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1000 results for “cheukting_ho”
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Trying to understand how to host an #onion site. Can someone confirm if I'm understanding this correctly and maybe fill in a gap or two?
The #tor client runs on a server and (somehow) receives requests from the network. The tor client then sends those requests to a webserver (via IP:Port), where the server does its normal thing by checking the host requested and matching it to the appropriate virtual server block. The site is served by the webserver back the tor client, who in turn sends it back out over the tor network.
Is that right? What port does the tor client actually listen to for incoming requests (what would I need to allow in my firewall)? Do tor and the webserver have to run on the same machine, or can I run tor on my reverse proxy and have it point to a webserver on another machine like a standard http site? If I have multiple clearnet and onion sites on the same server, is there any risk of one exposing the other?
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#PhysicsJournalClub
"Three-dimensional holographic imaging of incoherent objects through scattering media"
by Y. Baek, H. de Aguiar and @sylvaingigan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.01475
#optics #physics #imagingAs you daily experience anytime you look at anything, light scattering severely impairs your ability to image (mild scattering like mist makes things in a distance fuzzy, strong scattering like your own body makes it completely impossible to see what is happening inside or behind it). On one hand this is good, as it allows us to see where (e.g.) trees are so we don't bump into them. On the other hand there are a LOT of situations where you would really like to see what is going on behind a scattering medium (surely it would save a lot of exploratory surgeries).
The problem of imaging through a scattering medium is largely unsolvable in its most general form, but there are a lot of special cases where you can go surprisingly far, and people (me included) have spent a lot of time checking exactly how far.In this paper the authors consider a set of small fluorescent objects behind a not-too-thick scattering medium, and look for a way to retrieve their 3D arrangement.
Problem: fluorescent emission means incoherent emission, so the phase information (which encodes a lot of information about position) is lost. Still, we can rely on the assumption that there is a finite (ideally not too large) amount of point emitters. Since each emitter is point-like, if we only measure the light that reaches us through the scattering medium at a single frequency (to be more realistic, a small bandwidth), we will see the incoherent sum of a speckle pattern per fluorescent emitter.
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🎵 A helping hand you lend 🎵
My Friend (Official Video) - Groove Armada
* Me (checking my home #Fediverse #CyberPlace #Mastodon timeline several times a day 😍)
(Look it up on your favorite music player, or use this #EVIL link…)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxohJX9ElpE -
Still doing some testing with leaflet.pub, this time checking out how and whether using it to post photography would work. (I'd like to vastly simplify my website / online publishing & sharing approach if possible).
#photography #streetphotography #fotografie #blogging #japan #tokyo #japanlife #tokyolife #itabashi #photographersofmastodon #shotoniphone
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https://www.kpopnsfw.com/163091/nayeon-checking-out-her-hot-maknae-tzuyu-%f0%9f%a9%b5%f0%9f%92%99/ Nayeon checking out her hot maknae Tzuyu 🩵💙 #checking #ChouTzuyu #hot #maknae #nayeon #Twice #tzuyu
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CW: +18
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CW: +18
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7 years ago while in #Edinburgh for #OSSEU I walked past this building after dinner thinking it looks cool and reminds me of #Gringotts.
This year while checking out hotels for our August trip there I'm like hey this looks familiar! And booked it. And got upgraded to the suite right under the dome.
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Kokoda Challenge Sunshine Coast
Brisbane WICEN was invited to assist this year in helping the Kokoda Youth Foundation run the 2025 Kokoda Challenge event at Kenilworth in the Sunshine Coast hinterland. This was a unique event for us as it was more traditional message passing rather than counting bicycles or checking off horse endurance ride competitors. There would be a handful of checkpoints, and competitors walked or jogged between them on one of three possible routes: 18km, 30km or 48km. They each carried a RFID tag […]https://brisbanewicen.org.au/2025/05/12/kokoda-challenge-sunshine-coast/
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Good news about our #pluginpv project in #Ukraine: “Yesterday we completed the installation of the panel: my husband fixed all the elements and ran the cables to the balcony.”
Our project partners from #EcoClubRivne are checking out how to install #solar on the #balcony. How to set ups such a system with a small battery, because there are lots of #blackouts in Ukraine, due to the destruction of the #powergrid by Russia.
Of course we also try to explore what landlords and gridoperators think and if they try to block small #pv.
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Fiquei com inveja desse corno! Que gozada sensacional!
👇Quer assistir essa cena completa? 👇
https://cornosecuckolds.com/o-doutor-resolveu-seu-problema/#corno #squirt #casada #oral #interracial #fullvideo #gozada #cheating #cuckold #hotwife
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Fiquei com inveja desse corno! Que gozada sensacional!
👇Quer assistir essa cena completa? 👇
https://cornosecuckolds.com/o-doutor-resolveu-seu-problema/#corno #squirt #casada #oral #interracial #fullvideo #gozada #cheating #cuckold #hotwife
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ok at least one of the troll servers has a block bot? which auto-posts the public profile of anyone who blocks someone on that server so be aware of this possibility; worth checking their home server to get a feel of the vibes before you block or check the box to also report there. i got a handful of more trolls after blocking someone because they were clicking on the bot post and now i know! / #fediverse #fediversesafety
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There are essentially two types of #ASOIAF fans.
