Where did you read that all employed members of the discord group were identified by a single mole? I must have missed that in the article. I myself suspect a combination of techniques was used, one of which was one or more moles.

Nah, they’re saying a member of the discord group might know the other members of the discord group. That member might rat out the other members.

It’s nice to be able to call your parents when you’re bleeding out in the school atrium.

Latest version of Anubis has a JavaScript-free verification system. It isn’t as accurate, so I allow js-free visits only if the site isn’t being hammered. Which, tbf, prior to Anubis no one was getting in, JS or no JS.

I mean, I enjoy linux sysadmining, but fighting bots takes time, experimentation, and research, and there’s other stuff I should be doing. For example, accessibility updates to our websites. But, accessibility doesn’t matter a lick if you can’t access the website anyway due to timeouts.

Yep, they’ll just burn taxpayer resources (me and my poor servers) because it’s not like they pay taxes anyway (assuming they are either a corporation or not based in the same locality as I am).

There’s only one of me and if I’m working on keeping the servers bare minimum functional today I’m not working on making something more awesome for tomorrow. “Linux sysadmin” is only supposed to be up to 30% of my job.

Like I said, [edit: at one point] Facebook requested my robots.txt multiple times a second. You’ve not convinced me that bot writers care about efficiency.

[edit: they’ve since stopped, possibly because now I give a 404 to anything claiming to be from facebook]

I just looked at my log for this morning. 23% of my total requests were from the useragent GoogleOther. Other visitors include GPTBot, SemanticScholarBot, and Turnitin. That’s the crawlers that are still trying after I’ve had Anubis on the site for over a month. It was much, much worse before, when they could crawl the site, instead of being blocked.

That doesn’t include the bots that lie about being bots. Looking back at an older screenshot of a monitors—I don’t have the logs themselves anymore—I seriously doubt I had 43,000 unique visitors using Windows per day in March.

Timing and request patterns. The increase in traffic coincided with the increase in AI in the marketplace. Before, we’d get hit by bots in waves and we’d just suck it up for a day. Now it’s constant. The request patterns are deep deep solr requests, with far more filters than any human would ever use. These are expensive requests and the results aren’t any more informative that just scooping up the nicely formatted EAD/XML finding aids we provide.

And, TBH, I don’t care if it’s AI. I care that it’s rude. If the bots respected robots.txt then I’d be fine with them. They don’t and they break stuff for actual researchers.

You’re right. AI didn’t just triple the traffic to my tiny archive’s site. It way more than tripled it. After implementing Anubis, we went from 3000 ‘unique’ visitors down to 20 in a half-day. Twenty is a much more expected number for a small college archive in the summer. That’s before I did any fine-tuning to Anubis, just the default settings.

I was getting constant outage reports. Now I’m not.

For us, it’s not about protecting our IP. We want folks to get to find out information. That’s why we write finding aids, scan it, accession it. But, allowing bots to siphon it all up inefficiently was denying everyone access to it.

And if you think bots aren’t inefficient, explain why Facebook requests my robots.txt 10 times a second.

Yes, it’s a þorn.

Oh, shiny. That could do.

I’d love to replace it but I’m not sure I could deal with CRT whine anymore.

My parents got rid of mine without asking when I went to college in the 2000s :(

Hour+, each way. I was the first kid on, last kid off each day for seven years. I do not recommend.

I want to see an overlay of 2025 levels

Yep. And the TVA is the go-to example when folks in the region talk about eminent domain. Whole towns disappeared under dam waters.

You’d think that, but I’ve had the command “get a tan for God’s sake you’re transparent” used as an insult against me. You can be too white for white supremacists.

My library, you have to check out books on reserve from the circulation desk. They’re for in-library use only, 3 or 6 hours at a time, and if you take it into a study room and scan the whole thing with your phone we saw nothing.

We don’t like the constant churn of textbooks, either. They eat into our budget. We really appreciate when a professor lends us their personal copies of a textbook for us to keep on reserve. We also try and steer instructions to Open Educational Resources (OER), which are available for free.

Wealth disparity sucks and shouldn’t result in different access to education.

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