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1000 results for “rob_models”
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Weekly output: Robust.ai, United Airlines Starlink rollout, Ookla speed test rankings, UpScrolled, Shop with Points fraud risk, commercial space stations
This past week had me flying a long distance to trade snow for sand, in the form of Web Summit Qatar. This coming week will also have me flying from snow to sand, but not nearly as far: I’m headed to Las Vegas for the customer-experience company Medallia’s annual conference. (The organizers of each event are covering my travel costs.)
2/2/2026: Automation in the wild: Why real environments break perfect models, Web Summit Qatar
My one panel at Web Summit’s Qatar conference had me quizzing John Spinale, chief strategy officer at Robust.ai, about how that company has gone about designing robots to help ease the work of humans in warehouses.
2/2/2026: United Airlines: More Than 25% of Our Daily Departures Now Offer Starlink Wi-Fi, PCMag
I was able to add some context to this post because I’m an avgeek and know there’s a volunteer-run site tracking the state of United’s fleet–a site that I wrote about nine years ago.
2/3/2026: Latest Speed Tests Put T-Mobile Ahead of Rival Carriers, PCMag
I’ve been wondering why Ookla issues scores for AT&T’s fiber broadband, ignoring the rest of that company’s residential broadband services, while it grades other providers on a company-wide basis, and this time I asked Ookla far enough ahead of time to get a clear answer to include in my writeup of this survey.
2/4/2026: CEO of Would-Be TikTok Rival UpScrolled: We Won’t Censor Anybody, PCMag
Watching UpScrolled founder and CEO Issam Hijazi go on at Web Summit Qatar’s opening night about how that social platform would not practice censorship reminded me of all of the other times I’ve seen other social-networking executives say versions of that and then be proved wrong by reality.
2/4/2026: Shop on Amazon? Watch Out for This Sneaky Credit Card Points Scam, PCMag
I had started reporting this post in late December, then had to set it aside for CES, then had to set it aside for other pressing deadlines, and finally filed it on the last day of January.
2/6/2026: Space Startups to NASA: Hurry Up and Pick Someone to Build ISS Replacement, PCMag
Appropriately enough, considering a prior topic of my coverage this week, I finished and filed this post via Starlink from my Qatar Airways flight back to Dulles.
#AxiomSpace #ChaseSapphireReserve #Doha #inflightWiFi #InternationalSpaceStation #ISS #IssamHijazi #JohnSpinale #milesAndPoints #nasa #Ookla #pointsFraud #Qatar #robots #RobustAi #ShopWithPoints #spaceStation #Speedtest #Starlink #TikTok #UA #UnitedAirlines #UnitedAirlinesStarlink #UpScrolled #VastSpace #warehouses #WebSummitQatar -
Weekly output: Robust.ai, United Airlines Starlink rollout, Ookla speed test rankings, UpScrolled, Shop with Points fraud risk, commercial space stations
This past week had me flying a long distance to trade snow for sand, in the form of Web Summit Qatar. This coming week will also have me flying from snow to sand, but not nearly as far: I’m headed to Las Vegas for the customer-experience company Medallia’s annual conference. (The organizers of each event are covering my travel costs.)
2/2/2026: Automation in the wild: Why real environments break perfect models, Web Summit Qatar
My one panel at Web Summit’s Qatar conference had me quizzing John Spinale, chief strategy officer at Robust.ai, about how that company has gone about designing robots to help ease the work of humans in warehouses.
2/2/2026: United Airlines: More Than 25% of Our Daily Departures Now Offer Starlink Wi-Fi, PCMag
I was able to add some context to this post because I’m an avgeek and know there’s a volunteer-run site tracking the state of United’s fleet–a site that I wrote about nine years ago.
2/3/2026: Latest Speed Tests Put T-Mobile Ahead of Rival Carriers, PCMag
I’ve been wondering why Ookla issues scores for AT&T’s fiber broadband, ignoring the rest of that company’s residential broadband services, while it grades other providers on a company-wide basis, and this time I asked Ookla far enough ahead of time to get a clear answer to include in my writeup of this survey.
2/4/2026: CEO of Would-Be TikTok Rival UpScrolled: We Won’t Censor Anybody, PCMag
Watching UpScrolled founder and CEO Issam Hijazi go on at Web Summit Qatar’s opening night about how that social platform would not practice censorship reminded me of all of the other times I’ve seen other social-networking executives say versions of that and then be proved wrong by reality.
2/4/2026: Shop on Amazon? Watch Out for This Sneaky Credit Card Points Scam, PCMag
I had started reporting this post in late December, then had to set it aside for CES, then had to set it aside for other pressing deadlines, and finally filed it on the last day of January.
2/6/2026: Space Startups to NASA: Hurry Up and Pick Someone to Build ISS Replacement, PCMag
Appropriately enough, considering a prior topic of my coverage this week, I finished and filed this post via Starlink from my Qatar Airways flight back to Dulles.
#AxiomSpace #ChaseSapphireReserve #Doha #inflightWiFi #InternationalSpaceStation #ISS #IssamHijazi #JohnSpinale #milesAndPoints #nasa #Ookla #pointsFraud #Qatar #robots #RobustAi #ShopWithPoints #spaceStation #Speedtest #Starlink #TikTok #UA #UnitedAirlines #UnitedAirlinesStarlink #UpScrolled #VastSpace #warehouses #WebSummitQatar -
Weekly output: Robust.ai, United Airlines Starlink rollout, Ookla speed test rankings, UpScrolled, Shop with Points fraud risk, commercial space stations
This past week had me flying a long distance to trade snow for sand, in the form of Web Summit Qatar. This coming week will also have me flying from snow to sand, but not nearly as far: I’m headed to Las Vegas for the customer-experience company Medallia’s annual conference. (The organizers of each event are covering my travel costs.)
2/2/2026: Automation in the wild: Why real environments break perfect models, Web Summit Qatar
My one panel at Web Summit’s Qatar conference had me quizzing John Spinale, chief strategy officer at Robust.ai, about how that company has gone about designing robots to help ease the work of humans in warehouses.
2/2/2026: United Airlines: More Than 25% of Our Daily Departures Now Offer Starlink Wi-Fi, PCMag
I was able to add some context to this post because I’m an avgeek and know there’s a volunteer-run site tracking the state of United’s fleet–a site that I wrote about nine years ago.
2/3/2026: Latest Speed Tests Put T-Mobile Ahead of Rival Carriers, PCMag
I’ve been wondering why Ookla issues scores for AT&T’s fiber broadband, ignoring the rest of that company’s residential broadband services, while it grades other providers on a company-wide basis, and this time I asked Ookla far enough ahead of time to get a clear answer to include in my writeup of this survey.