1. Stopped even looking to see if #TheWindsOfWinter is coming (but will buy it the nanosecond it goes on preorder).
2. Has spent a decade checking every hour to see if there is an update for the release of TWOW & also complains about GRRM at least once per day while saying they're "done" & will never buy or watch anything made by Martin (but will buy & watch everything the nanosecond it becomes available).
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Don’t Ban ChatGPT in Schools. Teach With It. - OpenAI’s new chat bot is raising fears of cheating on homework, but its potential as an e... - https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/12/technology/chatgpt-schools-teachers.html #teachersandschoolemployees #collegesanduniversities #computersandtheinternet #artificialintelligence #testsandexaminations #tutorsandtutoring #education(k-12) #openailabs
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Buddied up with a friend, attempted to make a small silly Anno 1800 mod and - succeeded! Yay! Orchards now also produce steel beams for no good reason! 😂 Reading all the amazing documentation for modding and checking out how Anno 1800 works is super fun and interesting. We now want to do something more elaborate.
Also please appreciate a) modding is officially supported and b) all of this works on Linux, too (through Proton).
#Anno1800 #modding -
The AI Con authors Emily M. Bender (Professor of Linguistics, University of Washington) and Alex Hanna (Director of Research, Distributed AI Research Institute) break down a #NYT opinion piece that exemplifies hype laundering: how AI industry narratives get legitimized through respected voices in prestigious outlets.
The article is "Stop Worrying, and Let A.I. Help Save Your Life" by Dr. Robert Wachter, chair of the Department of Medicine at #UCSF, published in the New York Times on January 19, 2026.
Dr. Wachter admits he's replacing professional medical consultations with colleagues—what physicians call "curbside consults"- with ChatGPT queries. He claims AI's input is "virtually always useful," though he admits it's sometimes "just plain wrong." Emily responds: "People who really should know better have fallen for this." Alex notes the absurdity: "This seems like really a weird kind of approach to medical practice... Maybe someone who is concerned about their different medical conditions and had no place to turn, but someone at UCSF. I've been to UCSF. That's very alarming."
Wachter provides zero peer-reviewed studies, no outcome data, no comparative metrics. Just personal anecdotes claiming the tools work. Emily points out he's demonstrating "no evidence-based practice of checking like how well does this work and also how does it impact the work of physicians when they're using it."
The accountability problem is central. Alex observes that with a human colleague, "you would actually know it's coming from them and there's some accountability if they give you some just wild advice." With LLMs? No one is responsible when the answer is wrong. Emily: "The point isn't that the answers are unreliable. Is that there's no accountability for the answers."
She also raises automation bias concerns: "If you review the output, are you also reviewing the things that you didn't get to because it didn't come out as output?" The system's omissions may be as dangerous as its errors.
Wachter is against "overly restrict[ing] A.I. tools" by "setting an impossibly high bar." Classic regulatory capture language. Emily: "I want all medical devices to be tightly regulated."
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2687163982 (just the video stream https://d2vi6trrdongqn.cloudfront.net/bc9948ab01f26c79a170_dair_institute_317110603102_1770049612/720p60/index-dvr.m3u8)
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/19/opinion/ai-health-medical-care.html
#ChatGPT (#OpenAI) is #Trump's biggest donor, and #ICE uses ChatGPT. It's time to quit. http://quitgpt.org/
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The AI Con authors Emily M. Bender (Professor of Linguistics, University of Washington) and Alex Hanna (Director of Research, Distributed AI Research Institute) break down a #NYT opinion piece that exemplifies hype laundering: how AI industry narratives get legitimized through respected voices in prestigious outlets.
The article is "Stop Worrying, and Let A.I. Help Save Your Life" by Dr. Robert Wachter, chair of the Department of Medicine at #UCSF, published in the New York Times on January 19, 2026.
Dr. Wachter admits he's replacing professional medical consultations with colleagues—what physicians call "curbside consults"- with ChatGPT queries. He claims AI's input is "virtually always useful," though he admits it's sometimes "just plain wrong." Emily responds: "People who really should know better have fallen for this." Alex notes the absurdity: "This seems like really a weird kind of approach to medical practice... Maybe someone who is concerned about their different medical conditions and had no place to turn, but someone at UCSF. I've been to UCSF. That's very alarming."
Wachter provides zero peer-reviewed studies, no outcome data, no comparative metrics. Just personal anecdotes claiming the tools work. Emily points out he's demonstrating "no evidence-based practice of checking like how well does this work and also how does it impact the work of physicians when they're using it."
The accountability problem is central. Alex observes that with a human colleague, "you would actually know it's coming from them and there's some accountability if they give you some just wild advice." With LLMs? No one is responsible when the answer is wrong. Emily: "The point isn't that the answers are unreliable. Is that there's no accountability for the answers."
She also raises automation bias concerns: "If you review the output, are you also reviewing the things that you didn't get to because it didn't come out as output?" The system's omissions may be as dangerous as its errors.
Wachter is against "overly restrict[ing] A.I. tools" by "setting an impossibly high bar." Classic regulatory capture language. Emily: "I want all medical devices to be tightly regulated."
