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long post, butlerian jihad 

Clearly the belief that opt-out is a good idea is premised on the assumption that there are very few programmers with bad ideas. Sadly, the opposite is true. As they said in Egypt, 6000 years ago: “Children will no longer obey their parents. Everybody wants to write a search engine. The end of the web is manifestly drawing nigh." https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/10/22/world-end/

This is why I'm feeling better every year about the sort of countermeasures I've deployed. Those rely on bot behavior.

The first one uses fail2ban. Instead of watching for failed SSH logins, however, it watches the Apache access logs. If you access too many pages, you're probably a bot and you get banned for 10min at the firewall level. If you are a repeated offender, you get banned for a week. Sadly, this requires the tracking of IP numbers in the log files for a bit.
Some notes here: https://alexschroeder.ch/wiki/2019-01-20_fail2ban_to_watch_over_my_sites

The second one is only used for my Gemini sites but one of these days I'll have to add it to my sites, too: every IP number accessing the site is kept in memory and if you access too many pages, you're probably a bot and you get the Gemini reply SLOW DOWN, with an every increasing indication of how many seconds you need to wait. 28 days is the maximum cool down period. If at any point three IP numbers from the same network are banned, the entire network gets banned. This works really well because residential networks and commercial hosting networks are usually separate. Almost all the banned networks are Amazon, OVH etc. It's great.
Some notes here: https://alexschroeder.ch/wiki/2020-12-25_Defending_against_crawlers

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Migrant worker exploited by Edmonton employer awarded $30K — but he can't collect | CBC News
cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/al

>A temporary foreign worker (TFW) who was underpaid and fired without notice by an Edmonton employer has been awarded $30,000 but the company at fault no longer exists.

No, but the former owners do.

Corporations are a legalized scam to dodge debt.

Burglars can't dodge criminal charges by incorporating; why is wage theft different?

Heute ist #welttagdesbuches und meine wundervolle Nichte hat mich fast zum Weinen gebracht. Sie hat gesagt, dass sie so dankbar ist, dass sie lesen kann. Sie hat eine geistige Behinderung und ihre damalige Lehrerin hat es für sinnlos gehalten, ihr lesen beizubringen. Meine Schwägerin hat sich dann mit ihr hingesetzt und mit ihr geübt. Und jetzt eröffnet sich ihr eine ganze Welt.

#Google buys an entire #Twitter EVERY SINGLE YEAR to make sure we don't ever use its competitors' products.

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So my FiL told me about this course at Cambridge University where you have to be a member of one of the world’s wealthiest families to apply. He read about it in Private Eye. I assumed it was a joke until I looked it up…

‘A safe space to hear radical voices and debate challenging and sensitive issues, such as the future of wealth in a context of growing inequality and new paradigms of power.’

cisl.cam.ac.uk/education/execu

Was recently asked which scientific 'myth' I'd like to see banished forever

Obviously, given my field and output, I had to choose 'we only use 10% of our brains'

It's not just a silly thing that leads to shoddy movie plots. It's worse than that

For one thing, the origins of the 'we only use 10% of our brain' notion are unclear. But analysis suggests it came about *at least* a century ago. Believe it or not, our understanding of the brain has improved by orders of magnitude since then

/1

Welcome to the newest member of the Bell family: Cruzan. Cruzan lives with my youngest son and his girlfriend at their apartment at Georgia Southern Uni.

I’m not having a mental break down, my brain is doing a rapid unscheduled disassembly.

Endhoven's hackerspace has an embroiding machine. The machine has a name. The name is Sir Stabalot.

Mortality Stats 

"[FDA Commissioner] Califf said a new factor has joined the list of known causes of life expectancy disparities like race, ethnicity, income and education: living in a rural area, where he noted that people are exposed to different information sources.

“Why aren’t we using medical products as effectively and efficiently as our peer countries? A lot of it has to do with choices that people make because of the things that influenced their thinking”

cnbc.com/2023/04/11/us-life-ex

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