Tootfinder

Sources: the FTC is investigating whether Amazon and Google misled advertisers by not properly disclosing the terms and pricing for ads on their websites (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-09-12/amazon-goo…

Amazon, Google Probed by FTC Over Search Ad Practices (AMZN, GOOGL)
The US Federal Trade Commission is investigating whether Amazon.com Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google misled advertisers that place ads on their websites, according to people familiar with the matter.

Sources: the FTC is investigating whether Amazon and Google misled advertisers by not properly disclosing the terms and pricing for ads on their websites (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-09-12/amazon-goo…

Amazon, Google Probed by FTC Over Search Ad Practices (AMZN, GOOGL)
The US Federal Trade Commission is investigating whether Amazon.com Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google misled advertisers that place ads on their websites, according to people familiar with the matter.

qa_user: User interactions on Q&A websites (2016)
Networks of interactions among users from four online Q&A sites: Stack Overflow, Math Overflow, Super User, and Ask Ubuntu. A directed edge (i,j) indicates a user i responded to user j's post. Edges are timestamped. For each Q&A site, four differently defined networks are provided, based on the definition of an edge: (i) a user answered a question, (ii) a user commented on a question, (iii) a user commented on an answer…

Which Sectors Are Most Eager to Hire Defenders? An Analysis of Leading Job-Search Websites: https://benborges.xyz/2025/09/12/which-sectors-are-most-eager.html

Google is fond of saying its mission is to
"organize the world's information,"
but who gets to decide what information is worthy of organization?
A San Francisco tech CEO has spent the past several years attempting to remove unflattering information about himself from Google's search index,
and the nonprofit Freedom of the Press Foundation says he's still at it.
Most recently, an unknown bad actor used a bug in one of Google's search …

Google tool misused to scrub tech CEO’s shady past from search
Google has fixed the bug, which it says affected only “a tiny fraction of websites.”…

In case you missed it: This September will be … smashing! 😻💚
@… is coming back to Freiburg on September 8–11, and I’m thrilled and honoured (and a bit baffled) to be part of this incredible lineup! Get your tickets, friends! 🔥😁

Matthias Ott — Freiburg in Germany, September 8–11.
Matthias is an independent user experience designer and web design engineer. He teaches interface prototyping at Muthesius University of Fine Arts and Design and runs workshops on modern web design, design engineering, and prototyping. He writes Own Your Web, a newsletter about personal websites, and blogs about design, development, CSS, the open web, and more on matthiasott.com.

Anyone still think having Facebook or Meta around (or whatever that asshole Zuckerberg wants to call his bullshit company this week) is good for the fediverse? And they're making Social Network 2 to further glorify him. Fuck all this shit. https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/meta-facebo

LEAKED: A New List Reveals Top Websites Meta Is Scraping of Copyrighted Content to Train Its AI
The tech giant is sidestepping guardrails that websites use to prevent being scraped, data show, in a move whistleblowers say is unethical and potentially illegal.

#PSA #feditips It seems that Nepal has blocked access to (some?) Mastodon sites.
With domain fronting the blocking of many fediverse sites can be circumvented.
This is based on the fact that many websites share the same IP number. Therefore a government blocking access to a website can in many cases only block the domain, but not the IP of the site, otnerwise many other websites would be blocked too.
By either configuring a proxy in the mastodon app or on the device or by usin…

#PSA #feditips It seems that Nepal has blocked access to (some?) Mastodon sites.
With domain fronting the blocking of many fediverse sites can be circumvented.
This is based on the fact that many websites share the same IP number. Therefore a government blocking access to a website can in many cases only block the domain, but not the IP of the site, otnerwise many other websites would be blocked too.
By either configuring a proxy in the mastodon app or on the device or by usin…

Hi hi!! I really need some #MutualAid!!
I’m trying to find the full 45-minute documentary “The Anarchist Rabbi” (2014) by Adam Kossoff.
This movie is a documentary about Rudolf Rocker, a German anarchist who worked with Jewish migrants in London’s East End, and it’s narrated by Steven Berkoff.
Here’s the movie on IMDb and similar websites:
- IMDb:

Spannende Effekte, die #LLM auf mein Leben haben: ich reaktiviere alte Geräte, ggf. zur Weitergabe an andere. Liegt soviel rum, was mangels Anleitungen oder wegen kleinen Macken nicht genutzt wird. Mit KI ist Diagnose Zeug wieder zum laufen bringen so einfach wie nie für mich. Original-Websites schon tot, Links kaputt, aber es ist irgendwie im Modell...