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2687163982 (just the video stream https://d2vi6trrdongqn.cloudfront.net/bc9948ab01f26c79a170_dair_institute_317110603102_1770049612/720p60/index-dvr.m3u8)
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/19/opinion/ai-health-medical-care.html
#ChatGPT (#OpenAI) is #Trump's biggest donor, and #ICE uses ChatGPT. It's time to quit. http://quitgpt.org/
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The AI Con authors Emily M. Bender (Professor of Linguistics, University of Washington) and Alex Hanna (Director of Research, Distributed AI Research Institute) break down a #NYT opinion piece that exemplifies hype laundering: how AI industry narratives get legitimized through respected voices in prestigious outlets.
The article is "Stop Worrying, and Let A.I. Help Save Your Life" by Dr. Robert Wachter, chair of the Department of Medicine at #UCSF, published in the New York Times on January 19, 2026.
Dr. Wachter admits he's replacing professional medical consultations with colleagues—what physicians call "curbside consults"- with ChatGPT queries. He claims AI's input is "virtually always useful," though he admits it's sometimes "just plain wrong." Emily responds: "People who really should know better have fallen for this." Alex notes the absurdity: "This seems like really a weird kind of approach to medical practice... Maybe someone who is concerned about their different medical conditions and had no place to turn, but someone at UCSF. I've been to UCSF. That's very alarming."
Wachter provides zero peer-reviewed studies, no outcome data, no comparative metrics. Just personal anecdotes claiming the tools work. Emily points out he's demonstrating "no evidence-based practice of checking like how well does this work and also how does it impact the work of physicians when they're using it."
The accountability problem is central. Alex observes that with a human colleague, "you would actually know it's coming from them and there's some accountability if they give you some just wild advice." With LLMs? No one is responsible when the answer is wrong. Emily: "The point isn't that the answers are unreliable. Is that there's no accountability for the answers."
She also raises automation bias concerns: "If you review the output, are you also reviewing the things that you didn't get to because it didn't come out as output?" The system's omissions may be as dangerous as its errors.
Wachter is against "overly restrict[ing] A.I. tools" by "setting an impossibly high bar." Classic regulatory capture language. Emily: "I want all medical devices to be tightly regulated."
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2687163982 (just the video stream https://d2vi6trrdongqn.cloudfront.net/bc9948ab01f26c79a170_dair_institute_317110603102_1770049612/720p60/index-dvr.m3u8)
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/19/opinion/ai-health-medical-care.html
#ChatGPT (#OpenAI) is #Trump's biggest donor, and #ICE uses ChatGPT. It's time to quit. http://quitgpt.org/
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The AI Con authors Emily M. Bender (Professor of Linguistics, University of Washington) and Alex Hanna (Director of Research, Distributed AI Research Institute) break down a #NYT opinion piece that exemplifies hype laundering: how AI industry narratives get legitimized through respected voices in prestigious outlets.
The article is "Stop Worrying, and Let A.I. Help Save Your Life" by Dr. Robert Wachter, chair of the Department of Medicine at #UCSF, published in the New York Times on January 19, 2026.
Dr. Wachter admits he's replacing professional medical consultations with colleagues—what physicians call "curbside consults"- with ChatGPT queries. He claims AI's input is "virtually always useful," though he admits it's sometimes "just plain wrong." Emily responds: "People who really should know better have fallen for this." Alex notes the absurdity: "This seems like really a weird kind of approach to medical practice... Maybe someone who is concerned about their different medical conditions and had no place to turn, but someone at UCSF. I've been to UCSF. That's very alarming."
Wachter provides zero peer-reviewed studies, no outcome data, no comparative metrics. Just personal anecdotes claiming the tools work. Emily points out he's demonstrating "no evidence-based practice of checking like how well does this work and also how does it impact the work of physicians when they're using it."
The accountability problem is central. Alex observes that with a human colleague, "you would actually know it's coming from them and there's some accountability if they give you some just wild advice." With LLMs? No one is responsible when the answer is wrong. Emily: "The point isn't that the answers are unreliable. Is that there's no accountability for the answers."
She also raises automation bias concerns: "If you review the output, are you also reviewing the things that you didn't get to because it didn't come out as output?" The system's omissions may be as dangerous as its errors.
Wachter is against "overly restrict[ing] A.I. tools" by "setting an impossibly high bar." Classic regulatory capture language. Emily: "I want all medical devices to be tightly regulated."
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2687163982 (just the video stream https://d2vi6trrdongqn.cloudfront.net/bc9948ab01f26c79a170_dair_institute_317110603102_1770049612/720p60/index-dvr.m3u8)
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/19/opinion/ai-health-medical-care.html
#ChatGPT (#OpenAI) is #Trump's biggest donor, and #ICE uses ChatGPT. It's time to quit. http://quitgpt.org/
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The AI Con authors Emily M. Bender (Professor of Linguistics, University of Washington) and Alex Hanna (Director of Research, Distributed AI Research Institute) break down a #NYT opinion piece that exemplifies hype laundering: how AI industry narratives get legitimized through respected voices in prestigious outlets.
The article is "Stop Worrying, and Let A.I. Help Save Your Life" by Dr. Robert Wachter, chair of the Department of Medicine at #UCSF, published in the New York Times on January 19, 2026.