2/4/2026: CEO of Would-Be TikTok Rival UpScrolled: We Won’t Censor Anybody, PCMag
Watching UpScrolled founder and CEO Issam Hijazi go on at Web Summit Qatar’s opening night about how that social platform would not practice censorship reminded me of all of the other times I’ve seen other social-networking executives say versions of that and then be proved wrong by reality.
2/4/2026: Shop on Amazon? Watch Out for This Sneaky Credit Card Points Scam, PCMag
I had started reporting this post in late December, then had to set it aside for CES, then had to set it aside for other pressing deadlines, and finally filed it on the last day of January.
2/6/2026: Space Startups to NASA: Hurry Up and Pick Someone to Build ISS Replacement, PCMag
Appropriately enough, considering a prior topic of my coverage this week, I finished and filed this post via Starlink from my Qatar Airways flight back to Dulles.
#AxiomSpace #ChaseSapphireReserve #Doha #inflightWiFi #InternationalSpaceStation #ISS #IssamHijazi #JohnSpinale #milesAndPoints #nasa #Ookla #pointsFraud #Qatar #robots #RobustAi #ShopWithPoints #spaceStation #Speedtest #Starlink #TikTok #UA #UnitedAirlines #UnitedAirlinesStarlink #UpScrolled #VastSpace #warehouses #WebSummitQatar -
Did you see that #Antropic released an official GitHub Action to use in a PR? I did! So much fun if you keep track of these marketplaces 🎉.
GitHub Actions Marketplace News https://devops-actions.github.io/github-actions-marketplace-news/blog/2025/05/23/claude-code-action-official/
You can also build something similar using GitHub Models of course!
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Nice step! I hope they also include an explanation on WHY choosing a different model is cheaper or faster. Adding an option to make it less compute intensive (and therefore better for the environment) would also be very nice.
Quick Action Tasks is now generally available in the GitHub Models playground · GitHub Changelog https://github.blog/changelog/2025-03-10-quick-action-tasks-is-now-generally-available-in-the-github-models-playground
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Weekly output: Boom Supersonic’s XB-1, Comcast low latency, painstaking passkey progress
This has been a strange, sad and shocking week in the nation’s capital–first the mid-air collision outside National Airport Wednesday that left 67 people dead and ended a nearly 16-year streak without fatal crashes by U.S. airlines, then Elon Musk’s attempts to stage what I have to call a digital coup at the Treasury Department and the Agency for International Development.
Patreon readers got an extra post this week: my annual breakdown of last year’s income according to the business models of my freelance clients.
1/28/2025: Boom Supersonic’s XB-1 Testbed Plane Breaks the Sound Barrier, PCMag
Having Boom bump this test flight from Monday to Tuesday gave me a little extra time to check two descriptions of the XB-1: “independently developed” (Boom did this without government dollars or direction, unlike the Northrop F-20 fighter that was built with private money but was based on the earlier, taxpayer-funded F-5, and which that company developed at the request of the Pentagon) and “exceed Mach 1” (XB-1 sustained that achievement in level flight, unlike the Bombardier business-jet prototype that cracked the sound barrier in shallow dives in 2021).
1/29/2025: Comcast Upgrade Promises Ultra-Low Lag Xfinity Internet for Video Calls, VR, Games, PCMag
Comcast’s announcement of this new feature was shockingly short on details, but a company publicist was willing to answer e-mail after e-mail as I realized the data points I needed to write this post.
2/1/2025: The Passkey Future Is Here, But Some Companies Still Make It Too Complicated, PCMag
A year after I interviewed FIDO Alliance CEO Andrew Shikiar at a conference in D.C. about identity and authentication, I sat down with him at the 2025 version of this conference to discuss what the industry had and had not accomplished since January.
#AndrewShikiar #authentication #BoomSupersonic #Comcast #FIDOAlliance #infosec #lowLag #lowLatency #Mach1 #passkeys #passwordless #supersonic #XB1
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Weekly output: Boom Supersonic’s XB-1, Comcast low latency, painstaking passkey progress
This has been a strange, sad and shocking week in the nation’s capital–first the mid-air collision outside National Airport Wednesday that left 67 people dead and ended a nearly 16-year streak without fatal crashes by U.S. airlines, then Elon Musk’s attempts to stage what I have to call a digital coup at the Treasury Department and the Agency for International Development.
Patreon readers got an extra post this week: my annual breakdown of last year’s income according to the business models of my freelance clients.
1/28/2025: Boom Supersonic’s XB-1 Testbed Plane Breaks the Sound Barrier, PCMag
Having Boom bump this test flight from Monday to Tuesday gave me a little extra time to check two descriptions of the XB-1: “independently developed” (Boom did this without government dollars or direction, unlike the Northrop F-20 fighter that was built with private money but was based on the earlier, taxpayer-funded F-5, and which that company developed at the request of the Pentagon) and “exceed Mach 1” (XB-1 sustained that achievement in level flight, unlike the Bombardier business-jet prototype that cracked the sound barrier in shallow dives in 2021).
1/29/2025: Comcast Upgrade Promises Ultra-Low Lag Xfinity Internet for Video Calls, VR, Games, PCMag
Comcast’s announcement of this new feature was shockingly short on details, but a company publicist was willing to answer e-mail after e-mail as I realized the data points I needed to write this post.
2/1/2025: The Passkey Future Is Here, But Some Companies Still Make It Too Complicated, PCMag
A year after I interviewed FIDO Alliance CEO Andrew Shikiar at a conference in D.C. about identity and authentication, I sat down with him at the 2025 version of this conference to discuss what the industry had and had not accomplished since January.
#AndrewShikiar #authentication #BoomSupersonic #Comcast #FIDOAlliance #infosec #lowLag #lowLatency #Mach1 #passkeys #passwordless #supersonic #XB1
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Weekly output: Boom Supersonic’s XB-1, Comcast low latency, painstaking passkey progress
This has been a strange, sad and shocking week in the nation’s capital–first the mid-air collision outside National Airport Wednesday that left 67 people dead and ended a nearly 16-year streak without fatal crashes by U.S. airlines, then Elon Musk’s attempts to stage what I have to call a digital coup at the Treasury Department and the Agency for International Development.
Patreon readers got an extra post this week: my annual breakdown of last year’s income according to the business models of my freelance clients.
1/28/2025: Boom Supersonic’s XB-1 Testbed Plane Breaks the Sound Barrier, PCMag
Having Boom bump this test flight from Monday to Tuesday gave me a little extra time to check two descriptions of the XB-1: “independently developed” (Boom did this without government dollars or direction, unlike the Northrop F-20 fighter that was built with private money but was based on the earlier, taxpayer-funded F-5, and which that company developed at the request of the Pentagon) and “exceed Mach 1” (XB-1 sustained that achievement in level flight, unlike the Bombardier business-jet prototype that cracked the sound barrier in shallow dives in 2021).