UK researchers: 80 game cheat-selling websites generate $12.8M to $73.2M annually, with 30,000 to 174,000 monthly buyers across North America and Europe alone (Matt Burgess/Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/inside-the-multimillion-dollar-grey-ma…

Inside the Multimillion-Dollar Gray Market for Video Game Cheats
Gaming cheats are the bane of the video game industry—and a hot commodity. A recent study found that cheat creators are making a fortune from gamers looking to gain a quick edge.

If you read the "Bluesky requires IDs now" post:
1. This only applies to UK users.[1]
2. It's because the UK is building a surveillance state that requires websites and apps to do this, not because Bluesky is evil.[2]
3. It's either that or shut down in the UK.
Whether you like it or not, this also affects Mastodon—and even personal blogs with comments enabled.[3]
[1] https://www.theverge.com/news/704468/bluesky-age-verification-uk-online-safety-act
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Safety_Act_2023
[3] https://www.bentasker.co.uk/posts/blog/law/doing-an-osa-assessment-for-my-single-user-fedi-server.html

For me, if they say I have to use Chrome I extend a middle finger, delete the site if bookmarked and go elsewhere.
https://www.ghacks.net/2025/09/08/chrome-mask-make-firefox-appear-as-chrome-with-a-single-click/

I was googling whether there was a logo for the Open Source A.I. definition (OASID: https://opensource.org/ai). and I ended-up on one of those jolly logo generator websites. I think this one has delightful stalefish/surströmming vibes.
... and while you're here: Why not submit a talk proposal for the Every…

"The agency recently blocked users from accessing multiple websites and made password changes to an internet security tool in efforts to shore up its cyber posture"
FEMA begins security overhauls following cyber incident and employee firings

FEMA begins security overhauls following cyber incident and employee firings
The agency recently blocked users from accessing multiple websites and made password changes to an internet security tool in efforts to shore up its cyber posture, people familiar say.

heise | Wenn Websites verschwinden: Drei Wege, sie lokal im Original-Layout zu sichern
Websites verschwinden in alarmierendem Tempo und selbst die Wayback Machine ist nicht immer zuverlässig. So archivieren Sie Seiten lokal im Original-Layout.

Interesting numbers about US top websites.
https://pressgazette.co.uk/media-audience-and-business-data/media_metrics/most-popular-websites-news-us-monthly-3/

Top 50 news websites in the US: AP shrugs off Trump row with huge traffic boost
Press Gazette lists the top 50 biggest websites for news in the US. Monthly updated top 50 listing based on data from Similarweb.

TollBit: from Q4 2024 to Q1 2025, traffic from AI retrieval bots to 266 websites, half run by national and local news organizations, grew 49%, as AI usage jumps (Nitasha Tiku/Washington Post)

‘This is coming for everyone’: A new kind of AI bot takes over the web
As consumers switch from Google search to ChatGPT, a new kind of bot is scraping data for AI chatbots.

us_agencies: U.S. government agency websites (2018)
50 networks, one for each U.S. state, representing the web-based links between their associated government agencies websites. A node is an entire agency website and a directed edge (i,j) represents the existence of a hyperlink from any webpage in website i to some webpage in website j. Data was collected with a crawler. Nodes are annotated with the number of webpages per website, website name (related to its government function) and U…

When generating #websites with #AI, remember that your experience is the most valuable contribution you can make.

Fake CNN and BBC sites used to push investment scams https://therecord.media/news-websites-faked-to-spread-investment-scams

Is Google about to destroy the web?
#Internet

According to Dropsitenews Meta is training AI on multiple Lemmy instances. I also saw some mastodon instance in the PDF.
Full article https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/meta-facebook-tech-copyright-privacy-whistleblower
Full list:

TollBit: from Q4 2024 to Q1 2025, traffic from AI retrieval bots to 266 websites, including national and local news organizations, grew 49%, as AI usage jumps (Nitasha Tiku/Washington Post)

‘This is coming for everyone’: A new kind of AI bot takes over the web
As consumers switch from Google search to ChatGPT, a new kind of bot is scraping data for AI chatbots.

