Ben Tasker

3. ⁠this is not the moment for an incredibly expensive increase in state surveillance infrastructure to be run for profit by private tech firms just before Labour ushers in an (even more) authoritarian right wing government.

FIX THE GODDAMN COST OF LIVING INSTEAD YOU FREAKS.

2. Countries that have ID cards - like the whole of Europe - still have the same irregular migration problem (you may have heard!!!)

& in fact the UK has the lowest share of its economy estimated as irregular economy in Europe so if it fixes the issue WHY DIDNT IT FIX IT THERE?

Ok. They’ve pissed me off.

I’m back to tell you 3 things about ID cards:

1. Migrants ALREADY HAVE biometric ID cards & govts have been trying to digitise them for years w repeated fuckups & failures causing complete chaos - they don’t work, you do not want that system for you.

Dealing With Nuisance Abuse Complaints This week, I've been wrong about (at least) two things, believing that: I was done with the Copytrack stuff: I sent them proof of license

Dealing With Nuisance Abuse Complaints

https://www.bentasker.co.uk/posts/blog/law/handling-abuse-complaints-being-sent-to-your-providers.html?utm_source=rss

Replacing the Valve In a Stuck or Dripping Tap I hate plumbing and, as a result, tend to try and put off any job where a mistake could lead to an inexorable drip-drip that

New Documentation: Replacing the Valve In a Stuck or Dripping Tap

https://www.bentasker.co.uk/posts/blog/house-stuff/replacing-the-valve-in-a-bathroom-tap.html?utm_source=rss

Deploying Anubis to protect against AI scrapers Much like others on the net, I've seen a marked increase in traffic to my sites. The new requests sport browser-like user-agents and originate from

New Blog: Deploying Anubis to protect against AI scrapers

https://www.bentasker.co.uk/posts/blog/the-internet/deploying-anubis-to-block-ai-bots.html?utm_source=rss

Two years of solar We've now had a solar install for 2 years (give or take a couple of days). Although last year's summer wasn't as sunny as the

New Blog: Two years of solar

https://www.bentasker.co.uk/posts/blog/house-stuff/second-year-of-solar.html?utm_source=rss

Automating an audit of my image use Earlier this month, I ended up with a known copyright troll in my inbox. As a result of not doing much (if any) due diligence,

New Blog: Automating an audit of my image use

https://www.bentasker.co.uk/posts/blog/software-development/automatically-reverse-searching-images-to-list-possible-concerns.html?utm_source=rss

Understanding the sentence of Lucy Connolly

Had it not been for competent legal advice, her sentence could have been far harsher

By me, at @prospectmagazine.co.uk

www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/ideas/law/th...

Fans reading through the romance novel Darkhollow Academy: Year 2 got a nasty surprise last week in chapter 3. In the middle of steamy scene between the book’s heroine and the dragon prince Ash there’s this: "I've rewritten the passage to align more with J. Bree's style, which features more tension, gritty undertones, and raw emotional subtext beneath the supernatural elements:" It appeared as if author, Lena McDonald, had used an AI to help write the book, asked it to imitate the style of another author, and left behind evidence they’d done so in the final work. As of this writing, Darkhollow Academy: Year 2 is hard to find on Amazon. Searching for it on the site won’t show the book, but a Google search will. 404 Media was able to purchase a copy and confirm that the book no longer contains the reference to copying Bree’s style. But screenshots of the graph remain in the book’s Amazon reviews and Goodreads page.

New from 404 Media: authors are getting caught leaving AI prompts in their novels, telling the AI to follow someone else's style. We bought a copy to confirm.

www.404media.co/authors-are-...

In the real actual world we already live in, restaurants are already reverting to only taking reservations by phone, or charging huge reservation fees, to stop automated booking. This is with basic bots!

Examining A Copyright Claim From Copytrack This morning, I awoke to find an email from Copytrack in my inbox. If that name sounds vaguely familiar, it's because they made a

New Blog: Examining A Copyright Claim From Copytrack

https://www.bentasker.co.uk/posts/blog/general/copytrack-sent-me-a-copyright-claim.html?utm_source=rss

Doggy Boot Build The Mini is now gone: It failed one time too many, so we sent it to the great scrapyard in the sky (via, uhhh, the

New Blog: Doggy Boot Build

https://www.bentasker.co.uk/posts/blog/house-stuff/converting-a-zafiras-boot-to-a-dog-transportation-area.html?utm_source=rss

"Even worse, when you Google one of these slop-squatted package names, you’ll often get an AI-generated summary from Google itself confidently praising the package, saying it’s useful, stable, well-maintained. But it’s just parroting the package’s own README, no skepticism, no context."

1. LLM-generated code tries to run code from online software packages. Which is normal but
2. The packages don’t exist. Which would normally cause an error but
3. Nefarious people have made malware under the package names that LLMs make up most often. So
4. Now the LLM code points to malware.