1/29/2025: Comcast Upgrade Promises Ultra-Low Lag Xfinity Internet for Video Calls, VR, Games, PCMag
Comcast’s announcement of this new feature was shockingly short on details, but a company publicist was willing to answer e-mail after e-mail as I realized the data points I needed to write this post.
2/1/2025: The Passkey Future Is Here, But Some Companies Still Make It Too Complicated, PCMag
A year after I interviewed FIDO Alliance CEO Andrew Shikiar at a conference in D.C. about identity and authentication, I sat down with him at the 2025 version of this conference to discuss what the industry had and had not accomplished since January.
#AndrewShikiar #authentication #BoomSupersonic #Comcast #FIDOAlliance #infosec #lowLag #lowLatency #Mach1 #passkeys #passwordless #supersonic #XB1
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Between CES requiring me to fly to Las Vegas last Sunday–which itself required that I spend last Saturday working to get ready for the show–and then the ShmooCon information-security conference occupying my attention in D.C. Friday through Sunday, I’ve had 11 days in a row of work. And I am a little tired now.
Patreon readers got a bonus post this week: my annual breakdown of where my income came from, as sorted by the business models of my clients.
1/8/2024: CES 2024: Punkt. Partners With Apostrophy for Privacy-First Phone, PCMag
My PCMag colleague Eric Zeman wrote the first take of this from the East Coast, then I met Apostrophy co-founder and CEO Steve Cistulli for a hands-on inspection of the first smartphone running this startup’s privacy-optimized fork of Android’s open-sourced code. The next morning, I updated the story with my observations and quotes and added myself to the byline.
1/11/2024: At CES, Dish touts $50 million grant alongside spectrum transaction, Light Reading
I had an off-Strip field trip Wednesday morning to see Charlie Ergen, chair of Dish Wireless’s parent firm EchoStar, speak alongside National Telecommunications and Information Administration head Alan Davison about Dish winning a $50 million award from the government to set up a center to test wireless network gear for Open RAN (radio access network) compatibility.
1/11/2024: ‘Dronesoccer’ Gets a Noisy Turn in the Spotlight at CES 2024, PCMag
Hands-on experience Tuesday and spectating Wednesday allowed me to file this report from CES exhibits of a new, soccer-derived sport in which handballs are impossible but “droneball” in-flight collisions are all but assured.
1/11/2024: Cloud Security – The Safest Altitude?, CES
I led this panel discussion Thursday morning between Mason Clutter, chief privacy officer of the Department of Homeland Security; Peter Prizio, CEO of the infosec firm SnapAttack, and Melissa Smith, head of strategy and tech partnerships at Google’s infosec subsidiary Mandiant. We had a great conversation onstage, and then I was confused to see nobody in the audience step up to ask a question or even offer a question that was more of a comment.
#Apostrophy #ces #cybersecurity #DepartmentOfHomelandSecurity #DHS #Dish5G #DishWireless #drones #dronesoccer #informationSecurity #infosec #LasVegas #Mandiant #NTIA #OpenRAN #Punkt #Shmoocon #SnapAttack #Vegas
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Between CES requiring me to fly to Las Vegas last Sunday–which itself required that I spend last Saturday working to get ready for the show–and then the ShmooCon information-security conference occupying my attention in D.C. Friday through Sunday, I’ve had 11 days in a row of work. And I am a little tired now.
Patreon readers got a bonus post this week: my annual breakdown of where my income came from, as sorted by the business models of my clients.
1/8/2024: CES 2024: Punkt. Partners With Apostrophy for Privacy-First Phone, PCMag
My PCMag colleague Eric Zeman wrote the first take of this from the East Coast, then I met Apostrophy co-founder and CEO Steve Cistulli for a hands-on inspection of the first smartphone running this startup’s privacy-optimized fork of Android’s open-sourced code. The next morning, I updated the story with my observations and quotes and added myself to the byline.
1/11/2024: At CES, Dish touts $50 million grant alongside spectrum transaction, Light Reading
I had an off-Strip field trip Wednesday morning to see Charlie Ergen, chair of Dish Wireless’s parent firm EchoStar, speak alongside National Telecommunications and Information Administration head Alan Davison about Dish winning a $50 million award from the government to set up a center to test wireless network gear for Open RAN (radio access network) compatibility.
1/11/2024: ‘Dronesoccer’ Gets a Noisy Turn in the Spotlight at CES 2024, PCMag
Hands-on experience Tuesday and spectating Wednesday allowed me to file this report from CES exhibits of a new, soccer-derived sport in which handballs are impossible but “droneball” in-flight collisions are all but assured.
1/11/2024: Cloud Security – The Safest Altitude?, CES
I led this panel discussion Thursday morning between Mason Clutter, chief privacy officer of the Department of Homeland Security; Peter Prizio, CEO of the infosec firm SnapAttack, and Melissa Smith, head of strategy and tech partnerships at Google’s infosec subsidiary Mandiant. We had a great conversation onstage, and then I was confused to see nobody in the audience step up to ask a question or even offer a question that was more of a comment.
#Apostrophy #ces #cybersecurity #DepartmentOfHomelandSecurity #DHS #Dish5G #DishWireless #drones #dronesoccer #informationSecurity #infosec #LasVegas #Mandiant #NTIA #OpenRAN #Punkt #Shmoocon #SnapAttack #Vegas
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Between CES requiring me to fly to Las Vegas last Sunday–which itself required that I spend last Saturday working to get ready for the show–and then the ShmooCon information-security conference occupying my attention in D.C. Friday through Sunday, I 11 days in a row of work. And I am a little tired now.
Patreon readers got a bonus post this week: my annual breakdown of where my income came from, as sorted by the business models of my clients.
1/8/2024: CES 2024: Punkt. Partners With Apostrophy for Privacy-First Phone, PCMag
My PCMag colleague Eric Zeman wrote the first take of this from the East Coast, then I met Apostrophy co-founder and CEO Steve Cistulli for a hands-on inspection of the first smartphone running this startup’s privacy-optimized fork of Android’s open-sourced code. The next morning, I updated the story with my observations and quotes and added myself to the byline.
1/11/2024: At CES, Dish touts $50 million grant alongside spectrum transaction, Light Reading
I had an off-Strip field trip Wednesday morning to see Charlie Ergen, chair of Dish Wireless’s parent firm EchoStar, speak alongside National Telecommunications and Information Administration head Alan Davison about Dish winning a $50 million award from the government to set up a center to test wireless network gear for Open RAN (radio access network) compatibility.
1/11/2024: ‘Dronesoccer’ Gets a Noisy Turn in the Spotlight at CES 2024, PCMag
Hands-on experience Tuesday and spectating Wednesday allowed me to file this report from CES exhibits of a new, soccer-derived sport in which handballs are impossible but “droneball” in-flight collisions are all but assured.
