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Who is going to train the local LLMs though? If it's not feeding back into the AI circular funding ecosystem who's offering up the compute, scraping, vast storage and taking on the legal risk of huge pirated data archives?

People were persuaded to give up piracy because legitimate platforms were seen as priced low enough to be worth avoiding the hassle and potential risk of hunting down pirate sites and downloading movies or music. As people are squeezed financially and prices rise, that logic just does not hold now.

So "grooming", right? That's the appropriate word for that.

one morning gregor samsa awoke and found himself metamorphosed into a hunky seismologist with a heart condition in an erotic visual novel for adult women

Nobody else is using shurly[.]net so I'm pretty sure it's their infrastructure.
it's really weird that you go: "domain[.]com/r/xyz" -> "shurly[.]net/xyz" -> "domain[.]com/article".
It's *very* strange/suspicious that it's taking you out to this separate website, only to send you back...bad vibes.

Took another couple of pokes at this, I've found 7~ sites that are part of this network.
They all have a subpath under /r/ which they use as a URL shortener. It redirects to a shortener hosted at shurly[.]net
Which feels really familiar...
www.vice.com/en/article/g...

A user is quoting a post, the original post is about a "Russian-state aligned bot network" targeting Zelensky. The user in quoting the post with a link to an article. The article is from a US CENTCOM operated "news" outlet.

Garfield helpfully reminds you that you are not immune to propaganda.

Exclusive: ICE Glasses Homeland Security is making “smart glasses” to collect intelligence inside the U.S.

🚨 ICE Glasses are coming - specialized smart glasses designed by and for the Department of Homeland Security, documents reveal:
www.kenklippenstein.com/p/exclusive-...

I just mean it's like email, if gmail goes down then proton and hotmail and yahoo, etc can all still talk to each other unimpeded. gmail (service) users are impacted but not everyone using email (protocol) is.

I didn't notice either really. But mastodon didn't need the same level of infrastructure, not because you couldn't DDoS it but it's not as effective to attack a single instance of it. Its is an upside of being decentralised, which Bluesky/ATProto is nominally meant to have but still isn't there yet.

I think one of the lessons that we've seen repeated over the last couple of decades is people exclaiming "DDoS is solved" and DDoS attacks continuing to be larger and refute that.
Maybe load balancing and redundancy is going to work for some skids with a booter service but not DDoS writ large.

Nobody asks "How does a buffer overflow feel like?" :(

It does kind of show how "decentralised" bluesky still isn't. Even if they took down the .social instance, the others don't depend on it to continue to function amongst themselves.

Archive.org of entornodiario.com on January 24th 2026 showing "This website is no longer available".

bsky.app/search?q=ent... shout out to these 3 accounts posting CENTCOM South/Central American propaganda. A "news" site that went down in January 2026. Huh, I wonder why that was?
👁️

alfasselnews.com/packs/media/...

🙃

Ah, well, you did try and comment it out...*however*, comments are still shipped...

Trebil — Grokipedia Trebil is a strategic border crossing point in Iraq that serves as the only official land entry to Jordan, facilitating cross-border trade and movement of goods and people. Located on the Iraq-Jordan

Both sites have had terrible engagement on X. But I found that many Al-Fassel articles have somehow found their way into the citations of Grokipedia, Elon Musk's Wikipedia clone: grokipedia.com/page/trebil

https://www.theonion.info/

https://www.macstories.net/notes/openais-new-codex-app-has-the-best-computer-use-feature-ive-ever-tested/ We all have Apple’s Accessibility team to thank for the technology that allows Codex’s computer use tool to exist. To build it, the Codex team took advantage of an advanced accessibility feature that allows third-party apps to read the “accessibility hierarchy” (also known as “AX Tree”) of any app open on macOS. My understanding is that this technology was primarily created to allow screen-readers and other assistive tools to work with Mac apps regardless of their automation/scripting features. In this case, it’s been repurposed as a way for Codex to ingest the full contents and hierarchy of any window and, essentially, load it as context for the LLM.

https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/mobile/2026/03/google-cracks-down-on-android-apps-abusing-accessibility The accessibility API lets app developers support users living with disabilities who need extra help using their phones. Apps can use this API to access the screen in unique ways, control input for the user, and use voice services, for example. Sadly, as with most useful tools, someone will always find a way to misuse it and ruin it for everyone else. Malware developers have been using this API for years as a way into your bank account. The accessibility service has a lot of power: Any app with permissions to use it can read what’s on your screen.

The other day, this blog came across my feed. In it, they talk about this new AI tool for controlling MacOS.
It works better than previous ones because it uses accessibility features.
But it's really following a design pattern of spyware/malware, it is *designed* to breach permission barriers.

“The way an agent works is that it completes complex tasks on your behalf, and it does that by accessing many sources of data,” she said in an interview on the sidelines of the Slush technology conference in Helsinki, Finland, last week. “It would need access to your Signal contacts and your Signal messages…that access is an attack vector and that really nullifies our reason for being.”

also this exact thing, where AI agents bridge traditional permission barriers and thus undermine that security because they *require* that kind of broad access is what people (e.g. Meredith Whittaker) have been warning about.

Recently, based on information provided by Vercel and additional internal investigation, we learned that, during the incident last month, the unauthorized actor also likely compromised OAuth tokens for some of our consumer users. We also learned that the unauthorized actor appears to have used a compromised OAuth token to access Vercel’s Google Workspace. Vercel is not a Context customer, but it appears at least one Vercel employee signed up for the AI Office Suite using their Vercel Google Workspace account and granted “Allow All” permissions. Vercel’s internal OAuth configurations appear to have allowed this action to grant these broad permissions in Vercel’s enterprise Google Workspace. https://context.ai/security-update

yikes. we really gotta do some kinda "least authority" type thing for oauth tokens, like you see with "here are the smallest subset of capabilities" for a system service so you're not just running stuff as unrestricted root.
i suspect this isn't the last we'll see of something like this.

Cargo cult reconstruction of Obama.

a photo of a phone showing a fake app with "Story Corps" branding. It has as list of conversations, the smaller details are AI hallucinated non-letters and the conversations all take place in late 2026 and they're weirdly not sorted alphabetically or chronologically.

They're going to give you a free archive to store "CD quality" family conversations, and from the looks of the (AI generated) promotional image, the ability to play them back on (always on their damn) phones.

But...what if free music or audiobook storage instead?

“Everything now is AI, and everyone has their phones on the table,” says Elyce Henkin, a managing director of StoryCorps studios and brand partnerships. “It interrupts the conversation and the flow. We wanted to get rid of that and go back to the basics and have everyone talking to each other.”

doing return with a v shit, except its for digital surveillance.

tweet from @mavant to @cremieuxrecueil the famous nazi blogger who was so racist he got paper co-authors into trouble and was a source for a racist hacker to racist reporters at the NYT on race science.

Checking in on Trump 1 neveragain.tech pledge.
ctrl-f "Palantir".
I wonder what they're doing now?
Oh...

James Esses Conservative Candidate for High Barnet James Esses is the Conservative candidate for High Barnet ward.An Irish-Jewish psychotherapist living in Arkley with his wife and young family, James previously worked as a criminal barrister and senior civil servant leading on crime and justice policy across government.James’s top three priorities

one party in particular, in this case it seems? insanely his therapy website on its front page also talks (negatively) about "critical race theory" which is also pretty telling.

The spycops inquiry has been kind of toothless, some of the spycops just said "No" and didn't have to turn up to answer questions, etc. Yet all the stuff it does manage to turn up has been extremely damning and illuminating as to the real nature and goals of police and security services.

🙃