#1 can be especially important in places like the northeast US where some houses still have 100 year old knob & tube wiring. When we bought our house in a Boston suburb 10 years ago it still had some live knob & tube. Our insurance company required us to remove it all & replace it.
The thing is, every CDN provider does the exact same thing, and the modern internet wouldn’t work without them. Cloudflare gets a bad rap largely because they offer free and low cost services that are very attractive to individuals, hobbiests, etc.
Companies like Akamai, Fastly, AWS, etc. offer virtually identical services but you may never have heard of them because they mostly only offer services to corporate customers. But their CDNs operate the same way - by decoding the traffic so they can analyze it for purposes of caching it to speed up delivery.
Edit: Love how my comments are being downvoted. What I’ve said here is 100% accurate and true. I used to work at Akamai, and still work with it on a daily basis at my current employer so I have a lot of knowledge of the platform. If you think what I’m saying isn’t accurate then just say so.
Every single CDN provider works this way, and the internet as we know it wouldn’t work without them. If you don’t like that Cloudflare works this way then you should be upset at Amazon, Akamai, Google, Fastly, and many others as well.
Edit: For all of you downvoting me, if I am wrong then please enlighten me as to how CDNs operate without being able to decrypt your browsers traffic.
That goes for any CDN provider, cloud hosting provider, etc. Amazon, Akamai, and others have all suffered significant outages that knocked large swaths of the internet offline. It’s certainly nothing unique to Cloudflare.
Guy gets shot and the impact sends him flying across the room, out the window, etc. Physics says “oh hell no”. The guy who fired that shot would have likely had his arm dislocated from the recoil if he was able to even hold onto it.
I’d be very careful about using copper this way. While ingesting small amounts of copper is ok, and in fact a good part of a diet, Ingesting too much copper is not a good thing, and can be toxic.
Having copper piping, etc. in close proximity to a garden risks having it leach into the plants, which might then be ingested. Since copper is a fairly soft metal then rain could slowly corrode it and introduce it to the plants.
A bit more on copper toxicology here.
Probably written by AI…
Depends on how much Putin will be able to squeeze out of all the oligarchs.
A decade or so ago National Geographic had a reality TV show called Worlds Toughest Fixes, where they went around and documented all sorts of major repair & other big construction jobs. One episode had them replacing the steam turbine in a nuclear power plant. I really enjoyed that series.
Some other fixes they documented included a valve on the Alaska oil pipeline, replacing an antenna on a 2000 foot tall tower, and launching a rocket in French Guiana. It’s a fun series if you’re into this kind of stuff.
I work in IT for a tech company that is embracing AI to an extent. We have a ticketing system for managing all the work we do. Tickets can range from simple tasks that take literally 5 minutes to complex multi-part collaborative projects that take weeks.
Recently I’ve been getting tickets that read like a miniature novel, with formatted sections labeled things like “summary”, “acceptance criteria”, and so on. It’s all clearly AI generated, and it makes it difficult to understand exactly what is being asked. I don’t need (or want) three pages of word salad when the requestor could have simply said “write a script to alert us when the API key ‘X’ is set to expire in 7 days”.
When I see tickets like these the first thing I do is go back to the requestor and ask them exactly what they want from me. Often times what they want is not what it sounds like their AI generated ticket is asking for, or at least specific details are wrong. And I have absolutely no problem wasting their time when they waste mine with this AI slop.
Yeah, I use it for some programming tasks as well. I’m sick and tired of telling it that it did something wrong or simply omitted something, only to have it apologize and offer to fix its own mistakes.
Back in the early 2000’s I worked at Akamai for a while. Their worldwide CDN is built on clusters of servers physically located at thousands of datacenters around the world. They rely on the local staff to physically install it and do any on-site maintenance like replacing failed hard drives, etc. So Akamais remote management capabilities are quite sophisticated.
During my training one day I started poking around old tickets and found one that was a few years old and still open, but appeared to be abandoned. It started out with an automated alert that the systems at a small Midwest ISP had stopped responding, followed by a few updates from techs who tried to remotely access them with no luck. That was followed by comments that calls had been made to the ISP and voicemails left. The final note in the ticket stated that the entire datacenter had been destroyed by a tornado.