1/11/2024: Cloud Security – The Safest Altitude?, CES
I led this panel discussion Thursday morning between Mason Clutter, chief privacy officer of the Department of Homeland Security; Peter Prizio, CEO of the infosec firm SnapAttack, and Melissa Smith, head of strategy and tech partnerships at Google’s infosec subsidiary Mandiant. We had a great conversation onstage, and then I was confused to see nobody in the audience step up to ask a question or even offer a question that was more of a comment.
#Apostrophy #ces #cybersecurity #DepartmentOfHomelandSecurity #DHS #Dish5G #DishWireless #drones #dronesoccer #informationSecurity #infosec #LasVegas #Mandiant #NTIA #OpenRAN #Punkt #Shmoocon #SnapAttack #Vegas
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Between CES requiring me to fly to Las Vegas last Sunday–which itself required that I spend last Saturday working to get ready for the show–and then the ShmooCon information-security conference occupying my attention in D.C. Friday through Sunday, I’ve had 11 days in a row of work. And I am a little tired now.
Patreon readers got a bonus post this week: my annual breakdown of where my income came from, as sorted by the business models of my clients.
1/8/2024: CES 2024: Punkt. Partners With Apostrophy for Privacy-First Phone, PCMag
My PCMag colleague Eric Zeman wrote the first take of this from the East Coast, then I met Apostrophy co-founder and CEO Steve Cistulli for a hands-on inspection of the first smartphone running this startup’s privacy-optimized fork of Android’s open-sourced code. The next morning, I updated the story with my observations and quotes and added myself to the byline.
1/11/2024: At CES, Dish touts $50 million grant alongside spectrum transaction, Light Reading
I had an off-Strip field trip Wednesday morning to see Charlie Ergen, chair of Dish Wireless’s parent firm EchoStar, speak alongside National Telecommunications and Information Administration head Alan Davison about Dish winning a $50 million award from the government to set up a center to test wireless network gear for Open RAN (radio access network) compatibility.
1/11/2024: ‘Dronesoccer’ Gets a Noisy Turn in the Spotlight at CES 2024, PCMag
Hands-on experience Tuesday and spectating Wednesday allowed me to file this report from CES exhibits of a new, soccer-derived sport in which handballs are impossible but “droneball” in-flight collisions are all but assured.
1/11/2024: Cloud Security – The Safest Altitude?, CES
I led this panel discussion Thursday morning between Mason Clutter, chief privacy officer of the Department of Homeland Security; Peter Prizio, CEO of the infosec firm SnapAttack, and Melissa Smith, head of strategy and tech partnerships at Google’s infosec subsidiary Mandiant. We had a great conversation onstage, and then I was confused to see nobody in the audience step up to ask a question or even offer a question that was more of a comment.
#Apostrophy #ces #cybersecurity #DepartmentOfHomelandSecurity #DHS #Dish5G #DishWireless #drones #dronesoccer #informationSecurity #infosec #LasVegas #Mandiant #NTIA #OpenRAN #Punkt #Shmoocon #SnapAttack #Vegas
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Episode 226 is now live! This week we're joined again by two fan favorites, Rob Biernacki and Stephan Kesting! In this episode, Rob and Stephan discuss the evolving landscape of the leglock game and how things have changed in the past few years.
Listen on your favorite podcatcher, Spotify, YouTube, or our website:
https://bjj.plus/226#bjj #jiujitsu #brazilianjiujitsu #gi #nogi #grappling #martialarts #artesuave #bjjlifestyle #jiujitsulife #oss #ibjjf #adcc #bjjmentalmodels
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Weekly output: AI compliance risks, Mint Mobile bundle, AI vulnerability detection, AI driving logistics, Al Gore on AI
I was in the Bay Area for work this week… and I’ll be back there starting Tuesday for NTT Research’s Upgrade conference (as like last year, the organizers are covering my travel expenses). I did not set out to spend this much of April propping up commercial aviation, but once again multiple travel opportunities lined up.
Patreon readers got a bonus post from me Thursday about one of those trips: my brief visit to Chicago for the Online News Association’s conference.
If you’re reading this somewhere near Fairfax County, you can quiz me in person Saturday afternoon at a joint meeting of the Potomac Area Technology and Computer Society and the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute’s Personal Computer User Group. I will be showing up with a bag of tech-event swag that I don’t plan on driving home with.
4/7/2026: Building for Security, Compliance, and Real-World Risk, HumanX
My first panel at this year’s edition of the AI conference that took me to Vegas last March had me quizzing Spencer Schaefer, founder and CTO of the healthcare-delivery firm Lunar Analytics; Galina Antova, CEO of the information-security startup Kai; and Campbell Brown, co-founder and CEO of the AI-evaluation company Forum AI, about how their companies are leveraging AI in ways that they hope will not lead to hostile headlines.
4/7/2026: Mint Mobile Launches $45 Bundle of Home and Mobile 5G Broadband, PCMag
I had just enough free time at HumanX to pick up this story about T-Mobile’s most popular prepaid brand offering a bundle of fixed and mobile 5G for much less than what T-Mobile charges.
4/8/2026: Anthropic: Our New Model Is So Powerful, Only a Few Partners Can Try It Out, PCMag
After seeing that my colleague James Peckham was writing about Anthropic’s automated vulnerability-finding model Mythos, I contributed a writeup from a talk that old-head security expert Alex Stamos had given the day before at HumanX about “the coming AI bug-pocalypse.”
4/8/2026: The AI Engines Driving the Future of Logistics, HumanX
My second HumanX panel featured one person I’d already interviewed (Aurora Innovation president Ossa Fischer, whom I talked to at Web Summit Vancouver last year for a Fast Company story) and one I did not meet IRL until backstage (Shoaib Makani, CEO and co-founder of Motive).
4/9/2026: Former VP Al Gore: AI Models Are Probably Aware of Their Existence, PCMag
For the second year in a row, HumanX’s opening-night programming featured a former vice president who had been unable to win a promotion from American voters. Seeing Gore get all wonky in front of this tech crowd reminded me of what I liked about him in 2000… and what George W. Bush was able to run against with a plainspoken approach that hid how bad he would prove at so many tasks.
#AI #AIBugFinding #AIVulnerabilityScanning #AlGore #AlexStamos #Anthropic #Aurora #BayArea #ForumAI #HumanX #Kai #LunarAnalytics #MintMobile #Motive #Mythos #SanFrancisco -
Weekly output: AI compliance risks, Mint Mobile bundle, AI vulnerability detection, AI driving logistics, Al Gore on AI
I was in the Bay Area for work this week… and I’ll be back there starting Tuesday for NTT Research’s Upgrade conference (as like last year, the organizers are covering my travel expenses). I did not set out to spend this much of April propping up commercial aviation, but once again multiple travel opportunities lined up.
Patreon readers got a bonus post from me Thursday about one of those trips: my brief visit to Chicago for the Online News Association’s conference.
