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The statistics from #AdGuard are quite shocking. More than 40% of DNS requests in my household are #surveillance related.

This is the sad reality of what the Internet has become.

I had read good reviews about the #GL-iNet #routers so I purchased one of their products around 18 months ago. One of my main motivations was supporting, at some level, #OpenWrt and including tools like #AdGuardHome and #Wireguard.

But to be honest, it all has been a bit disappointing.

AdGuardHome never worked very well. Apart from being slow, the service would frequently freeze (e.g. whenever I updated the custom filter) and I had to manually restart it.

In addition, the system stack was quite messy and difficult to make sense of. For example, the #DNS service #Dnsmasq could be managed directly or via Openwrt, sometimes creating unintended problems.

Anyway, the router decided to implode after a firmware upgrade, which is quite underwhelming. I tried a few things like reflashing Uboot, factory reset, etc. before deciding to just toss it away and get another one, from a different brand.

Since I setup a #tarpit (using #nepenthes) about 3 days ago, the server has been hit more than 1 million times by the likes of #OpenAI and #Meta. Apart from the usual parasitic crawlers.

This only proves, how unethical the whole industry is.

I have written a #blog entry about my experience with running a #tarpit with the intention of boycotting #AI #bots.

https://blog.n41.lat/posts/boycotting-ai-crawlers/

#GenAI should be known as the industry pushing multi-billion dollar solutions to solve million-dollar problems.

As an experiment, today I setup an instance of #Nepenthes in a #VPS.

It is a poisoning #tarpit intended for crawlers that scrape data for #LLMs. It will generate endless linked pages with randomly generated content.

Interestingly, just minutes after deployment, the #OpenAI crawler showed up. Since then, it has been happily eating all the crap thrown at it.

I know this is a tiny effort against one of the most toxic industries in history, but I love the feeling of fighting back even if it is almost symbolic.

https://zadzmo.org/code/nepenthes/

Pretty excited about this #retro deck of #cards with an #Atari theme that we got yesterday at a bookshop in #Perth.

Can anyone point me at the list of IP blocks used by #TencentCloud?

This is something most cloud providers provide, but I have failed to find this one.

That will help me block at once (instead or one at a time) all those endless #AI #bots that are constantly hitting my #Mastodon server. Thanks.

People mention that the social media #X is a cesspool. Unfortunately, I do not think #Mastodon is doing much better these days.

From time to time I dare to look at the Federated Timeline and WTF, it cannot get worse than that. Just garbage to the point that maybe 1 out of 10 posts may have some value.

My organic timeline is still mostly fine for the time being, but it requires a decent amount of effort in blocking bots and automated accounts.

Why #Australia is going through so many #CyberAttacks, many resulting in #dataleaks, lately?

According to cryptographer Prof. Vanessa Teague from the Australian National University:

'We've had a decade of anti-security policy. We've had laws that required the acquisition of data that didn't need to be acquired, laws that demand the retention of data that didn't need to be retained'.