Dr. Wachter admits he's replacing professional medical consultations with colleagues—what physicians call "curbside consults"- with ChatGPT queries. He claims AI's input is "virtually always useful," though he admits it's sometimes "just plain wrong." Emily responds: "People who really should know better have fallen for this." Alex notes the absurdity: "This seems like really a weird kind of approach to medical practice... Maybe someone who is concerned about their different medical conditions and had no place to turn, but someone at UCSF. I've been to UCSF. That's very alarming."
Wachter provides zero peer-reviewed studies, no outcome data, no comparative metrics. Just personal anecdotes claiming the tools work. Emily points out he's demonstrating "no evidence-based practice of checking like how well does this work and also how does it impact the work of physicians when they're using it."
The accountability problem is central. Alex observes that with a human colleague, "you would actually know it's coming from them and there's some accountability if they give you some just wild advice." With LLMs? No one is responsible when the answer is wrong. Emily: "The point isn't that the answers are unreliable. Is that there's no accountability for the answers."
She also raises automation bias concerns: "If you review the output, are you also reviewing the things that you didn't get to because it didn't come out as output?" The system's omissions may be as dangerous as its errors.
Wachter is against "overly restrict[ing] A.I. tools" by "setting an impossibly high bar." Classic regulatory capture language. Emily: "I want all medical devices to be tightly regulated."
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2687163982 (just the video stream https://d2vi6trrdongqn.cloudfront.net/bc9948ab01f26c79a170_dair_institute_317110603102_1770049612/720p60/index-dvr.m3u8)
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/19/opinion/ai-health-medical-care.html
#ChatGPT (#OpenAI) is #Trump's biggest donor, and #ICE uses ChatGPT. It's time to quit. http://quitgpt.org/
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Why does the right always increase #debt itself while blaming the left for ”unresponsible” #fiscalpolicy while it is out of power?
The answer is simple, and you should have seen it by now: LIES.
Those who yearn for inequality see the world differently. Cheating is honorable in that world, if you do it to benefit yours while hurting the other.
The left yearns for equality. That’s why they will take the right at it’s word. The right considers that weak. You need to learn & see that distinction.
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A reminder that the simplest explanations to observations are not guaranteed to be correct. They're merely more likely to be correct than explanations with more unnecessary variables.
Sometimes there really is a conspiracy or a complex scheme afoot, or at least the correct explanation is more complex than one might otherwise expect.
Every now and then when you hear hoofbeats, there are zebras, not horses. But you might still want to check for horses first, especially if you're not on the same continent that provides habitat to zebras.
The occasional finding of zebras, however, does not indicate that you should always suspect zebras, at least not without checking for horses first.
It's never lupus... except that one time that it was.
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The Scaly-head Pionus parrot we've been fostering since he got lost and found us during the pandemic is driving me up the damn wall this week.
He's like a 2-year-old child in CONSTANT need of attention, and when he doesn't get it, he starts misbehaving, badly, destroying everything he can get his grubby little beak on.
I can deal with the shitting. It's the screaming and screeching and destruction that I can't deal with.
It may be time to consider finding him a home where someone is home all the time and he can get all the insane quantities of attention he craves... but the prospect of interviewing people and checking out home situations to ensure that he's properly looked after is overwhelming.
(We looked in vain for ages to find his parents, with no success. I wonder if they got fed up with him too and turned him loose.)
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Open Measures; Webhook.Site; Wget WARC-Style
Today’s edition is all about data, whether it be about what’s happening on smaller content platforms – like Bluesky and Mastodon — or, receiving data from apps and APIs, or creating content collections for analysis.
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TL;DR
(This is an AI-generated summary of today’s Drop.)
(Perplexity is back to not giving links…o_O)
- Open Measures: A data-driven platform designed to combat online extremism and disinformation by providing journalists, researchers, and organizations with tools and data to investigate harmful activities. The platform tracks a wide array of sites, especially those on the fringes of the internet, and offers a robust API for integrating its data into in-house dashboards for ongoing investigations.
- Webhook.Site: An online tool that provides a unique, random URL (and email address) for testing webhooks or arbitrary HTTP requests. It displays requests in real-time for inspection without needing own server infrastructure. The site also features a custom graphical editor and scripting language for processing HTTP requests, making it useful for connecting incompatible APIs or quickly building new ones.
- Wget WARC-Style: An introduction to using Wget for creating web archive (WARC) files, a standardized format for archiving web content including HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and digital media, along with metadata about the retrieval process. Wget’s built-in support for WARC format allows for straightforward archiving of websites, with options for compression and extensive archiving like capturing an entire website.
Open Measures
Prelude: I feel so daft for not knowing about this site until yesterday.
I know each and every reader of the Drop groks that disinformation and extremism are yuge problems. While there are definitely guardians out there who help track this activity and thwart the plans of those that seek to do harm. There just aren’t enough of them. But, it turns out, we can all get some telemetry on these activities and, perhaps, do our part, even in some small way.
Open Measures is a data-driven site that lets us all battle online extremism and disinformation. The platform is designed to empower journalists, researchers, and organizations dedicated to social good, enabling them to delve into and investigate these harmful activities. With a focus on transparency and cooperation, Open Measures offers a suite of tools that are well-integrated and open source, along with incredibly cool data. The team behind it works super hard to ensure that both the tools and data are accessible to all who wish to use them for public benefit.
