analysis shows that what these AI crawlers do is swarm content to get around rate limiting; with many end-points each can be limited to sane human defaults and their automation can still harvest content at massive scales from the same source in little time.

I noticed however that (for unknown reasons) Anthropic started reducing the number of crawler endpoints, tapering down traffic from them. So I doubled the rate to 2/s. This added over 100k hits to the logs in a day.

Great article ...

2026-04-24T04:31:05Z

In reply to nevent1q…40yx
_________________________

Great article https://dreckiger.schleimpilz.ch/blog/hasnt/digitizer%20provided%20obsoleteness

Actual hits dropping slightly, but more data is pulled from the ...

2026-04-23T07:50:10Z

In reply to nevent1q…5rkg
_________________________

Actual hits dropping slightly, but more data is pulled from the tarpit day on day. This is reflected by a higher proportion of HTTP 200's - so less bad req's. Less reaching for what isn't there, just want the madness.

Unclear why this has changed.

Here's a thing I did in a couple of mins to ban all IPs in ...

2026-04-23T07:39:35Z

In reply to nevent1q…vycc
_________________________

Here's a thing I did in a couple of mins to ban all IPs in the parasites.txt serverside. You could ofc REJECT rather than DROP to send a message.

---
#!/bin/bash

while read parasite;
do
if [[ "$parasite" == *"."* ]]; then
iptables -I INPUT -s "$parasite" -j DROP
elif [[ "$parasite" == *":"* ]]; then
ip6tables -I INPUT -s "$parasite" -j DROP
fi
done < /path/to/parasites.txt
---

- Mum, if you made a chain out of all the endpoint addresses of ...

2026-04-22T06:42:13Z

In reply to nevent1q…ntca
_________________________

- Mum, if you made a chain out of all the endpoint addresses of AI crawlers, how far would it reach?

- All the way to the moon, darling. All the way to the moon.

https://scienceispoetry.net/files/parasites.txt

Even faster now. Again, these pages are randomly generated, and ...

2026-04-19T21:24:27Z

In reply to nevent1q…m2a8
_________________________

Even faster now.

Again, these pages are randomly generated, and each line is a page request from a crawler.

To think of the energy expended at a global scale, the waste. All the money, water & minerals thrown at this. These AI companies are near DoS'ing the human web as they deep-sea trawl our content.

Computationally, infrastructurally, & culturally, it's an obscenity,

It's approaching DoS at this point. This just one of the VMs, ...

2026-04-18T08:12:51Z

In reply to nevent1q…dpmf
_________________________

It's approaching DoS at this point. This just one of the VMs, and just OpenAI's parasite.

Threading's holding up but need some more tuning of rate limits and burst. Trying sending 429's now to ask them to play nice.

To think the www was built for people.

And here we are

I've started to harvest a list of AI crawler endpoint addrs ...

2026-04-18T05:45:55Z

In reply to nevent1q…uqpj
_________________________

I've started to harvest a list of AI crawler endpoint addrs for your blacklisting pleasure.

I'll try to keep it updated. I've been fastidious with ensuring I'm only pulling those related to the known user agent, so as not to have any false positives

https://scienceispoetry.net/files/parasites.txt

It is at the same path for all contributed domains.

For instance:

https://carrot.mro1.de/files/parasites.txt

I have only linked them here and on the landing page, and already ...

2026-04-18T02:50:20Z

In reply to nevent1q…jk36
_________________________

I have only linked them here and on the landing page, and already it's gone nuts.

These are *solely* the new domains you've donated, all in one log. These do not pertain to the project domain.

Thanks for all the domain donations, a beautiful thing! Listed on ...

2026-04-18T02:27:08Z

In reply to nevent1q…tl54
_________________________

Thanks for all the domain donations, a beautiful thing!

Listed on the landing page:

https://scienceispoetry.net

And copied into this post:

https://carrot.mro1.de
https://car.rot.mro1.de
https://ca.rr.ot.mro1.de
https://sygrovelaw.co.nz
https://wholesaletechnology.co.nz
https://goldenageproductions.co.nz
https://kginno.eu
https://outgoing.nz
https://unbreak.nz
https://poetry.rainskit.com
https://poetry.narthur.com
https://madhattercorp.com
https://sustainable-collective.org
https://sustainable-collective.de
https://c0-cloud.de

Thanks all for the fine domains! I've decided to spin up a ...