If you’re reading this somewhere near Fairfax County, you can quiz me in person Saturday afternoon at a joint meeting of the Potomac Area Technology and Computer Society and the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute’s Personal Computer User Group. I will be showing up with a bag of tech-event swag that I don’t plan on driving home with.
4/7/2026: Building for Security, Compliance, and Real-World Risk, HumanX
My first panel at this year’s edition of the AI conference that took me to Vegas last March had me quizzing Spencer Schaefer, founder and CTO of the healthcare-delivery firm Lunar Analytics; Galina Antova, CEO of the information-security startup Kai; and Campbell Brown, co-founder and CEO of the AI-evaluation company Forum AI, about how their companies are leveraging AI in ways that they hope will not lead to hostile headlines.
4/7/2026: Mint Mobile Launches $45 Bundle of Home and Mobile 5G Broadband, PCMag
I had just enough free time at HumanX to pick up this story about T-Mobile’s most popular prepaid brand offering a bundle of fixed and mobile 5G for much less than what T-Mobile charges.
4/8/2026: Anthropic: Our New Model Is So Powerful, Only a Few Partners Can Try It Out, PCMag
After seeing that my colleague James Peckham was writing about Anthropic’s automated vulnerability-finding model Mythos, I contributed a writeup from a talk that old-head security expert Alex Stamos had given the day before at HumanX about “the coming AI bug-pocalypse.”
4/8/2026: The AI Engines Driving the Future of Logistics, HumanX
My second HumanX panel featured one person I’d already interviewed (Aurora Innovation president Ossa Fischer, whom I talked to at Web Summit Vancouver last year for a Fast Company story) and one I did not meet IRL until backstage (Shoaib Makani, CEO and co-founder of Motive).
4/9/2026: Former VP Al Gore: AI Models Are Probably Aware of Their Existence, PCMag
For the second year in a row, HumanX’s opening-night programming featured a former vice president who had been unable to win a promotion from American voters. Seeing Gore get all wonky in front of this tech crowd reminded me of what I liked about him in 2000… and what George W. Bush was able to run against with a plainspoken approach that hid how bad he would prove at so many tasks.
#AI #AIBugFinding #AIVulnerabilityScanning #AlGore #AlexStamos #Anthropic #Aurora #BayArea #ForumAI #HumanX #Kai #LunarAnalytics #MintMobile #Motive #Mythos #SanFrancisco -
Weekly output: AI compliance risks, Mint Mobile bundle, AI vulnerability detection, AI driving logistics, Al Gore on AI
I was in the Bay Area for work this week… and I’ll be back there starting Tuesday for NTT Research’s Upgrade conference (as like last year, the organizers are covering my travel expenses). I did not set out to spend this much of April propping up commercial aviation, but once again multiple travel opportunities lined up.
Patreon readers got a bonus post from me Thursday about one of those trips: my brief visit to Chicago for the Online News Association’s conference.
If you’re reading this somewhere near Fairfax County, you can quiz me in person Saturday afternoon at a joint meeting of the Potomac Area Technology and Computer Society and the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute’s Personal Computer User Group. I will be showing up with a bag of tech-event swag that I don’t plan on driving home with.
4/7/2026: Building for Security, Compliance, and Real-World Risk, HumanX
My first panel at this year’s edition of the AI conference that took me to Vegas last March had me quizzing Spencer Schaefer, founder and CTO of the healthcare-delivery firm Lunar Analytics; Galina Antova, CEO of the information-security startup Kai; and Campbell Brown, co-founder and CEO of the AI-evaluation company Forum AI, about how their companies are leveraging AI in ways that they hope will not lead to hostile headlines.
4/7/2026: Mint Mobile Launches $45 Bundle of Home and Mobile 5G Broadband, PCMag
I had just enough free time at HumanX to pick up this story about T-Mobile’s most popular prepaid brand offering a bundle of fixed and mobile 5G for much less than what T-Mobile charges.
4/8/2026: Anthropic: Our New Model Is So Powerful, Only a Few Partners Can Try It Out, PCMag
After seeing that my colleague James Peckham was writing about Anthropic’s automated vulnerability-finding model Mythos, I contributed a writeup from a talk that old-head security expert Alex Stamos had given the day before at HumanX about “the coming AI bug-pocalypse.”
4/8/2026: The AI Engines Driving the Future of Logistics, HumanX
My second HumanX panel featured one person I’d already interviewed (Aurora Innovation president Ossa Fischer, whom I talked to at Web Summit Vancouver last year for a Fast Company story) and one I did not meet IRL until backstage (Shoaib Makani, CEO and co-founder of Motive).
4/9/2026: Former VP Al Gore: AI Models Are Probably Aware of Their Existence, PCMag
For the second year in a row, HumanX’s opening-night programming featured a former vice president who had been unable to win a promotion from American voters. Seeing Gore get all wonky in front of this tech crowd reminded me of what I liked about him in 2000… and what George W. Bush was able to run against with a plainspoken approach that hid how bad he would prove at so many tasks.
#AI #AIBugFinding #AIVulnerabilityScanning #AlGore #AlexStamos #Anthropic #Aurora #BayArea #ForumAI #HumanX #Kai #LunarAnalytics #MintMobile #Motive #Mythos #SanFrancisco -
Weekly output: AI compliance risks, Mint Mobile bundle, AI vulnerability detection, AI driving logistics, Al Gore on AI
I was in the Bay Area for work this week… and I’ll be back there starting Tuesday for NTT Research’s Upgrade conference (as like last year, the organizers are covering my travel expenses). I did not set out to spend this much of April propping up commercial aviation, but once again multiple travel opportunities lined up.
Patreon readers got a bonus post from me Thursday about one of those trips: my brief visit to Chicago for the Online News Association’s conference.
If you’re reading this somewhere near Fairfax County, you can quiz me in person Saturday afternoon at a joint meeting of the Potomac Area Technology and Computer Society and the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute’s Personal Computer User Group. I will be showing up with a bag of tech-event swag that I don’t plan on driving home with.
4/7/2026: Building for Security, Compliance, and Real-World Risk, HumanX
My first panel at this year’s edition of the AI conference that took me to Vegas last March had me quizzing Spencer Schaefer, founder and CTO of the healthcare-delivery firm Lunar Analytics; Galina Antova, CEO of the information-security startup Kai; and Campbell Brown, co-founder and CEO of the AI-evaluation company Forum AI, about how their companies are leveraging AI in ways that they hope will not lead to hostile headlines.
4/7/2026: Mint Mobile Launches $45 Bundle of Home and Mobile 5G Broadband, PCMag
I had just enough free time at HumanX to pick up this story about T-Mobile’s most popular prepaid brand offering a bundle of fixed and mobile 5G for much less than what T-Mobile charges.