Also have “developers” CALLING me now wanting to do websites for my domains. I haven’t added any domains recently, and all of them redirect to a website, except for my mail server, which I added 15 years ago. Are things that bad in the IT job market?

Spannende Effekte, die #LLM auf mein Leben haben: ich reaktiviere alte Geräte, ggf. zur Weitergabe an andere. Liegt soviel rum, was mangels Anleitungen oder wegen kleinen Macken nicht genutzt wird. Mit #KI macht Diagnose Zeug wieder zum laufen bringen viel mehr Spaß.
Original-Websites schon to…

@… @ethicalrevolution I see you share reviews from other websites, so wondering if mine might qualify. Thanks for your efforts for unsigned musicians. https://muz4now.com/category/biz/unsig

Unsigned Musicians Archives

Encyclopedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster sue Perplexity, alleging that it unlawfully scraped their websites and redirected their traffic to its AI summaries (Blake Brittain/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/e

Wolf admits sheep population is in ‘rapid decline’. https://flipboard.com/@thenewsdesk/business-nbfr4cs7z/-/a-1AhrCxHAS1i_bbcq3SK6Hw:a:43591897-/0

Google admits the open web is in ‘rapid decline’
The statement contradicts Google’s recent narrative about the health of the online ecosystem. For months, Google has maintained that the web is “thriving,” AI isn’t tanking traffic, and its search engine is sending people to a wider variety of websites than ever. But in a court filing from last …

Encyclopedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster sue Perplexity, alleging that it unlawfully scraped their websites and redirected their traffic to its AI summaries (Blake Brittain/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/e

KIMissbrauch
Cloudflare wirft dem KI-Anbieter ##Perplexity vor, sich mit undeklarierten Crawlern Zugang zu gesperrten Websites zu verschaffen.
Trotz robots.txt-Verboten und IP-Blockaden soll Perplexity mit wechselnden User-Agents und IPs Inhalte verdeckt auslesen.
Das wäre eine Verletzung etablierter Webstandards und Missachtung von Website-Präferenzen.

Perplexity is using stealth, undeclared crawlers to evade website no-crawl directives
Perplexity is repeatedly modifying their user agent and changing IPs and ASNs to hide their crawling activity, in direct conflict with explicit no-crawl preferences expressed by websites.

AI startup Perplexity is crawling and scraping content from websites that have explicitly indicated they don’t want to be scraped, according to internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare.
On Monday, Cloudflare published research saying it observed the AI startup ignore blocks and hide its crawling and scraping activities.
The network infrastructure giant accused Perplexity of obscuring its identity when trying to scrape web pages “in an attempt to circumvent the website’s prefe…

Perplexity accused of scraping websites that explicitly blocked AI scraping | TechCrunch
Internet giant Cloudflare says it detected Perplexity crawling and scraping websites, even after customers had added technical blocks telling Perplexity not to scrape their pages.

»Static Site Generators - Hugo:
Hugo ist einer der beliebtesten Open-Source-Generatoren für statische Websites. Mit seiner erstaunlichen Geschwindigkeit und Flexibilität macht das Erstellen von Websites mit Hugo wieder Spaß.«
Ich pers. bevorzuge Zola, da ich ein Rust Fanboy bin und es extrem schnell ist aber im allgemeinen sind jegliche statische Seiten in den meisten Fällen absolut ausreichend.
🌐

Serie: Static Site Generators - Hugo (Teil 1)
Hugo ist einer der beliebtesten Open-Source-Generatoren für statische Websites. Mit seiner erstaunlichen Geschwindigkeit und Flexibilität macht das Erstellen von Websites mit Hugo wieder Spaß.

From a 2016 idea to national policy: using transparency to fix security, cut costs & boost control. Now also in Belgium — and measuring accessibility too. See how open data, cyber tokens & a few surprises at #WHY2025 make society safer (and some people nervous).

How we made the Netherlands more secure and accessible using transparency WHY2025
It started with a simple idea in 2016: make the state of security of our government transparent/public. The simple idea has become national government policy. Using transparency we've helped fix tons of security issues, reduce costs and increased control on IT. This year we've rolled out in Belgium and started measuring accessibility of websites in the same fashion. Learn how we've achieved extreme impact with a minimal budget and keep on doing so. Security and accessibility must be commodities.