2026-04-17T08:50:02Z

In reply to nevent1q…ukce
_________________________

Thanks all for the fine domains! I've decided to spin up a new VM and do all the site configs and TLS chain for them at once - more efficient, less prone to error. I will get onto that on my tomorrow and report back here.

A bit over half a million page reads a day by crawlers rn. Just ...

2026-04-17T02:26:23Z

In reply to nevent1q…6j78
_________________________

A bit over half a million page reads a day by crawlers rn. Just to say the server is doing some good work.

Do you have an unused domain that you would be happy to donate to ...

2026-04-16T22:59:39Z

In reply to nevent1q…3m7v
_________________________

Do you have an unused domain that you would be happy to donate to a counter-offensive against unchecked & unregulated AI crawlers that scrape human-made content to simulate & deceive for profit?

If so, pls reply to this post. Your domain would become an entrypoint to the AI tarpit & Poison-as-a-Service project below, allowing concerned public to choose to use it on their sites, helping make the project more resilient to blacklisting.

https://julianoliver.com/projects/science-is-poetry/

#ai #bigtech #tacticalmedia

A newcomer frantically lost in the Caves of Babble. ---- ...

2026-04-16T04:35:23Z

In reply to nevent1q…d5wf
_________________________

A newcomer frantically lost in the Caves of Babble.

----
3.215.221.125 - - [16/Apr/2026:06:14:25 +0200] "GET /noodles/images/primigenous/orchiepididymitis/Lord/havent.png HTTP/1.1" 200 111459 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Amazonbot/0.1; +https://developer.amazon.com/support/amazonbot) Chrome/119.0.6045.214 Safari/537.36" "-"
----

Relieved for Hungary. The EU too. OK also the planet. One less ...

2026-04-12T21:17:41Z

Relieved for Hungary. The EU too. OK also the planet.

One less tireless and cruel fascist away from the controls.

If you're interested in learning more about implementations ...

2026-04-12T20:47:12Z

In reply to nevent1q…nttd
_________________________

If you're interested in learning more about implementations of resistance in this era of unchecked Big AI, direct action strategies and the techno-politics therein, be sure to check out ASRG's site (https://algorithmic-sabotage.gitlab.io/asrg/) and give them a follow here on Mastodon (ASRG (npub1mwg…zng5)).

They've put a lot of heartbeats and neurons - human stuff - into this area.

Pleased to share a page and explainer for the AI tarpit project ...

2026-04-12T10:34:15Z

Pleased to share a page and explainer for the AI tarpit project Science is Poetry, with legal statement, rationale(s), and a few deployment notes:

https://julianoliver.com/projects/science-is-poetry/

The page may grow a bit. Just wanted to get it out the door.

#AI #bigtech

May this sanity spread to all nations. FWIW you can be absolutely ...

2026-04-10T19:49:20Z

May this sanity spread to all nations.

FWIW you can be absolutely sure there is no way the US public, gov and mil sectors would ever allow the use of non-US proprietary OS's.

We've all just normalised US tech dependency. Tireless pressure gangs of lobbyists on insane carbon miles have helped of course.

https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/10/france-to-ditch-windows-for-linux-to-reduce-reliance-on-us-tech/

#sovereignty #linux #floss

OK here goes. You get the first look at this madness. ...

2026-04-10T10:21:36Z

In reply to nevent1q…fy67
_________________________

OK here goes. You get the first look at this madness.

https://scienceispoetry.net/noodles

Go easy on it. I did my best to thread & rate limit while LLM bots this very moment are lost deep inside. They never stop. It's a siege.

Link it in your sites and AI crawlers will get caught when they hit it, veering off into the maze of babble.

Going to come out & say I channeled my inner GeoCities 180% in a nostalgic grief walk back to a happier & weedier www, so that parts for us that still remember

GPTbot is still at it, throughout the night. It seems to have a ...

2026-04-09T21:29:01Z

In reply to nevent1q…n5s9
_________________________

GPTbot is still at it, throughout the night. It seems to have a different pattern to ClaudeBot. It pack-feeds from 2 or 3 different endpoints, and is slower, as though processing content in some way in the course of each page scrape. Its rhythm changes too, but I've not yet looked into correlation between payload size or complexity, and pattern. ClaudeBot is far faster, and has an even step as it moves through the babble. Seems to me it is solely concerned with collection.