The tool tracks a wide array of sites, particularly those on the fringes of the internet, where extremism and disinformation tend to proliferate. By providing access to hundreds of millions of data points across these fringe social networks, Open Measures equips users with the necessary data to uncover and analyze trends related to hate, misinformation, and disinformation.
They have a great search tool and API. The API enables folks to bring Open Measures data into their own in-house dashboards and plug into the platform to augment their ongoing investigations. This feature is especially useful for modern threat intelligence operations that require systems to communicate seamlessly with one another. The API, while robust, is (rightfully so) rate-limited to mitigate risks from malicious actors. However, for users who find the Public API insufficient for their needs, Open Measures offers Pro or Enterprise functionality, which may better suit their requirements.
The need for and utility of Open Measures cannot be overstated. On a daily basis, we all witness the real-world consequences of online disinformation and extremism. Having tools that can sift through scads of data to identify harmful content is invaluable. For researchers and journalists, this means being able to trace and piece together online threats with greater efficiency. For social good organizations, it means having the resources to combat disinformation and protect communities from harm.
Now, while it’s an essential tool for this malicious activity, the site is — fundamentally — indexing the public content on the listed network. That means you can use it for arbitrary queries, such as checking out how often the term “bridge” was seen on, say, Bluesky and Mastodon in the past month (ref: section header images). (For those still unawares, there’s yet-another firestorm on Mastodon related to a new protocol bridge being built between it and Bluesky.)
Webhook.Site
I needed to test out a webhook for something last week and hit up my Raindrop.io bookmarks to see what I used last time, and was glad to see that Webhook.site was still around and kicking!
If you ever have a need to get the hang of a new webhook (or arbitrary HTTP request) or test out what you might want do do in response to an email, you need to check this site out. Putting it simply, Webhook.site (I do dislike product names that are also domain names) gives you a unique, random URL (and, as noted, even an email address) to which you can send HTTP requests and emails. These requests are displayed in real-time, which lets us inspect their content without the need to set up and maintain our own server infrastructure. This feature is incredibly useful for testing webhooks, debugging HTTP requests, and even creating workflows. Said workflows can be wrangled through the site’s custom graphical editor or using their scripting language to transform, validate, and process HTTP requests in various ways.
Webhook.site can also act as an intermediary (i.e., proxying requests) so you can see what was sent in the past, transforming webhooks into other formats, and re-sending them to different systems. This makes it a pretty useful tool for connecting APIs that aren’t natively compatible, or for building APIs quickly without needing to set up infrastructure from scratch.
The external service comes with a great CLI tool, which can be used as a receptor of forwarded requests or execute commands. Their documentation is also exceptional.
However, while this service offers a plethora of benefits and is super easy to use, it’s important to exercise caution when deciding what you hook up to it. Webhooks, by their nature, often involve sending data to a public endpoint on the internet. Without proper security measures, this could potentially expose sensitive data to unauthorized parties. As an aside, I’m really not sure you should be using any service that transmits sensitive information over a webhook. Just make sure you go into the use of a third-party site, such as this, with eyes open and with deliberate consideration.
The section header is a result of this call:
curl -X POST 'https://webhook.site/U-U-I-D' \ -H 'content-type: application/json' \ -d $'{"message": "Hey there Daily Drop readers!"}'Wget WARC-Style
In preparation for one section coming tomorrow, I wanted to spread some scraping 💙 (it is Valentine’s Day, after all) to wget. The curl utility and library gets most of the ahTTpention these days, but there are things it just cannot do (because it was not designed to do them). One of these things is creating web archive (WARC) files.
These files are in a standardized format used for archiving all web content, including the HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and digital media of web pages, along with the metadata about the retrieval process. This makes WARC an ideal format for digital preservation efforts or for anyone looking to capture and store web content for future reference.
Creating WARC files with Wget is straightforward, thanks to its built-in support for the format. To start archiving a website, you simply need to use the
--warc-fileoption followed by a filename for your archive. If you use Wget’s--input-fileoption, you can save a whole collection of sites into one WARC file. For example:wget --input-file=urls.txt --warc-file="research-collection"
This command downloads the website and saves the content into a WARC file named
research-collection.warc.gz. The.gzextension indicates that the file is compressed with gzip, which is Wget’s default behavior to save space. If you prefer to have an uncompressed WARC file, you can add the--no-warc-compressionoption to your command.For more extensive archiving, such as capturing an entire website, you can combine the
--warc-fileoption with Wget’s--mirroroption. This tells Wget to recursively download the website, preserving its directory structure and including all pages and resources. This approach ensures that you get a complete snapshot of the site at the time of download, stored in a series of WARC files. Wget automatically splits the archive into multiple files if needed, appending a sequence number to each file’s name.We’ll be using this technique, tomorrow, to explore a new tool that can operate on WARC files, so I wanted to make sure y’all had time to check this out before we tap into that content.
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BRECK: Dead Delivery: Chapter Fifteen: Stronger Than You Knew
Daily writing prompt What’s a moment that made you realize you were stronger than you thought? View all responsesBRECK: Dead Delivery — Chapter Fifteen
Stronger Than You Knew
This is Chapter 15 of BRECK: Dead Delivery, a serialized noble dark fantasy story by Chadwick Rye, set in the world of Lumenvale. New chapters post daily at noon Eastern.
