Would YOU spend £8,000 on a wood-fired hot tub? Eco-friendly models promise 'rustic' feel and 'off-grid' set-up, but experts warn of overheating and flammability risks
They're all the rage for homeowners hoping to create a rustic Scandi spa paradise - but experts have warned that 'wood-fired hot tubs' may not be as relaxing as they seem...
Pupils to debate both 'triumphs and traumas' of the British Empire to counteract 'algorithm-driven outrage'
Parallel Histories, which works with more than 3,000 schools, wants to give more teachers the confidence to tackle 'contested topics'.
Tiger Woods is finally toppled from golf's all-time earnings list after 26 years... as new superstar passes legend's $120 MILLION career total
After a 26-year run, Tiger Woods is no longer golf's all-time leader in career earnings - a distinction that now belongs to one of the game's budding superstars.
AI's 'Creepy' Crawlers Criticized by Linux Foundation's IT Infrastructure Director
The Linux Foundation's director of IT infrastructure says they now spend more CPU cycles "rendering commits for scrapers than we spend on all other kinds of legitimate access."
At any one time, across 5 geo-distributed nodes, there are 14 CPU cores doing nothing but rendering git commits as html....
[W]hen a source is guaranteed to be LLM-free, like the entire history of kernel commits, it's worth its weight in gold as a source of training data... At the time of writing, linux.git is about 1.48 million commits. Oh, and we have about 922 forks of it on git.kernel.org — but don't worry, it's actually extremely efficient on the backend, since it's mostly the same objects in every fork. Unless, of course, you're a scraper, in which case you have, oh, several BILLION valid URLs you can scrape, only to get 922 duplicates of the same 1.48 million commits — which is exactly what the scrapers are doing. But wait, it's not just commits itself. You can also ask for patches, plain renders, diffs between arbitrary commits — cgit is happy to let you, which was perfect for the times when the Internet was for humans or crawlers who obeyed robots.txt, and is AWFUL right about now, because we can generate 1.2 METRIC BAJILLION valid URLs just for a single fork of linux.git.
Initially, this was the solution — look through the logs, find out which IPs are obvious scraper bots, and fail2ban them. At first, this was easy, because the bots helpfully told you who they were via their user-agent. Then, they wised up and started pretending that they were random vanilla browsers. So, we started banning them by IP — after all, it's easy to figure out that an IP that is trying to grab every possible commit in a 8-year-old abandoned fork of linux is not really some lone Chrome on Windows user who is just furiously clicking every link that comes across their screen. The bots then started fanning out to entire subnets, but this was still meh, because obviously an IP coming from Google Compute is just pretending to be a Firefox user...
And... that's when things turned really, really ugly. Suddenly, the crawlers were coming from millions of random residential or mobile IPs, all pretending to be random modern browsers. An IP like that would make 4-5 requests and then never show up in the logs again... They descended like swarms of locust, hit hard and fast until the system fell over and then moved on to the next target until you recovered. Then, they returned. Rinse. Repeat. They still do that — welcome to the wonderful world of "proxy SDK monetization." It's big business, and your TV is probably doing it...
Today, git.kernel.org receives about 6M daily requests demanding to see random commits. Of these, 66% are still immediately batted away with the Anubis challenge, but 33% are now solving the math and getting through to the main site — because apparently what we have to offer is worth spending a ton of cycles to calculate the Anubis challenge... With a bunch of generous assumptions, legitimate requests are only about 2% of git.kernel.org traffic — everything else are scrapers...
[W]e're turning off features to reduce the number of crawlable URLs and to gate off actions that are expensive for us to run. Expect to lose some functionality, at least when accessing our resources anonymously. Trust me, we hate it just as much as you, but at this point it's a necessity... [W]e promise to still offer all of our data for download to anyone who asks. You just may have to jump through more hoops to get it.
Sorry.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Sophie Habboo poses topless while cradling son Ziggy as she shares sweet snaps with husband Jamie Laing to mark the end of summer
Sophie Habboo posed topless while cradling son Ziggy as she shared sweet Instagram snaps to mark the end of summer on Sunday.
Ex-BBC star who bought a derelict water tower for £138k and turned it into a spectacular Grand Designs style home is selling it for £3m
Russell Harris, 68, and his wife Jannette, 56, spent seven years transforming the abandoned 19th-century tower in affluent Lymm, Cheshire, after purchasing it for just £138,000 in 1997.