I moved the project to a giant of a server, getting ready for ...

2026-04-09T11:55:42Z

In reply to nevent1q…wu4k
_________________________

I moved the project to a giant of a server, getting ready for launch.

Within 15mins (no exaggeration) of bringing up the reverse proxy, with one link in a wiki, OpenAI's gptbot has found the link and hooked into the maze. Very aggressive, so still some rate limiting to do, threading massage before it's good to go.

In fact now ClaudeBot has stopped reading, it switched to ...

2026-04-08T00:46:36Z

In reply to nevent1q…8mtk
_________________________

In fact now ClaudeBot has stopped reading, it switched to Anthropic's Claude 'searchbot' during the night. It seems it either gave up or decided to respect the robots.txt.

I misread that in the logs a few hours ago. The above address is in fact that of "+searchbot@anthropic.com" not "+claudebot@anthropic.com"

An interesting development.

Still solely ClaudeBot, a page every 2 seconds, but a new src IP ...

2026-04-07T20:46:06Z

In reply to nevent1q…eugw
_________________________

Still solely ClaudeBot, a page every 2 seconds, but a new src IP of 216.73.216.37. The crawler at that addr has been at it all night. Ceaseless zombie walk through infinitely-hyperlinked randomly generated babble.

My non-Markov text seems far stickier to the ClaudeBot.

Rate limit in place. Seems stable and a little less like siege ...

2026-04-07T11:57:33Z

In reply to nevent1q…guxx
_________________________

Rate limit in place. Seems stable and a little less like siege warfare now. ClaudeBot at least, still very much captive.

ClaudeBot crashed my tarpit. Working on some rate limiting at the ...

2026-04-07T11:45:20Z

In reply to nevent1q…hj4u
_________________________

ClaudeBot crashed my tarpit. Working on some rate limiting at the reverse proxy to buy me time to improve the threading.

Claude is still going. There is now a robots.txt with clear ...

2026-04-07T11:02:34Z

In reply to nevent1q…84a6
_________________________

Claude is still going. There is now a robots.txt with clear `User-agent: ClaudeBot [...] Disallow /` and it is ignored.

I will say there's a contradiction in setting up a tarpit like this. Sure these crawlers are DoSing anyway - they're uninvited ultra-demanding company - but when you have an infinite maze it feels like volunteering for an exhaustion contest.

My end is CO2e neutral, or at least on traceable renewables. But the other end, who knows. That dimension of it cannot be avoided.

It is quite wild how persistent Claude is, and an eerie feeling ...

2026-04-07T04:54:33Z

In reply to nevent1q…m73t
_________________________

It is quite wild how persistent Claude is, and an eerie feeling watching it just roam ever deeper into the endless rhizome of generated linked pages. It's been like this for a couple of hours now, and is not touching any other pages on the server, solely those in the tarpit. So that PoC does seem to check out.

CPU spikes are worrying, so will need to work the threading a bit and provision a couple more cores.

It has a rhythm of ~10-15s gorging, then a pause for 20-30s, and then at it again

It hit it, but I guess decompressed in a thread. It's a 127M ...

2026-04-07T02:25:36Z

In reply to nevent1q…s98p
_________________________

It hit it, but I guess decompressed in a thread. It's a 127M archive that decompresses to 128GB. The bot kept scraping for a bit and then dropped off. Difficult to know if it was a discouragement.

Strange is that soon after other IPs were reaching statistically non-guessable randomly generated URL paths, without touching the webroot or another other tarpit URL prior. They all had iOS UA strings (readily forged).

Running a non-Markov tarpit for half an hour on one public link, ...

2026-04-07T01:29:27Z

In reply to nevent1q…g32y
_________________________

Running a non-Markov tarpit for half an hour on one public link, and already have Claude lost in my swamp. Waiting to see if it runs into my ZIP bomb

---
216.73.216.124 - - [07/Apr/2026:03:28:49 +0200] "GET /tarpit/until/same/drive/harmattan_leftmost_intranscalency_few_ministries_few_between HTTP/2.0" 200 10132 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; ClaudeBot/1.0; +claudebot@anthropic.com)" "-"
---

After seeing ChatGPTBot blow 123 seconds on my drip-feed poison ...