Running Imaginary on Kubernetes for Fast Nextcloud Thumbnailing We have quite a few photos in Nextcloud and, after a big upload, thumbnail generation can be quite demanding. About six years ago, I hacked

New Documentation: Running Imaginary on Kubernetes for Fast Nextcloud Thumbnailing

https://www.bentasker.co.uk/posts/documentation/kubernetes/deploying-imaginary-onto-kubernetes-for-thumbnailing.html?utm_source=rss

Isolating our Guest Wireless Network in OPNSense I've changed jobs and, whilst setting my new work laptop up, decided that I'd create a completely isolated LAN segment for it. I once caught

New Blog: Isolating our Guest Wireless Network in OPNSense

https://www.bentasker.co.uk/posts/blog/house-stuff/creating-isolated-ipv4-and-ipv6-networks-with-vlans-and-opnsense.html?utm_source=rss

Automatically Deleting Old Gitlab Issues Normally, tickets in an issue tracker are expected to exist forever (with the exception of ticket spam, which'll vanish once an admin purges it). However,

New Documentation: Automatically Deleting Old Gitlab Issues

https://www.bentasker.co.uk/posts/documentation/general/autopruning-old-issues-from-projects.html?utm_source=rss

My Scammer Girlfriend: Baiting A Romance Fraudster At the beginning of the year, a spate of very similar mails appeared in my spam-box. Although originating from different addresses (and sent to

New Blog: My Scammer Girlfriend: Baiting A Romance Fraudster

https://www.bentasker.co.uk/posts/blog/security/seducing-a-romance-scammer.html?utm_source=rss

Geoblocking the UK with BunnyCDN I recently wrote about performing an Online Safety Act assessment for my Mastodon server. In that post, I noted that Ofcom's vague statements meant that

New Documentation: Geoblocking the UK with BunnyCDN

https://www.bentasker.co.uk/posts/documentation/general/geoblocking-uk-users-with-bunnycdn.html?utm_source=rss

Mini Cooper: Battery Replacement Earlier this week, the Mini's battery gave up. When the start-stop button was pressed, none of the usual warning lights illuminated, only the handbrake and

Mini Cooper: Battery Replacement

https://www.bentasker.co.uk/posts/documentation/vehicles/replacing-the-battery-on-a-bmw-mini-cooper.html?utm_source=rss

Automatically Backing Up Zones Stored In ClouDNS I recently moved DNS providers and migrated my domains to using ClouDNS. What I didn't write about in that post, though, was setting up local backups

New Documentation: Automatically Backing Up Zones Stored In ClouDNS

https://www.bentasker.co.uk/posts/documentation/general/automatically-backing-up-cloudns-dns-records.html?utm_source=rss

The end of NATO, Televised

https://www.bentasker.co.uk/posts/videos/trump-and-vance-childlike-bullies.html?utm_source=rss

Manually Charging Our US2000C Solar Battery Earlier this month, I discovered a couple of issues with our Solar setup. Two apparent bugs had combined and resulted in our solar battery going completely

New Blog: Manually Charging Our US2000C Solar Battery

https://www.bentasker.co.uk/posts/blog/house-stuff/reviving-our-pylontech-us2000c-solar-battery-with-a-wall-charger.html?utm_source=rss

Moving bentasker.co.uk services to European Providers I must admit, I've struggled a bit to write the introduction to this blogpost, given that it relates to an intersection between technology and

New Blog: Moving bentasker.co.uk services to European Providers

https://www.bentasker.co.uk/posts/blog/the-internet/migrating-my-services-away-from-us-providers.html?utm_source=rss

A homeopath being among roles on the UK skilled worker visa list just shows the government is now pandering to the 0.00000000000000000000001%

(Sorry.)

Yes, yes, this is a serious person testifying before Congress that Canada is less open to free speech than North Korea.

Tell me again that Bari Weiss's publication (for whom this person works) is a trustworthy publication on speech issues.

A Year of Bonnie A year ago, my son and I started the day by standing in the park waiting for Bonnie to be brought over by her

New Blog: A Year of Bonnie

https://www.bentasker.co.uk/posts/blog/general/marking-bonnies-first-year-with-us.html?utm_source=rss

I am (unsurprisingly) fairly burnt out on the OSA, having attended my first meeting on it in June 2019, so I'm only dealing with it for paid clients. But I take no pleasure in seeing those six years of warnings now turning into "I told you so"s.

Performing an Online Safety Act Assessment For mastodon.bentasker.co.uk I've been having a bit of a paperworky Sunday, sitting down and catching up with some of the admin on my list. It's never a

New Blog: Performing an Online Safety Act Assessment For mastodon.bentasker.co.uk

https://www.bentasker.co.uk/posts/blog/law/doing-an-osa-assessment-for-my-single-user-fedi-server.html?utm_source=rss