Trump regime rewriting climate science.
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/08/07/climate/wright-national-climate-assessments-updating

Energy chief suggests Trump administration is altering previously published climate reports
Wright said the Trump administration is updating the National Climate Assessments that have been previously published, which the administration recently removed from government websites.

I forgot that I need to add "RewriteBase /" to the .htaccess when using Datenstrom Yellow (#cms

Layered, Overlapping, and Inconsistent: A Large-Scale Analysis of the Multiple Privacy Policies and Controls of U.S. Banks
Lu Xian, Van Tran, Lauren Lee, Meera Kumar, Yichen Zhang, Florian Schaub
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.05415

Layered, Overlapping, and Inconsistent: A Large-Scale Analysis of the Multiple Privacy Policies and Controls of U.S. Banks
Privacy policies are often complex. An exception is the two-page standardized notice that U.S. financial institutions must provide under the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA). However, banks now operate websites, mobile apps, and other services that involve complex data sharing practices that require additional privacy notices and do-not-sell opt-outs. We conducted a large-scale analysis of how U.S. banks implement privacy policies and controls in response to GLBA; other federal privacy policy requ…

I recently bought a fan. You know, because it's hot.
I really wanted something decent, so I spent 3 hours researching the market, tracking down whitelabel products and their resellers, checking brand websites and "data sheets". I queried trade registers to find out from where and for how long they have been operating and which brands belong to them. I also used the internet archive to trace supplier changes over time.
This is completely normal, right?
I call it…

us_agencies: U.S. government agency websites (2018)
50 networks, one for each U.S. state, representing the web-based links between their associated government agencies websites. A node is an entire agency website and a directed edge (i,j) represents the existence of a hyperlink from any webpage in website i to some webpage in website j. Data was collected with a crawler. Nodes are annotated with the number of webpages per website, website name (related to its government function) and U…

“AI has brought the cost of disinformation down to nothing. It has automated bullshit.”
#ArtificialStupidity https://www.desmog.com/2025/08/27/ai-slop-…

AI ‘Slop’ Websites Are Publishing Climate Science Denial
At the start of June, MSN, the world’s fourth-largest news aggregator, posted an article from a new climate-focused publication, Climate Cosmos, entitled: “Why Top Experts Are Rethinking Climate Alarmism”. The article – by “Kathleen Westbrook M.Sc Climate Science” – cited a finding from the “Global Climate Research Institute” that “65 percent of surveyed climate professionals […]

A German court ruled Meta's tracking pixels embedded in third-party websites and apps violate the EU's GDPR, ordering it to pay €5,000 to a German Facebook user (Suzanne Smalley/The Record)
https://therecord.media/german-court-meta-tracking-tech

German court rules Meta tracking technology violates European privacy laws
The court in Leipzig ruled that Meta must pay €5,000 ($5,900) to a German Facebook user who sued the platform for embedding tracking technology in third-party websites — a ruling that could open the door to other lawsuits.

It’s amazing how many replies I’m getting that “vibe coding is fine, it doesn’t matter if software actually works”.
People literally die or get hurt all the time when websites or apps don’t work, because they get false information or they’re incorrectly flagged or they hit some edge case and stuff just doesn’t happen.
Power gets turned off. Medications don’t arrive. Accounts get frozen. Credit scores ruined. Personal information leaked.
If you don’t take making software seriously you should fuck right off and leave the field.

Noch einige der zuletzt hier besonders häufig geteilten #News:
Nach Datenlecks bei Hunderten Restaurant-Seiten: Datenschutzbehörde prüft Panne

With a little experience, it's easy to identify website search queries that don't work. In this session, @… used live examples from several high-profile websites to demonstrate how to effectively break search. He explained what is meant by 'broken' search, the different types of failure and what these problems reveal about the underlying search…

Imagine if #Laravel, the company, actually shared news on their own website instead of X.
It would be like all the people everywhere could read it.
https://oldfriends.live/@paul/11480878

I’m quoted here regarding the ethics in not disclosing to students and defense contractors that their information may have been leaked in an Indiana University data breach. Still no word of a third party investigator being engaged. Dear Internet, do your thing.
https://www.

Administrator says IU will never explain IT security breach publicly
For more than three weeks, Indiana University websites have been down, disrupting and frustrating the university community.