2026-04-05T21:26:46Z

In reply to nevent1q…8crl
_________________________

After seeing ChatGPTBot blow 123 seconds on my drip-feed poison tarpit and then never come back, I got reading on how modern LLM scrapers might employ mechanisms to detect tarpits and blacklist.

During research I came across this tarpit evading scraper that provides some interesting insights into how modern LLM scrapers might do this.

https://github.com/Draconiator/Ipema

This gives me pause and has me looking at other solutions for counter-detection.

The GeoCities CSS is going nowhere.

Also working on a zip bomb, to randomly scatter in among the ...

2026-04-05T05:19:08Z

In reply to nevent1q…q4ta
_________________________

Also working on a zip bomb, to randomly scatter in among the links.

Thanks to Anais (npub1ukn…mmev) I came across this excellent method, using LZ77:

https://natechoe.dev/blog/2025-08-04.html

TBH I was just going to `dd if=/dev/urandom` my way to a titanic RAM flooding *.gz, but am getting great results with the above, and with bonus site data honey inside to keep bots on the chase.

Working on some poison-as-a-service (PaaS). Looking to launch in ...

2026-04-04T09:46:39Z

Working on some poison-as-a-service (PaaS). Looking to launch in the next few days.

#AI #enjoythinking

NodeJS, for all the brilliant projects out there leaning on it, ...

2026-04-02T05:56:15Z

NodeJS, for all the brilliant projects out there leaning on it, has a supply chain that might as well run the length of a dark alley permanently at 2am in the club district.

https://thehackernews.com/2026/03/axios-supply-chain-attack-pushes-cross.html

Anyway, hope none of you good people are affected by this latest pox

#infosec #sysadmin

Depicts him better than any photo ...

2026-03-29T21:28:38Z

Depicts him better than any photo

Revealing piece on the scale and scope of AI-induced psychosis: ...

2026-03-26T20:23:53Z

Revealing piece on the scale and scope of AI-induced psychosis:

"There seem to be three common delusions [..]. The most frequent is the belief that they have created the first conscious AI. The second is a conviction that they have stumbled upon a major breakthrough in their field of work or interest and are going to make millions. The third relates to spirituality and the belief that they are speaking directly to God. “We’ve seen full-blown cults getting created”

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2026/mar/26/ai-chatbot-users-lives-wrecked-by-delusion

#ai

My biosphere bucket was filled today with this news. 10 Kiwi are ...

2026-03-20T06:09:12Z

My biosphere bucket was filled today with this news. 10 Kiwi are being finally released into the forests of the Karioi Rāhui (Ruapehu) region. They were welcomed by local iwi (tribe) Ngāti Rangi before release into the land of their ancestors.

They come from a population of over 3000 at the Maungatautari predator-free sanctuary, a number brought up from just 8(!) breeding pairs over 2 decades. I did not know this wonder, despite living on the same island.

https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/ldr/590181/kiwi-come-home-taonga-return-to-ancestral-forest-after-30-year-effort

#conservation

Buzzfeed's shares go from $15 to 70 cents, now approaching ...

2026-03-14T04:16:27Z

Buzzfeed's shares go from $15 to 70 cents, now approaching bankruptcy, seemingly as a result of going all-in on 'AI' generated content.

This emerging pattern does not speak to a wicked problem. Rather, it should be no surprise that people don't want to read machine-generated content that outwardly pretends to come from a person. Because it is innately &intrinsically deceptive, which people do not like, so ending trust that will be very hard to win back. If at all

https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/buzzfeed-disastrous-earnings-ai

#ai

Condemnation of the illegal attack on Iran is complicated by some ...

2026-03-01T19:04:41Z

Condemnation of the illegal attack on Iran is complicated by some Iranian people celebrating it as the beginning of liberation. An Iranian activist tells me this is further muddied by the fact many monarchists in Iran want to see the regime toppled so that the monarchy can be reinstated.

For others it will understandably seem a release from captivity.

But 'liberation' may not age well amidst a battle for control of the Strait of Hormuz & Iranian oil, US-appointed leadership etc.