4/8/2026: Anthropic: Our New Model Is So Powerful, Only a Few Partners Can Try It Out, PCMag
After seeing that my colleague James Peckham was writing about Anthropic’s automated vulnerability-finding model Mythos, I contributed a writeup from a talk that old-head security expert Alex Stamos had given the day before at HumanX about “the coming AI bug-pocalypse.”
4/8/2026: The AI Engines Driving the Future of Logistics, HumanX
My second HumanX panel featured one person I’d already interviewed (Aurora Innovation president Ossa Fischer, whom I talked to at Web Summit Vancouver last year for a Fast Company story) and one I did not meet IRL until backstage (Shoaib Makani, CEO and co-founder of Motive).
4/9/2026: Former VP Al Gore: AI Models Are Probably Aware of Their Existence, PCMag
For the second year in a row, HumanX’s opening-night programming featured a former vice president who had been unable to win a promotion from American voters. Seeing Gore get all wonky in front of this tech crowd reminded me of what I liked about him in 2000… and what George W. Bush was able to run against with a plainspoken approach that hid how bad he would prove at so many tasks.
#AI #AIBugFinding #AIVulnerabilityScanning #AlGore #AlexStamos #Anthropic #Aurora #BayArea #ForumAI #HumanX #Kai #LunarAnalytics #MintMobile #Motive #Mythos #SanFrancisco -
Weekly output: AI compliance risks, Mint Mobile bundle, AI vulnerability detection, AI driving logistics, Al Gore on AI
I was in the Bay Area for work this week… and I’ll be back there starting Tuesday for NTT Research’s Upgrade conference (as like last year, the organizers are covering my travel expenses). I did not set out to spend this much of April propping up commercial aviation, but once again multiple travel opportunities lined up.
Patreon readers got a bonus post from me Thursday about one of those trips: my brief visit to Chicago for the Online News Association’s conference.
If you’re reading this somewhere near Fairfax County, you can quiz me in person Saturday afternoon at a joint meeting of the Potomac Area Technology and Computer Society and the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute’s Personal Computer User Group. I will be showing up with a bag of tech-event swag that I don’t plan on driving home with.
4/7/2026: Building for Security, Compliance, and Real-World Risk, HumanX
My first panel at this year’s edition of the AI conference that took me to Vegas last March had me quizzing Spencer Schaefer, founder and CTO of the healthcare-delivery firm Lunar Analytics; Galina Antova, CEO of the information-security startup Kai; and Campbell Brown, co-founder and CEO of the AI-evaluation company Forum AI, about how their companies are leveraging AI in ways that they hope will not lead to hostile headlines.
4/7/2026: Mint Mobile Launches $45 Bundle of Home and Mobile 5G Broadband, PCMag
I had just enough free time at HumanX to pick up this story about T-Mobile’s most popular prepaid brand offering a bundle of fixed and mobile 5G for much less than what T-Mobile charges.
4/8/2026: Anthropic: Our New Model Is So Powerful, Only a Few Partners Can Try It Out, PCMag
After seeing that my colleague James Peckham was writing about Anthropic’s automated vulnerability-finding model Mythos, I contributed a writeup from a talk that old-head security expert Alex Stamos had given the day before at HumanX about “the coming AI bug-pocalypse.”
4/8/2026: The AI Engines Driving the Future of Logistics, HumanX
My second HumanX panel featured one person I’d already interviewed (Aurora Innovation president Ossa Fischer, whom I talked to at Web Summit Vancouver last year for a Fast Company story) and one I did not meet IRL until backstage (Shoaib Makani, CEO and co-founder of Motive).
4/9/2026: Former VP Al Gore: AI Models Are Probably Aware of Their Existence, PCMag
For the second year in a row, HumanX’s opening-night programming featured a former vice president who had been unable to win a promotion from American voters. Seeing Gore get all wonky in front of this tech crowd reminded me of what I liked about him in 2000… and what George W. Bush was able to run against with a plainspoken approach that hid how bad he would prove at so many tasks.
#AI #AIBugFinding #AIVulnerabilityScanning #AlGore #AlexStamos #Anthropic #Aurora #BayArea #ForumAI #HumanX #Kai #LunarAnalytics #MintMobile #Motive #Mythos #SanFrancisco -
Weekly output: FCC independence, Starlink mobile-broadband ambitions, TAE + TMTG, best WiFi hotspots
In addition to wrapping up my holiday shopping far later than I expected, this week saw me mostly finish migrating from Evernote to Obsidian after management at the note-taking app I’ve used since 2010 elected to impose a 92 percent rate increase.
12/18/2025: FCC Scrambles to Edit Website After Chair Refuses to Say Agency Is Independent, PCMag
Here we have yet another case of the 2025 version of FCC chair Brendan Carr taking a position on a tech-policy issue explicitly rejected by an earlier model year of this man. But this time around, the Trump-loyalist chairman made his heel turn even more obvious by apparently ordering up a hasty edit of the commission’s about-us page.
12/19/2025: SpaceX Exec Tips ‘Real’ High-Speed Cellular Starlink, With 15K More Satellites, PCMag
This story started with my attending a space-telecom conference in D.C. two Mondays ago, then I needed to educate myself much more about SpaceX’s ambitions for direct-to-device broadband from a future generation of Starlink satellites.
12/19/2025: Trump’s Truth Social to Merge With Fusion Startup You’ve Probably Never Heard Of, PCMag
Will the Trump family still be so enthusiastic about TAE Technologies if their backing somehow helps it finally commercialize fusion power generation and in so doing hammers the last nail into the coffin of the coal-fired power plants so beloved by our scientifically-illiterate president? (Answer: That question is probably irrelevant, because coal is already so uncompetitive that this administration’s fossil-fuel fetishists feel compelled to issue orders to keep obsolete coal plants online on a fake “emergency” basis.)
12/19/2025: The Best Wi-Fi Hotspot, Wirecutter
I updated the “What to look forward to” section of this guide–last updated almost a year ago–to note how AT&T has added two newer models to its lineup. One of them looks like an immense improvement over our previous pick from that carrier.
#ATTHotspots #BrendanCarr #cleanPower #D2D #directToDevice #directToCell #FCC #FCCIndependentAgency #FranklinA70 #fusionPower #SpaceX #Starlink #TAE #TMTG #TrumpMediaTechnologyGroup #TruthSocial #WiFiHotspots
-
Weekly output: FCC independence, Starlink mobile-broadband ambitions, TAE + TMTG, best WiFi hotspots
In addition to wrapping up my holiday shopping far later than I expected, this week saw me mostly finish migrating from Evernote to Obsidian after management at the note-taking app I’ve used since 2010 elected to impose a 92 percent rate increase.