Medien werden in der Google Suche kaum noch gefunden
AI Overview in der Suche und die weiteren KI-Tools von Google sorgen dafür, dass bei vielen Websites der Traffic einbricht. Denn vielfach entfällt durch etwa die KI-Übersichten in der Suche die Notwendigkeit, überhaupt noch eine Website aufzurufen.
Damit droht das Ende des Journalismus und leichtes Spiel für Manipulatoren.
Via #savesocial

Google AI Overview sorgt offenbar für massive Traffic-Einbrüche bei vielen Websites
Über viele Jahre war es eine Symbiose: Die Suchmaschine von Google hat Besucher zu Websites geleitet, die Verlage haben die Inhalte ...

This coming Monday is the 33rd anniversary of my registering omnigroup.com. (Along with wizards.com: having dug up the registration forms, figured I might as well fill out both of them at the same time.)
Back then, registering an Internet domain was free, you just had to fill out the paperwork and send it to the right place. This was mostly done for the sake of having a domain for email and ftp, not websites, since only a few of us crazy NeXT people were using the World Wide Web at tha…

"The #cloud isn’t your friend. It’s a business. And when their business needs conflict with your data’s existence, guess which one wins?"
"I wasn’t alone in being targeted by AWS—especially #MENA. Hundreds of Reddit threads, websites, forums, all telling similar stories."
"

Я знала, что #Hetzner - контора пидарасов, но чтобы настолько...
История такая. Я нашла интересный поисковик https://searchmysite.net и захотела добавить в него свой личный веб-сайт, но получила ошибку: "…

Sometimes I think the vibe coding fad will pass, and people will realize that just putting a little bit more cognitive effort in up front—and keeping a strong simplicity bias—will lead to a much simpler, more maintainable product.
Then I think about the way modern websites are built.

Ok interwebs/mastodon/fediverse. I need your help.
I need to figure out the best way to tune in to EVERY AND ANY LaLiga team game.
Is it possible online? (Legit, no pirate websites please)
It can be in English or en Español.
⚽️
Using a VPN service is probably a requirement so if you have recommendations for that, please include.
Thank you!! 🙏
#laliga #sports #deportes #espana #laliga #help #askMastodon

AI Agents for Web Testing: A Case Study in the Wild
Naimeng Ye, Xiao Yu, Ruize Xu, Tianyi Peng, Zhou Yu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.05197 https://arxiv.org/…

AI Agents for Web Testing: A Case Study in the Wild
Automated web testing plays a critical role in ensuring high-quality user experiences and delivering business value. Traditional approaches primarily focus on code coverage and load testing, but often fall short of capturing complex user behaviors, leaving many usability issues undetected. The emergence of large language models (LLM) and AI agents opens new possibilities for web testing by enabling human-like interaction with websites and a general awareness of common usability problems. In thi…

Tipp: Seitenvorschau in Safari auf dem Mac nutzen
Eine nützliche iOS-Funktion zur Vorschau von Websites funktioniert auch unter macOS. Wir zeigen, wie Sie vorgehen.
https://www.heise.de/ra…

@… I follow websites/publications that feature the kind of music I prefer. I also follow quite a few artists on FB (I know, but it is one of the few things that FB is good for) and see who they like.

us_agencies: U.S. government agency websites (2018)
50 networks, one for each U.S. state, representing the web-based links between their associated government agencies websites. A node is an entire agency website and a directed edge (i,j) represents the existence of a hyperlink from any webpage in website i to some webpage in website j. Data was collected with a crawler. Nodes are annotated with the number of webpages per website, website name (related to its government function) and U…

"Today, over two and a half million websites have chosen to completely disallow AI training through our managed robots.txt feature or our managed rule blocking AI Crawlers. Every Cloudflare customer is now able to selectively decide which declared AI crawlers are able to access their content in accordance with their business objectives.
We expected a change in bot and crawler behavior based on these new features, and we expect that the techniques bot operators use to evade detecti…

Perplexity is using stealth, undeclared crawlers to evade website no-crawl directives
Perplexity is repeatedly modifying their user agent and changing IPs and ASNs to hide their crawling activity, in direct conflict with explicit no-crawl preferences expressed by websites.