The Story So Far
Breck is a veteran courier — 6’5″, 285 pounds, former Crystal Wars special operations — who arrived in Crestfall on a routine delivery and found a town quietly strangled by a corrupt magistrate named Voss. He built the case from the inside: the hidden ledger, the chalk map, the patrol gap. Last night he retrieved the original documents from Voss’s storage room and walked back through a dark corridor where Drav was waiting. Drav stepped aside. This morning, before dawn, Breck built the fire, gave Maret the sealed letter for the Regional Adjudicator in Millhaven, said what needed saying, and walked out into the dark before the second bell. He is on the north road now — the documents against his chest, the bracelet on the satchel strap, Crestfall behind him. But Voss discovered the empty room at the second bell. And Drav received his orders at the third.
← Chapter Fourteen — The Small Thing | Chapter Sixteen — Coming Tomorrow →
Chapter Fifteen: Stronger Than You Knew
This chapter explores the moment when you discover what you are made of — not in triumph, but in the testing.
The ambush was well-planned.
Breck gave it that. In the ten seconds between recognizing it and responding to it, he registered its architecture with the detached professional appreciation of a man who had spent four years designing exactly this kind of thing from the other side — the terrain selected for limited sightlines, the timing calculated for the gray half-light of early morning when eyes were still adjusting, three men positioned to create overlapping fields of engagement so that moving away from one moved you toward another.
Senne had planned it. The quiet one, the watchful one — the most dangerous of Drav’s remaining men after Pelk’s education in the alley behind the granary. Breck had tracked Senne’s movements for four days and had built a picture of a man who thought before he acted and acted without hesitation once the thinking was done. The ambush confirmed the picture. It was the work of someone who understood geometry and patience and the particular advantage of opponents who didn’t know they were being studied.
The problem — for Senne — was that Breck had spent four years being studied by men considerably better resourced than a regional enforcer with three weeks of preparation time, and he was still here.
The north road ran through a cut in the limestone ridge two miles above Crestfall, where the banks rose on both sides and the road narrowed to accommodate a single cart. Senne had positioned himself at the far end of the cut, where the road widened again — the blocking position, intended to halt forward movement. The two others were on the banks above, one to each side, staggered so that their angles of descent didn’t interfere with each other.
Textbook. Clean. Competent.
Breck had identified the cut on his third evening in Crestfall, while walking the approaches to the north road under the guise of checking his horse at the waystation. He had noted it as the single unavoidable piece of terrain between Crestfall and the first junction, which meant it was the single unavoidable decision point for anyone who wanted to intercept someone leaving by the north road. He had filed it under problems that might require attention.
He had entered the cut at a walk, hands loose at his sides, satchel settled across his chest, because changing his pace or his posture in the approach would have communicated the wrong thing and he had no interest in communicating anything useful to people positioned to ambush him.
He had also entered it with his right hand already adjusted on the satchel strap — not reaching for anything, just repositioned, the way a man shifted his grip during a long walk — so that when the moment came, the movement required to do what needed doing was already half-completed.
The moment came at the cut’s midpoint.
Senne stepped out from behind a limestone shelf at the far end. Unhurried. Controlled. His right hand held a short blade — not a sword, practical choice, close quarters and limited swing room — and his expression was the expression Breck had been watching for four days: watchful, assessing, stripped of everything that wasn’t operationally relevant.
“Leave the satchel,” Senne said. His voice was level. “Walk back the way you came. That’s the whole transaction.”
The two on the banks hadn’t moved yet. They were holding their positions, which was correct — movement too early would break the geometry, and Senne was giving the verbal option its fair chance before escalating. Professional. Breck respected that.
He looked at Senne for a long moment. At the blade, the positioning, the gap between them — eighteen feet, enough for Senne to close before Breck could reach him but not enough to be comfortable about it. At the banks, where the two others were still and dark against the gray limestone.
He thought about the documents against his chest. About Aldric Moss’s neat architectural handwriting, preserved through fourteen months of darkness beside a hearthstone, finally in the light.
He thought about a girl in a valley who had given him everything she had to give and had received nothing adequate in return. About the specific weight of a debt that couldn’t be paid backward — only forward, in kind, to other people in other places, carried on the road from one town to the next with the same patient, aching, insufficient faithfulness.
He thought about the fire he had built this morning in a cold room, already burning without him.
He thought — briefly, with the compressed economy of a man who had long practice thinking quickly in narrow spaces — about what he was made of.
Not what he had been made of in the war. Not what the war had required of him, which had sometimes been things he did not choose to revisit in the daylight hours. But what he was made of beneath that — the original material, the grain-farm boy who had learned to read rivers, who had understood at ten years old that water found paths around obstacles by the simple application of patience and consistent pressure, not by force, not by declaration, just by continuing to move.
He had been continuing to move for a very long time.
“No,” he said.
Senne came forward the way Breck had expected — fast, low, direct, no wasted theater. He was good. Considerably better than Pelk, considerably better than the two in the alley, and the blade was an honest tool in his hand rather than a prop. The two on the banks came down simultaneously, which was the correct response to Breck declining the verbal option — both flanks activating together to prevent the obvious counter of engaging one before the other arrived.
The obvious counter was not what Breck had in mind.