I worked in IT at a university about 15 years ago. As part of a research project I helped set up a Tor exit node. Within a few hours of it taking on traffic I was contacted by the universities IT security team. They were seeing all sorts of malicious traffic originating from that system and wanted to know what was going on. They had the system shut down immediately.
A few years ago I was given a technical deep dive into Akamai’s bot detection systems. One area they were quite focused on were bots impersonating mobile devices, and in particular mobile apps. It’s commonplace for attackers to try to mimic the behavior of mobile apps because it often provides more direct access to the data they’re looking for than trying to scrape websites.
To counter this threat Akamai developed a library for their customers to incorporate into their apps. This library collects a bunch of haptic data from the mobile device, such as the tilt sensors, accelerometers, finger taps/swipes on the screen, and other available data. It then encrypts it and sends it along to Akamai along with the data the app sends. Akamai then analyzes that haptic data and uses it as part of their bot detection analysis.
It is VERY difficult for a computer to mimic the truly random way a mobile device moves in space, or the way your fingers tap/swipe on a screen. If you were asked to draw a straight line from the upper left corner to the bottom right corner of your smartphone, not only would it not be perfectly straight but it would be quite fluid in its randomness. Writing a computer program to simulate that would be very tough. You’re far more likely to get lots of short straight lines with jagged angles than something that looks like a human drew it. And computer algorithms can quickly analyze this sort of data and return a confidence score indicating if it appears to have been created artificially or not.
So my guess is that when that QR code is scanned it will launch a Google app that will collect some similar haptic data and send it off to Google along with a unique id for that captcha. Google will then quickly analyze that haptic data to determine if you’re a bot or not.
Saudi Arabia should build a pipeline similar to the Alaska Pipeline that lets them transport oil from the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea. There’s already the Sumed pipeline that gets around the physical size limitations of the Suez Canal. A cross-Saudi one would completely neuter this power grab by Iran…
Same. I have Firefox with ublock Origin on it right next to Chrome. If I need to visit some third party site I use Firefox. Occasionally I forget I’m in chrome and visit a third party site that’s chock full of ads. When that happens I immediately close the page in Chrome and jump to Firefox for a more reasonable experience.
My employer has been pushing AI as well so I’ve been using Claude to help me when it makes sense. I’ve had it write python scripts to interact with various API’s, had it analyze log files, etc. I might use it two or three times every other day for between 10 to 30 minutes at a time. So while I’m not using it excessively, I’m still using it what I consider to be a reasonable amount.
I checked my Claude account the other day and it said I have used a whopping 1% of my quota for the past month. That really makes me wonder how all these companies are burning through their usage the way they are reporting. Do they have teams of employees now that are doing nothing but interacting with AIs for 8 hours a day? It seems like that would be the only way for me to put a dent in my monthly quota with Claude…
I used to work across the street from Boston Dynamics and would regularly see them testing robots in their parking lot & surrounding grassy/hilly areas. At one point they actually gave a bunch of folks in my company a tour of their labs. I still keep tabs on them from time to time because I find what they do absolutely amazing.
From what I’ve seen of the past 15 years or so of watching them I believe that Boston Dynamics is well in front of Tesla when it comes to robotics. Especially when you see gaffes by Tesla like that video that seems to show their robot was actually being controlled by a person wearing a VR headset.
Our solar panels are probably the best investment we ever made. Year to year our electric bill averages out to zero, even with charging our EV. Over the summer our batteries participate in our electric utilities virtual power plant program, which pays us around $2000 each year for the excess electricity we provide. And our state has a renewable energy program that pays us for every megawatt our panels generate, no matter what it’s used for.
Bullshit. I work on a daily basis with Akamai, providing CDN, WAF, image optimization, and other services across roughly a dozen domains. Those services are all fully in-line with the domains in question. No need for a third party domain. We’ve also evaluated Cloudflare to see if the cost savings would justify migrating from Akamai.