Websites expand ancestry records of enslaved people (Russell Contreras/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2025/06/19/websites-expand-ancestry-records-enslaved-people
http://www.memeorandum.com/250619/p17#a250619p17

I wish RSS/Atom had opt-in CSS.
I appreciate that I can effectively download a website and read it whenever I want, but so many websites I read are quite pretty.
I’d love it if they showed up just as pretty in my feed reader, with the option to toggle it per feed.

Yes! More of this sort of thing please, News Websites.
"He just likes being a giant cat. He doesn't frighten our dog."
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/crmvvy2d9p4o

»HTTP/1.1 Must Die – It's time to acknowledge HTTP/1.1 is insecure«
Admittedly, I know pers. not how seriously you have to take this but I am only developing web servers set to HTTP/2.0, because HTTP/3 is not yet extensively supported.
🪦 https://http1mustdie.com

HTTP/1.1 Must Die
Upstream HTTP/1.1 is inherently insecure, and routinely exposes millions of websites to hostile takeover. Join the mission to kill HTTP/1.1 now

Strong regulation can nudge automakers to improve customers’ privacy, research suggests https://therecord.media/automakers-data-privacy-ratings-websites-customer-portals

A researcher says 245 extensions on nearly 1M devices are overriding security protections to turn browsers into engines that scrape websites for a paid service (Dan Goodin/Ars Technica)
https://arstechnica.com/security/2025/

Browser extensions turn nearly 1 million browsers into website-scraping bots
Extensions load unknown sites into invisible Windows. What could go wrong?

Oh man, the cybersecurity news is piling up ahead of next week's Hacker Summer Camp, so check out today's Metacurity to stay on top of critical infosec developments you should know, including
--The US Army booted Easterly from West Point post to pacify a conspiracy theorist,
--Big Balls got his hands on sensitive law enforcement HR and payroll systems,
--Fraudsters are flooding Discord with polished websites,
--Likely DPRK hackers stole $44m from India's Co…

The US Army booted Easterly from West Point post to pacify a conspiracy theorist
Big Balls got his hands on sensitive law enforcement HR and payroll systems, Fraudsters are flooding Discord with polished websites, Likely DPRK hackers stole $44m from India's CoinDCX, 90 state and local gov'ts targeted in SharePoint attacks, SSNs swiped in Allianz breach, much more

Man könnte ja eigentlich auch mal die #Stromspeicher grafisch darstellen. 🤔
Wobei es ja eigentlich schon Websites mit solchen Darstellungen gibt. Und jeder versucht wohl krampfhaft, irgendwas aus der gruseligen #Datenqualität der

Companies too. Like my gym. https://oldfriends.live/@paul/114808787833782813

Anubis verifies that any visitor to a site is a human using a browser as opposed to a bot.
🍿One of the ways it does this is by making the browser do a type of cryptographic math with JavaScript or other subtle checks that browsers do by default but bots have to be explicitly programmed to do.
This check is invisible to the user, and most browsers since 2022 are able to complete this test.
In theory, bot scrapers could pretend to be users with browsers as well, but the ad…

The Open-Source Software Saving the Internet From AI Bot Scrapers
Anubis, which block AI scrapers from scraping websites to death, has been downloaded almost 200,000 times.

A June ranking of the top 25 local public radio/TV websites in the US based on traffic shows MPR at the top, followed by LAist and Oregon Public Broadcasting (Joshua Benton/Nieman Lab)
https://www.niemanlab.org/2025/08/these-pu

These public radio stations have built online audiences that’ll help them survive federal cuts
They may have been born on the airwaves, but these public media stations compete on the web as well. Here's our first monthly ranking of the top 25 local public media websites in the United States.

Alright, so … websites! ✨

'SEO fraud-as-a-service' scheme hijacks Windows servers to promote gambling websites https://therecord.media/seo-scheme-windows-malware-gambling-sites-ghostredirector

Just Dork and Crawl: Measuring Illegal Online Gambling Defacement in Indonesian Websites
Luqman Muhammad Zagi, Girindro Pringgo Digdo, Wervyan Shalannanda
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.19368

Just Dork and Crawl: Measuring Illegal Online Gambling Defacement in Indonesian Websites
This study investigates the defacement of Indonesian websites by actors promoting illegal online gambling. Using a lightweight methodology that combines keyword-driven dorking with systematic crawling, we identified 453 defaced webpages within one month. Although dorking alone yielded a false positive rate of approximately 20.3\%, the integration of crawling and keyword-counting enabled reliable differentiation between true and false positives. Our measurements revealed diverse defacement behav…