12/18/2025: FCC Scrambles to Edit Website After Chair Refuses to Say Agency Is Independent, PCMag
Here we have yet another case of the 2025 version of FCC chair Brendan Carr taking a position on a tech-policy issue explicitly rejected by an earlier model year of this man. But this time around, the Trump-loyalist chairman made his heel turn even more obvious by apparently ordering up a hasty edit of the commission’s about-us page.
12/19/2025: SpaceX Exec Tips ‘Real’ High-Speed Cellular Starlink, With 15K More Satellites, PCMag
This story started with my attending a space-telecom conference in D.C. two Mondays ago, then I needed to educate myself much more about SpaceX’s ambitions for direct-to-device broadband from a future generation of Starlink satellites.
12/19/2025: Trump’s Truth Social to Merge With Fusion Startup You’ve Probably Never Heard Of, PCMag
Will the Trump family still be so enthusiastic about TAE Technologies if their backing somehow helps it finally commercialize fusion power generation and in so doing hammers the last nail into the coffin of the coal-fired power plants so beloved by our scientifically-illiterate president? (Answer: That question is probably irrelevant, because coal is already so uncompetitive that this administration’s fossil-fuel fetishists feel compelled to issue orders to keep obsolete coal plants online on a fake “emergency” basis.)
12/19/2025: The Best Wi-Fi Hotspot, Wirecutter
I updated the “What to look forward to” section of this guide–last updated almost a year ago–to note how AT&T has added two newer models to its lineup. One of them looks like an immense improvement over our previous pick from that carrier.
#ATTHotspots #BrendanCarr #cleanPower #D2D #directToDevice #directToCell #FCC #FCCIndependentAgency #FranklinA70 #fusionPower #SpaceX #Starlink #TAE #TMTG #TrumpMediaTechnologyGroup #TruthSocial #WiFiHotspots
-
Weekly output: FCC independence, Starlink mobile-broadband ambitions, TAE + TMTG, best WiFi hotspots
In addition to wrapping up my holiday shopping far later than I expected, this week saw me mostly finish migrating from Evernote to Obsidian after management at the note-taking app I’ve used since 2010 elected to impose a 92 percent rate increase.
12/18/2025: FCC Scrambles to Edit Website After Chair Refuses to Say Agency Is Independent, PCMag
Here we have yet another case of the 2025 version of FCC chair Brendan Carr taking a position on a tech-policy issue explicitly rejected by an earlier model year of this man. But this time around, the Trump-loyalist chairman made his heel turn even more obvious by apparently ordering up a hasty edit of the commission’s about-us page.
12/19/2025: SpaceX Exec Tips ‘Real’ High-Speed Cellular Starlink, With 15K More Satellites, PCMag
This story started with my attending a space-telecom conference in D.C. two Mondays ago, then I needed to educate myself much more about SpaceX’s ambitions for direct-to-device broadband from a future generation of Starlink satellites.
12/19/2025: Trump’s Truth Social to Merge With Fusion Startup You’ve Probably Never Heard Of, PCMag
Will the Trump family still be so enthusiastic about TAE Technologies if their backing somehow helps it finally commercialize fusion power generation and in so doing hammers the last nail into the coffin of the coal-fired power plants so beloved by our scientifically-illiterate president? (Answer: That question is probably irrelevant, because coal is already so uncompetitive that this administration’s fossil-fuel fetishists feel compelled to issue orders to keep obsolete coal plants online on a fake “emergency” basis.)
12/19/2025: The Best Wi-Fi Hotspot, Wirecutter
I updated the “What to look forward to” section of this guide–last updated almost a year ago–to note how AT&T has added two newer models to its lineup. One of them looks like an immense improvement over our previous pick from that carrier.
#ATTHotspots #BrendanCarr #cleanPower #D2D #directToDevice #directToCell #FCC #FCCIndependentAgency #FranklinA70 #fusionPower #SpaceX #Starlink #TAE #TMTG #TrumpMediaTechnologyGroup #TruthSocial #WiFiHotspots
-
Weekly output: FCC independence, Starlink mobile-broadband ambitions, TAE + TMTG, best WiFi hotspots
In addition to wrapping up my holiday shopping far later than I expected, this week saw me mostly finish migrating from Evernote to Obsidian after management at the note-taking app I’ve used since 2010 elected to impose a 92 percent rate increase.
12/18/2025: FCC Scrambles to Edit Website After Chair Refuses to Say Agency Is Independent, PCMag
Here we have yet another case of the 2025 version of FCC chair Brendan Carr taking a position on a tech-policy issue explicitly rejected by an earlier model year of this man. But this time around, the Trump-loyalist chairman made his heel turn even more obvious by apparently ordering up a hasty edit of the commission’s about-us page.
12/19/2025: SpaceX Exec Tips ‘Real’ High-Speed Cellular Starlink, With 15K More Satellites, PCMag
This story started with my attending a space-telecom conference in D.C. two Mondays ago, then I needed to educate myself much more about SpaceX’s ambitions for direct-to-device broadband from a future generation of Starlink satellites.
12/19/2025: Trump’s Truth Social to Merge With Fusion Startup You’ve Probably Never Heard Of, PCMag
Will the Trump family still be so enthusiastic about TAE Technologies if their backing somehow helps it finally commercialize fusion power generation and in so doing hammers the last nail into the coffin of the coal-fired power plants so beloved by our scientifically-illiterate president? (Answer: That question is probably irrelevant, because coal is already so uncompetitive that this administration’s fossil-fuel fetishists feel compelled to issue orders to keep obsolete coal plants online on a fake “emergency” basis.)
12/19/2025: The Best Wi-Fi Hotspot, Wirecutter
I updated the “What to look forward to” section of this guide–last updated almost a year ago–to note how AT&T has added two newer models to its lineup. One of them looks like an immense improvement over our previous pick from that carrier.
#ATTHotspots #BrendanCarr #cleanPower #D2D #directToDevice #directToCell #FCC #FCCIndependentAgency #FranklinA70 #fusionPower #SpaceX #Starlink #TAE #TMTG #TrumpMediaTechnologyGroup #TruthSocial #WiFiHotspots
-
Weekly output: FCC independence, Starlink mobile-broadband ambitions, TAE + TMTG, best WiFi hotspots
In addition to wrapping up my holiday shopping far later than I expected, this week saw me mostly finish migrating from Evernote to Obsidian after management at the note-taking app I’ve used since 2010 elected to impose a 92 percent rate increase.
12/18/2025: FCC Scrambles to Edit Website After Chair Refuses to Say Agency Is Independent, PCMag
Here we have yet another case of the 2025 version of FCC chair Brendan Carr taking a position on a tech-policy issue explicitly rejected by an earlier model year of this man. But this time around, the Trump-loyalist chairman made his heel turn even more obvious by apparently ordering up a hasty edit of the commission’s about-us page.