He moved toward Senne rather than away — inside the blade’s effective reach, which negated its primary advantage and converted the distance between them from Senne’s asset to his own. His left forearm intercepted the blade arm above the wrist, pinning it, redirecting rather than blocking — he’d learned early that blocking a committed strike was a losing proposition against a man who meant it — and his right hand drove a precise open-palm strike into Senne’s sternum, not the hardest blow he could throw but accurately placed and sharply timed, targeting the body’s central nerve cluster.
Senne folded at the diaphragm. Not out — the man had iron in him — but compromised, the wind gone, the blade still in his hand but the hand no longer receiving reliable instructions from the rest of him.
The first bank man reached Breck’s left side three seconds later and found that Breck had already rotated — using Senne’s compromised body as a partial barrier, forcing the bank man to commit to an angle that took him away from his partner — and the elbow that met his forward momentum was not something he had been adequately prepared for. He went down hard. Stayed there, contributing the specific vocal expressions of someone whose collarbone had received new and unwelcome information.
The second bank man stopped.
He was six feet away, on Breck’s right, and he had seen the previous four seconds with full clarity, and he was performing the mathematics that the situation presented with the rapid, honest attention of a young man who had perhaps not fully modeled all the variables before signing on for this particular assignment.
His name, Pell’s map had noted, was Torven. He was nineteen years old. He had a mother in the lower town who mended sails for the river merchants and a younger brother who helped her on the days her hands ached.
“Torven,” Breck said. His breathing was elevated but controlled. “Put it down.”
The young man looked at him. At Senne on one knee in the road, blade dropped, both hands pressed to his sternum. At his partner on the ground with his collarbone. At Breck — at the size of him, at the quality of stillness that had descended over him in the aftermath of the preceding four seconds, the combat stillness, the particular absolute calm of a man who had found and settled into the thing he was made of and was standing in it without apology or performance.
Torven put the blade down.
It made a small sound on the limestone road. A very small sound, in the quiet of the gray morning, the limestone walls on either side and the sky overhead just beginning to consider the possibility of light.
Breck looked at him for a moment longer. Then at Senne, still on one knee, working his breathing back toward functional with the focused determination of a man who had been hurt before and understood the process.
“Tell Drav,” Breck said to Senne, “that the letter is already on its way. The documents too. It’s done. Whatever he does now — ” he paused, looking at the road that ran ahead between the limestone banks toward the first junction and the north road beyond — “doesn’t change what’s already been set in motion.”
Senne looked up at him. His eyes were steady and old even in their discomfort, the eyes of a man absorbing information and filing it with the professional rigor of someone who would deliver it accurately regardless of how it had been received.
He nodded once.
Breck picked up his satchel — he’d set it against the limestone wall before any of it started, because the job didn’t get damaged — settled the strap across his chest, touched the bracelet once.
Then he walked out of the cut and onto the north road and didn’t look back.
The sky had made its decision about the light by then. It was arriving, gray and thin and honest, the way mornings arrived in Lumenvale in late autumn — without ceremony, without announcement, simply present, simply real.
He walked into it.
This is Chapter 15 of BRECK: Dead Delivery, a serialized noble dark fantasy story by Chadwick Rye, set in the world of Lumenvale. Breck is a veteran courier — a man who can’t walk past certain things — moving through a medieval world one delivery at a time. New chapters post daily at noon Eastern.
← Chapter Fourteen — The Small Thing | Chapter Sixteen — Coming Tomorrow →
#Action #actionThriller #adventure #books #cozyFantasy #Crestfall #dailyprompt #dailyprompt2767 #DarkFantasy #EpicFantasy #fantasy #FantasyAdventure #FantasyFiction #fantasyThriller #fiction #FreeFantasyFiction #freeFantasyFictionOnline #FreeStory #HighFantasy #lowFantasy #Lumenvale #Millhaven #writing -
Open Measures; Webhook.Site; Wget WARC-Style
Today’s edition is all about data, whether it be about what’s happening on smaller content platforms – like Bluesky and Mastodon — or, receiving data from apps and APIs, or creating content collections for analysis.
TL;DR
(This is an AI-generated summary of today’s Drop.)
(Perplexity is back to not giving links…o_O)
- Open Measures: A data-driven platform designed to combat online extremism and disinformation by providing journalists, researchers, and organizations with tools and data to investigate harmful activities. The platform tracks a wide array of sites, especially those on the fringes of the internet, and offers a robust API for integrating its data into in-house dashboards for ongoing investigations.
- Webhook.Site: An online tool that provides a unique, random URL (and email address) for testing webhooks or arbitrary HTTP requests. It displays requests in real-time for inspection without needing own server infrastructure. The site also features a custom graphical editor and scripting language for processing HTTP requests, making it useful for connecting incompatible APIs or quickly building new ones.
- Wget WARC-Style: An introduction to using Wget for creating web archive (WARC) files, a standardized format for archiving web content including HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and digital media, along with metadata about the retrieval process. Wget’s built-in support for WARC format allows for straightforward archiving of websites, with options for compression and extensive archiving like capturing an entire website.
Open Measures
Prelude: I feel so daft for not knowing about this site until yesterday.
I know each and every reader of the Drop groks that disinformation and extremism are yuge problems. While there are definitely guardians out there who help track this activity and thwart the plans of those that seek to do harm. There just aren’t enough of them. But, it turns out, we can all get some telemetry on these activities and, perhaps, do our part, even in some small way.