Sources: OpenAI plans an AI-powered web browser with some user interactions within a ChatGPT-like native chat interface instead of clicking through to websites (Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/op…

qa_user: User interactions on Q&A websites (2016)
Networks of interactions among users from four online Q&A sites: Stack Overflow, Math Overflow, Super User, and Ask Ubuntu. A directed edge (i,j) indicates a user i responded to user j's post. Edges are timestamped. For each Q&A site, four differently defined networks are provided, based on the definition of an edge: (i) a user answered a question, (ii) a user commented on a question, (iii) a user commented on an answer…

Cloudflare launches Pay per Crawl, a marketplace letting sites charge AI crawlers per crawl; new sites set up with Cloudflare will block AI crawlers by default (Maxwell Zeff/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/01/clou

Cloudflare launches a marketplace that lets websites charge AI bots for scraping | TechCrunch
Cloudflare is launching a new marketplace that reimagines the relationship between publishers and AI companies.

heise | Obsidian: Wie man Notizen als Website veröffentlicht
Obsidian erleichtert nicht nur das persönliche Wissensmanagement – die flexible Notizen-App befüllt und verwaltet auch Websites. Inhalte gehen rasch online.

The orders of complexity of websites (and what they imply for the design of web platform features) #design

Cloudflare launches Pay per Crawl, a marketplace letting sites charge AI crawlers per crawl; new sites set up with Cloudflare will block AI crawlers by default (Maxwell Zeff/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/01/clou

Cloudflare launches a marketplace that lets websites charge AI bots for scraping | TechCrunch
Cloudflare is launching a new marketplace that reimagines the relationship between publishers and AI companies.

A look at various responses to AI firms' scraping, like open source Anubis that uses cryptographic JavaScript challenges, Cloudflare's "link mazes", and more (Emanuel Maiberg/404 Media)
https://www.404media.co/the-open-source-so

The Open-Source Software Saving the Internet From AI Bot Scrapers
Anubis, which block AI scrapers from scraping websites to death, has been downloaded almost 200,000 times.

us_agencies: U.S. government agency websites (2018)
50 networks, one for each U.S. state, representing the web-based links between their associated government agencies websites. A node is an entire agency website and a directed edge (i,j) represents the existence of a hyperlink from any webpage in website i to some webpage in website j. Data was collected with a crawler. Nodes are annotated with the number of webpages per website, website name (related to its government function) and U…

China-linked hackers spoof big-name brand websites to steal shoppers' payment info https://therecord.media/china-linked-hackers-website-phishing

JavaScript broke the web (and called it progress) #JavaScript

JavaScript broke the web (and called it progress)
We replaced simple websites with complex apps nobody asked for. Now it takes a complex build pipeline just to change a headline.

Cloudflare vs. KI-Bots: "Die Menschheit braucht vom Menschen gemachte Inhalte"
Der Netzdienstleister blockiert künftig Crawler, die Websites für KI-Training nutzen. Ziel sind neue Geschäftsmodelle, sagt Strategiechefin Stephanie Cohen.

German court rules Meta tracking technology violates European privacy laws https://therecord.media/german-court-meta-tracking-tech

A look at various responses to AI firms' scraping, like open source Anubis that uses cryptographic JavaScript challenges, Cloudflare's "link mazes", and more (Emanuel Maiberg/404 Media)
https://www.404media.co/the-open-source-so

The Open-Source Software Saving the Internet From AI Bot Scrapers
Anubis, which block AI scrapers from scraping websites to death, has been downloaded almost 200,000 times.

us_agencies: U.S. government agency websites (2018)
50 networks, one for each U.S. state, representing the web-based links between their associated government agencies websites. A node is an entire agency website and a directed edge (i,j) represents the existence of a hyperlink from any webpage in website i to some webpage in website j. Data was collected with a crawler. Nodes are annotated with the number of webpages per website, website name (related to its government function) and U…

SB Nation redesigns its websites to include community content, part of Vox's broader strategy to recapture engagement and counter AI's impact on search traffic (Sara Fischer/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2025/08/05/sb-nation-redesign-vox-media

SB Nation redesigns sites as Vox Media readies for Google Zero
The redesign is meant to help the brand recapture engagement that occurs on external social media feeds instead of its sites.