Cruz Beckham rocks Leeds Festival a day after Victoria and David supported him at Reading - as he pays tribute to girlfriend Jackie Apostel for her support of his music career
Cruz Beckham rocked Leeds Festival on Sunday amid a busy weekend for his budding music career which saw his parents Victoria and David support him at Reading.
€2.3million is paid out to four of the 16 families of people who were killed in the Lisbon funicular crash - as final report into tragedy is delayed
Almost one year following the Lisbon Glória disaster, Fidelidade has confirmed it will commit the sum toward compensation and other costs to relatives of some victims.
Met Gala could be rescheduled amid growing row with Jewish community over tribute to British designer John Galliano 15 years on from his antisemitic rant
Next year's Met Gala in New York could be rescheduled in a row over its decision to honour British fashion designer John Galliano - 15 years on from him making an antisemitic tirade.
'Golden goodbyes' for civil servants and staff at taxpayer-funded public bodies double to more than £300million after Whitehall headcounts soared by third, audit finds
An audit of Government accounts by the Mail found 6,000 former staff got exit packages worth £336million last year (2025/26).
Cyclist, 16, dies after being hit by car in Birmingham: Man is arrested
A 16-year-old boy was fatally struck near Birmingham City Stadium in Small Heath in the early hours of Friday morning.
Ranvir Singh reveals she overcame her phobia of water for new ITV gameshow The Box and says it helped her bond with her teenage son
She's known for quizzing politicians and reading the headlines on Good Morning Britain.
It's the Arctic's luminous beauty that makes this icy thriller so cool: CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews BBC's Vigil
Lions can be fended off with a chair. A punch on the nose deters sharks. But never try to keep a polar bear at bay by belting it with a police truncheon. This will only antagonise it.
Gary Lineker and Graeme Souness forced to put their differences aside for new ITV gameshow The Box as ex-Liverpool midfielder said he wanted to 'smash' his nemesis a few times' during filming
They were once rivals on the pitch, and in recent years found themselves clashing over opinions.
Debian votes to let contributors code with AI
Disclosure optional, quality mandatory
Woman, 40, died after taking monkey dust days after Christmas, inquest hears
Natalie Doorbar was found dead at a home in Biddulph, Staffordshire, on December 27, having used the synthetic drug.
Chess.com Launches New Poker Site, Plans More Classic Game Sites with Player Ratings - Thanks to AI Protyping
In May Chess.com "quietly launched" a free educational poker site named Gambit, reports The Verge, where players can learn the game and improve an Elo-like rating without risking real money. And next Chess.com will expand into more classic games, including go, backgammon, and mahjong:
Like Gambit, Chess.com is developing Elo-style rating systems for these games, as well. [Chess.com's chief growth officer, Albert Cheng] didn't say when the new sites will launch but that "development is moving quite rapidly" on them, using the same playbook he used for Gambit... He and one other employee took Gambit from prototype to launch within a year, partly with help from AI, mainly for coding tasks. "I think the biggest advantage that it's provided is essentially being able to read our existing codebase and our design system and apply consistent patterns to how we develop Chess.com over to a different platform and do so quickly," Cheng said.... "Just because code is easier to write doesn't mean that you just let it run on its own, but it certainly is a superpower in getting things off the ground."
Cheng also said the version of Gambit that's live at the time of writing has "zero or close to zero" AI-created assets, which were used in early prototypes.
According to Cheng, without help from AI, getting another site up and running would have required a bigger team or "would have been a lot more disruptive to the status quo of building and growing Chess." Now that a "small, scrappy" team can get a new platform off the ground much faster, it's opened the door for Chess.com to dip into more games, starting with poker.
The poker site already has 75,000 members, according to a blog post Friday — and they've already played nearly 20 million hands and completed 100,000 lessons. The site is now holding a daily poker tournament, and on Monday will broadcast the event with live commentary on their Twitch and YouTube channels.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
'They only made friends with people who could help them': What Meghan and Harry's Montecito neighbours REALLY think of them... as brutal locals reveal what couple got up to, their very rich friends - and huge potential windfall
Sitting forlornly on an oak table, three lonely tins of Meghan Markle's $15 flower sprinkles are all that remain of what was once a lavishly promoted outpost of the Duchess's Californian empire.
Iris Law shows off her toned figure in a skimpy green bikini as she gives a glimpse of her fun-filled summer
She is never shy showing off her incredible figure.
Revealed: The rules loophole that led to Man United's second goal being given despite Harry Maguire handling the ball
Harry Maguire's 'goal' against Ipswich Town left fans across the nation scratching their heads. How could a goal, where the player seemingly handled the ball before shooting, stand?