Thomas Baekdal

It makes sense to tell if me if credit card or password has been leaked, because I can change those. But to tell me that address has been leaked. I mean, I'm not going to change that...

I don't understand warnings like this one. I mean, what am I supposed to do about it? The 'leak' was in 2020, and they got my address. So, what am I supposed to do about that? Move to a new house? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I just published my latest Baekdal/Basic newsletter, and in it, I talked about switching from ChatGPT to Claude, and how much better Claude is at journalistic analysis. And to demonstrate that, I included both the prompt and the result of my news analyzer tool. www.baekdal.com/newsletter/w...

Holy moly, today was a bad day to send out a newsletter. I got more 'out of office' back than at any other time of the year ;)

I just checked the log, and for the bot that made 2,291 request for the same image, no IP was used more than twice.

Yeah, but with every requests using a new IP, it's ... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I have Cloudflare, and it's extremely aggressively configured, with all the anti-bot things enabled, 20 WAF rules, rate-limiting... the works. But these botnets pass right through it. Even Cloudflare's bot score doesn't detect it.

Yeah, except all of these are coming from different residential internet IPs, and not some cloud servers (which would be easy to block by their ASN). And, I cannot block countries either because they are coming from different countries too.

So, this is a botnet of compromised personal computers.

BTW: For those wondering why fail2ban didn't stop this. Every single one of these requests come from a different IP. This is a bot net that is doing this.

Or what about this one. This bot tried to load an image that I have no idea what it (it's one my server), but it kept retrying 50 times per second...

Per second!

I mean, what the f..?!?

I'm getting really frustrated by bad bots.... here is an example. In my error log file, I have recorded 2,294 attempts by a bot to try to load an image that doesn't exist on my server (404 Not Found).

It tried to do this 2,291 times!! ... I mean, obviously, my server can handle this, but... why?

What?!?! ... I'm trying to work here Google Docs!

I just published my latest Baekdal/Executive report, where I take a look at the trends and future patterns that major magazine publishing brands face: The future outlook for traditional magazines? baekdal.com/strategy/the...

This is getting out of hand... ;) ... my quest to find a bicycle saddle that is actually comfortable to use.

Not to mention that they previously reported about it being a problem.

2018: 'Fears for teens', 'bombarded by gambling ads', make to 'look fun'
2025: We call on Reeves to shelve crackdown on fun.

It is as blatant as it can get!

In fact, here in Denmark, I have not used cash for at least 25 years, I have never had a checkbook, and my bank stopped even processing checks in 2014 (so I cannot even accept checks, which is only a problem with US clients, but still)

YouTube video by Foil Arms and Hog When it's Cash Only

I came across this 'cash only' sketch, and I reminded my about a time, about 15 years ago, when I was in London where I took a cab, and then tried to pay with my credit card, and the driver said he only accepted cash. I, of course, did not have any cash.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWbK...

Holy crap... I just checked, and if I move my newsletter sending to Amazon SES, I can reduce my email cost by 92%... !! ... that can't be right. That's an insane difference.

What the actual... the system I use for sending out newsletters just increased their prices by 100%

I have a confession. I have a news blocker installed in my browser. And here is why. I'm a media analyst, and it's my job to figure out how to help publishers be more successful. Because of t... I have a confession. I have a news blocker installed in my browser. And here is why. I'm a media analyst, and it's my job to figure out how to help publishers be more successful. Because of this, I s...

You can see my original post about why I made this here: www.linkedin.com/feed/update/...

The Meow! Domain Blocker – Get this Extension for 🦊 Firefox (en-US) Download The Meow! Domain Blocker for Firefox. A ultra-simple tool to block domains that you don't want to load, and instead writes 'Meow!' to help you think of better things to do ;)

So, I have made a Firefox extension, called the The Meow! Domain Blocker: addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefo...

This is just a very simply tool that can block domains from loading, except, when it blocks a domain, it says "Meow!" in big friendly letters.

"I DON'T NEED YOU TO FUCKING REWRITE WHAT I'VE JUST WRITTEN!"

(No, this doesn't block cats. Instead, it blocks domains and replaces them with meows! ;)) ... I will write about it once it has been approved and published.

Waiting for Firefox to approve my Meow Domain Blocker ... ;)

Another test is to checked ages. It used to be that when asked to AIs to create images of women, they would either be extremely young, or very old, but it struggled with anything in-between. So, here I asked it to create an image for a 20, 30, 40, and 50 year old woman.

AI image generators used to exaggerate old biases. So one test we could do was to ask an AI to create an image of a man and a women, and for years, this has resulted in an older man, next to a almost teenage women, often sexualized too.

But look at this picture from Google Gemini. That's good.

We have now reached that time of year where a lot of shop will start to raise their prices so that, on Black Friday, they can reduce them back to their normal price and claim you are getting 40% off...

This one is better... because I cannot find him: (unless Google means that the guy in front is Waldo, but Waldo wears a hat and is thin)

Here is what ChatGPT made... ;) ... can you find him?

A couple of months ago, I asked ChatGPT to create a find Waldo/Wally image, and it was really bad it it. But now that I no longer use ChatGPT, I asked Google Gemini to do the same... ;)

I mean, it was better than ChatGPT, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