Interview with Lovable CEO Anton Osika on competition, staying in Europe, and more; the company now has 2.3M active users, including 180K paying subscribers (Dominic-Madori Davis/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/01/lovables-ceo-is…

Lovable's CEO isn't too worried about the vibe-coding competition | TechCrunch
Lovable specializes in helping people build apps and websites, especially people with no coding experience. It's one of the standouts in the popular AI category known as vibe-coding, which lets users guide AI models as they produce code, websites, or whole applications.

Google says total organic click volume from Search to websites has been "relatively stable" YoY and it's sending "slightly more quality clicks" than a year ago (Liz Reid/The Keyword)
https://blog.google/products/search/ai-sear…

AI in Search is driving more queries and higher quality clicks
We continue to send billions of clicks to the web every day and are committed to prioritizing the web in our AI experiences in Search.

An Indicator analysis of 85 AI "nudify" websites: the sites averaged 18.5M monthly visitors, may generate up to $36M annually, and rely on Big Tech services (Matt Burgess/Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/ai-nudify-websites-are-raking-in-millions-…

AI 'Nudify' Websites Are Raking in Millions of Dollars
Millions of people are accessing harmful AI “nudify” websites. New analysis says the sites are making millions and rely on tech from US companies.

us_agencies: U.S. government agency websites (2018)
50 networks, one for each U.S. state, representing the web-based links between their associated government agencies websites. A node is an entire agency website and a directed edge (i,j) represents the existence of a hyperlink from any webpage in website i to some webpage in website j. Data was collected with a crawler. Nodes are annotated with the number of webpages per website, website name (related to its government function) and U…

Nevada state websites, phone lines knocked offline by cyberattack https://therecord.media/nevada-state-websites-phones-cyberattack-disruption

Google says total organic click volume from Search to websites has been "relatively stable" YoY and it's sending "slightly more quality clicks" than a year ago (Liz Reid/The Keyword)
https://blog.google/products/search/ai-sear…

AI in Search is driving more queries and higher quality clicks
We continue to send billions of clicks to the web every day and are committed to prioritizing the web in our AI experiences in Search.

us_agencies: U.S. government agency websites (2018)
50 networks, one for each U.S. state, representing the web-based links between their associated government agencies websites. A node is an entire agency website and a directed edge (i,j) represents the existence of a hyperlink from any webpage in website i to some webpage in website j. Data was collected with a crawler. Nodes are annotated with the number of webpages per website, website name (related to its government function) and U…

Newsletter service Ghost says publishers have earned $100M on it, its annual revenue is $8.5M , it now supports ActivityPub, and is upping new member pricing (Neel Dhanesha/Nieman Lab)
https://www.niemanlab.org/2025/08/ghost-makes-it-easier-to-publish-t…

Newsletter service Ghost says publishers have earned $100M on it, its annual revenue is $8.5M , it now supports ActivityPub, and is upping new member pricing (Neel Dhanesha/Nieman Lab)
https://www.niemanlab.org/2025/08/ghost-makes-it-easier-to-publish-t…

Silicon Valley has shifted from Web 2.0 to a new "hard tech", AI-dominated era with fewer perks and a more serious mood, as startups use San Francisco as a base (Mike Isaac/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/04/technology/ai-silicon-valle…

A.I. Has Ushered in Silicon Valley’s ‘Hard Tech’ Era
Goodbye to the age of consumer websites and mobile apps. Artificial intelligence has ushered in an era of what insiders in the nation’s innovation capital call “hard tech.”

Cloudflare says Perplexity uses stealth crawling techniques, like undeclared user agents and rotating IP addresses, to evade robots.txt rules and network blocks (Cloudflare)
https://blog.cloudflare.com/perplexity-is-using-stea…

Perplexity is using stealth, undeclared crawlers to evade website no-crawl directives
Perplexity is repeatedly modifying their user agent and changing IPs and ASNs to hide their crawling activity, in direct conflict with explicit no-crawl preferences expressed by websites.

Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia, named by Trump as the first US chief design officer, says he wants to update federal websites to an "Apple Store-like experience" (Mike Allen/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2025/08/23/gebbia-chief-design-officer-airbnb

Scoop: Trump's new "Apple Store"
Gebbia, a co-founder of Airbnb, tells Axios he wants to update federal websites to be an "Apple Store-like experience."