Open Measures is a data-driven site that lets us all battle online extremism and disinformation. The platform is designed to empower journalists, researchers, and organizations dedicated to social good, enabling them to delve into and investigate these harmful activities. With a focus on transparency and cooperation, Open Measures offers a suite of tools that are well-integrated and open source, along with incredibly cool data. The team behind it works super hard to ensure that both the tools and data are accessible to all who wish to use them for public benefit.
The tool tracks a wide array of sites, particularly those on the fringes of the internet, where extremism and disinformation tend to proliferate. By providing access to hundreds of millions of data points across these fringe social networks, Open Measures equips users with the necessary data to uncover and analyze trends related to hate, misinformation, and disinformation.
They have a great search tool and API. The API enables folks to bring Open Measures data into their own in-house dashboards and plug into the platform to augment their ongoing investigations. This feature is especially useful for modern threat intelligence operations that require systems to communicate seamlessly with one another. The API, while robust, is (rightfully so) rate-limited to mitigate risks from malicious actors. However, for users who find the Public API insufficient for their needs, Open Measures offers Pro or Enterprise functionality, which may better suit their requirements.
The need for and utility of Open Measures cannot be overstated. On a daily basis, we all witness the real-world consequences of online disinformation and extremism. Having tools that can sift through scads of data to identify harmful content is invaluable. For researchers and journalists, this means being able to trace and piece together online threats with greater efficiency. For social good organizations, it means having the resources to combat disinformation and protect communities from harm.
Now, while it’s an essential tool for this malicious activity, the site is — fundamentally — indexing the public content on the listed network. That means you can use it for arbitrary queries, such as checking out how often the term “bridge” was seen on, say, Bluesky and Mastodon in the past month (ref: section header images). (For those still unawares, there’s yet-another firestorm on Mastodon related to a new protocol bridge being built between it and Bluesky.)
Webhook.Site
I needed to test out a webhook for something last week and hit up my Raindrop.io bookmarks to see what I used last time, and was glad to see that Webhook.site was still around and kicking!
If you ever have a need to get the hang of a new webhook (or arbitrary HTTP request) or test out what you might want do do in response to an email, you need to check this site out. Putting it simply, Webhook.site (I do dislike product names that are also domain names) gives you a unique, random URL (and, as noted, even an email address) to which you can send HTTP requests and emails. These requests are displayed in real-time, which lets us inspect their content without the need to set up and maintain our own server infrastructure. This feature is incredibly useful for testing webhooks, debugging HTTP requests, and even creating workflows. Said workflows can be wrangled through the site’s custom graphical editor or using their scripting language to transform, validate, and process HTTP requests in various ways.
Webhook.site can also act as an intermediary (i.e., proxying requests) so you can see what was sent in the past, transforming webhooks into other formats, and re-sending them to different systems. This makes it a pretty useful tool for connecting APIs that aren’t natively compatible, or for building APIs quickly without needing to set up infrastructure from scratch.
The external service comes with a great CLI tool, which can be used as a receptor of forwarded requests or execute commands. Their documentation is also exceptional.
However, while this service offers a plethora of benefits and is super easy to use, it’s important to exercise caution when deciding what you hook up to it. Webhooks, by their nature, often involve sending data to a public endpoint on the internet. Without proper security measures, this could potentially expose sensitive data to unauthorized parties. As an aside, I’m really not sure you should be using any service that transmits sensitive information over a webhook. Just make sure you go into the use of a third-party site, such as this, with eyes open and with deliberate consideration.
The section header is a result of this call:
curl -X POST 'https://webhook.site/U-U-I-D' \ -H 'content-type: application/json' \ -d $'{"message": "Hey there Daily Drop readers!"}'Wget WARC-Style
In preparation for one section coming tomorrow, I wanted to spread some scraping 💙 (it is Valentine’s Day, after all) to wget. The curl utility and library gets most of the ahTTpention these days, but there are things it just cannot do (because it was not designed to do them). One of these things is creating web archive (WARC) files.
These files are in a standardized format used for archiving all web content, including the HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and digital media of web pages, along with the metadata about the retrieval process. This makes WARC an ideal format for digital preservation efforts or for anyone looking to capture and store web content for future reference.
Creating WARC files with Wget is straightforward, thanks to its built-in support for the format. To start archiving a website, you simply need to use the
--warc-fileoption followed by a filename for your archive. If you use Wget’s--input-fileoption, you can save a whole collection of sites into one WARC file. For example:wget --input-file=urls.txt --warc-file="research-collection"
This command downloads the website and saves the content into a WARC file named
research-collection.warc.gz. The.gzextension indicates that the file is compressed with gzip, which is Wget’s default behavior to save space. If you prefer to have an uncompressed WARC file, you can add the--no-warc-compressionoption to your command.For more extensive archiving, such as capturing an entire website, you can combine the
--warc-fileoption with Wget’s--mirroroption. This tells Wget to recursively download the website, preserving its directory structure and including all pages and resources. This approach ensures that you get a complete snapshot of the site at the time of download, stored in a series of WARC files. Wget automatically splits the archive into multiple files if needed, appending a sequence number to each file’s name.We’ll be using this technique, tomorrow, to explore a new tool that can operate on WARC files, so I wanted to make sure y’all had time to check this out before we tap into that content.
FIN
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