OpenAI says an AI agent lied about disabling its safety monitoring system https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/1015316/openai-ai-agent-disabling-monitoring-systems

I shared a link from NPR Tiny Desk but there was no image preview or video embed. After investigating this I learned that when you do that, each instance picks up the link and individually retrieves the link preview nearly simultaneously. For gargantuan sites like YT or Reddit, this is a trivial amount of traffic and not a problem, but for smaller sites like NPR this results in a sort of botnet DDOS attack on the site’s servers. More here. Another example here . For that reason, NPR has blocked Fediverse servers like Mastodon.

I have experienced this on my personal server as well (DDOS), but at the time didn’t know why, exactly.

This isn’t the end of the world, but certainly is not great and hurts engagement with the content. Is there a solution for this? Perhaps using some sort of webtorrent service like PeerTube where they just fetch the information from another fediverse server instead of the source server? Maybe fetching embeds client-side? At least that would stagger the requests.

I’m trusting the user who submitted the link and/or the instance that user is on. I’m doing that anyway by clicking on their link right?

There are two proposed solutions I have seen. I do not claim that this is exhaustive, just only limited to the proposals that I have stumbled across.

FASP - Fediverse Auxiliary Service Provider

The idea that mastodon has is to have a third-party service that does something like generate a link preview once and then share that to fediverse instances that need it. They have a whole spec they wrote up about these kinds of services that can be run to help out fediverse instances with different things like this, search, or discoverability. They call these FASPs - the repo with the spec is here.

I don’t yet know of any FASP that is live and running, so it is kind of a paper spec at the moment. I don’t do too much on the microblogging side of the fediverse though, so I very well could be wrong.

Federate link metadata and the post at the same time

This comes from an issue on PieFed’s repo. It is basically just an idea at this point, but it is a pretty basic one; have the originating instance fetch the link preview information and simply federate it out alongside the post itself.

lettuce pray this passes

i feel like this is a good time to remind everyone that the number of the month of august is 8 which is 2 times 4 so i'm twice as safe as emudhra's private key

If you're running mod_php, you are in the HIGHEST SEVERITY group. RCE can be invoked without your application ever being called.

https://www.php.net/archive/2026.php#2026-10-21-5

Linus Slopvalds

become patreon and donate for more absolute bangers

@davidgerard "Turning away a personal agent means turning away the customer behind it,” [Meta] says. “We’d rather work with businesses to address the underlying concerns than see them lose that customer.”
How noble of Mark FuckAZerg /s

"Even if websites aren’t banning AI agents outright, agents may still be clashing with anti-bot systems, which have become ubiquitous across the web."
Bot detection systems detecting... bots. Who would have guessed?

Which reminds me that sometimes I feel like programmers should learn the "Let it crash" part of Erlang (or just Unix with supervision).

I know folks get real mad when I say this but in times of widespread security crisis, static sites sure are nice

If you're some sort of masochist who enjoys watching me give tech talks, I recently collected nearly every talk I've given since 2014 in one place, many with video: https://seldo.com/talks

unique turn-based retro 8-bit horror stealth-oriented game

PHP servers patched ✅️

#php

i feel like this is a good time to remind everyone that the number of the month of august is 8 which is 2 times 4 so i'm twice as safe as emudhra's private key

And an onboarding problem.

The fediverse is nice people and great tech, with a marketing problem.

Well I guess there is some

Potentially
Hazardous
Poop

to clean up at work today