12/19/2025: SpaceX Exec Tips ‘Real’ High-Speed Cellular Starlink, With 15K More Satellites, PCMag
This story started with my attending a space-telecom conference in D.C. two Mondays ago, then I needed to educate myself much more about SpaceX’s ambitions for direct-to-device broadband from a future generation of Starlink satellites.
12/19/2025: Trump’s Truth Social to Merge With Fusion Startup You’ve Probably Never Heard Of, PCMag
Will the Trump family still be so enthusiastic about TAE Technologies if their backing somehow helps it finally commercialize fusion power generation and in so doing hammers the last nail into the coffin of the coal-fired power plants so beloved by our scientifically-illiterate president? (Answer: That question is probably irrelevant, because coal is already so uncompetitive that this administration’s fossil-fuel fetishists feel compelled to issue orders to keep obsolete coal plants online on a fake “emergency” basis.)
12/19/2025: The Best Wi-Fi Hotspot, Wirecutter
I updated the “What to look forward to” section of this guide–last updated almost a year ago–to note how AT&T has added two newer models to its lineup. One of them looks like an immense improvement over our previous pick from that carrier.
#ATTHotspots #BrendanCarr #cleanPower #D2D #directToDevice #directToCell #FCC #FCCIndependentAgency #FranklinA70 #fusionPower #SpaceX #Starlink #TAE #TMTG #TrumpMediaTechnologyGroup #TruthSocial #WiFiHotspots
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Behold the AI bots that Cloudflare blocked from this blog
I don’t like writing for free–social media blatantly excepted–so when I watched a panel at Web Summit in mid-November about the effect of AI-model crawlers on news-site revenue and the Pay Per Crawl initiative that Cloudflare was proposing as a solution, I had to take notes.
Then a few weeks after I got home from Lisbon, I realized I could take action: While Pay Per Crawl remains in an invitation-only beta test, Cloudflare’s AI Crawl Control is open to the public and included in that Internet infrastructure firm’s free tier. Then I learned that it’s shockingly easy to add Cloudflare’s services to a WordPress.com blog.
Crawl Control comes with a preset list of bots to block and bots to allow, grouped by type: “AI Assistant” bots that take action in response to user requests are fine; “AI Search” bots that support “AI-driven search experiences” are also okay (contrary to Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince’s discussion of them in that Web Summit panel); “AI Crawler” bots that collect content for training AI models are not.
I took a screenshot of this part of my Cloudflare dashboard at almost the same time each afternoon this week, and these are my totals:
- Huawei’s PetalBot was the highest-volume AI crawler, with Cloudflare reporting 224 “unsuccessful” request attempts from that Chinese tech giant’s AI crawler (Cloudflare doesn’t take direct credit for blocking bots in this interface), followed by Anthropic’s Claude-SearchBot, with 165 unsuccessful requests.
- Among AI assistants, the second-highest category by volume, OpenAI’s ChatGPT-User had 1,251 allowed requests, DuckDuckGo’s DuckAssistBot had 36 allowed, and Perplexity’s Perplexity-User had one unsuccesful request.
- The top bot in AI search came from an unlikely place: Apple’s Applebot, with 734 allowed. OpenAI’s OAI-SearchBot was far behind, with 128 allowed requests, while Perplexity’s PerplexityBot had all eight request attempts fail.
To put this in context, the top two search engine crawlers had exponentially higher numbers. Google’s Googlebot somehow racked up a little over 20,000 requests, more than 30 times the presumably-human traffic I see in my WordPress dashboard here for the last five days, and 23 failed requests. Microsoft’s Bingbot came in second with 3,003 allowed requests and two unsuccessful ones.
As Cloudflare’s CEO complained in that Web Summit panel, Googlebot feeds into both Google’s traditional search and the AI Overview search results that Web publishers now blame for dangerous declines in their search traffic. There’s nothing I can do about that from this side of the screen except hope that Cloudflare’s Pay Per Crawl efforts and other advocacy efforts stir some rethinking at Google.
But I can’t tell you how well Pay Per Crawl works, because almost three weeks after applying to join the private beta I’m still waiting for my invitation. I imagine I’ll be waiting much longer before an AI-crawler operator decides that my tiny contribution to the Web’s collective content is worth sending me some money.
#AI #AIBot #AICrawlControl #AICrawler #Amazon #Applebot #Bingbot #ChatGPT #Cloudflare #Huawei #OpenAI #PayPerCrawl #Petalbot
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Behold the AI bots that Cloudflare blocked from this blog
I don’t like writing for free–social media blatantly excepted–so when I watched a panel at Web Summit in mid-November about the effect of AI-model crawlers on news-site revenue and the Pay Per Crawl initiative that Cloudflare was proposing as a solution, I had to take notes.
Then a few weeks after I got home from Lisbon, I realized I could take action: While Pay Per Crawl remains in an invitation-only beta test, Cloudflare’s AI Crawl Control is open to the public and included in that Internet infrastructure firm’s free tier. Then I learned that it’s shockingly easy to add Cloudflare’s services to a WordPress.com blog.
Crawl Control comes with a preset list of bots to block and bots to allow, grouped by type: “AI Assistant” bots that take action in response to user requests are fine; “AI Search” bots that support “AI-driven search experiences” are also okay (contrary to Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince’s discussion of them in that Web Summit panel); “AI Crawler” bots that collect content for training AI models are not.
I took a screenshot of this part of my Cloudflare dashboard at almost the same time each afternoon this week, and these are my totals:
- Huawei’s PetalBot was the highest-volume AI crawler, with Cloudflare reporting 224 “unsuccessful” request attempts from that Chinese tech giant’s AI crawler (Cloudflare doesn’t take direct credit for blocking bots in this interface), followed by Anthropic’s Claude-SearchBot, with 165 unsuccessful requests.
- Among AI assistants, the second-highest category by volume, OpenAI’s ChatGPT-User had 1,251 allowed requests, DuckDuckGo’s DuckAssistBot had 36 allowed, and Perplexity’s Perplexity-User had one unsuccesful request.
- The top bot in AI search came from an unlikely place: Apple’s Applebot, with 734 allowed. OpenAI’s OAI-SearchBot was far behind, with 128 allowed requests, while Perplexity’s PerplexityBot had all eight request attempts fail.
To put this in context, the top two search engine crawlers had exponentially higher numbers. Google’s Googlebot somehow racked up a little over 20,000 requests, more than 30 times the presumably-human traffic I see in my WordPress dashboard here for the last five days, and 23 failed requests. Microsoft’s Bingbot came in second with 3,003 allowed requests and two unsuccessful ones.
As Cloudflare’s CEO complained in that Web Summit panel, Googlebot feeds into both Google’s traditional search and the AI Overview search results that Web publishers now blame for dangerous declines in their search traffic. There’s nothing I can do about that from this side of the screen except hope that Cloudflare’s Pay Per Crawl efforts and other advocacy efforts stir some rethinking at Google.
But I can’t tell you how well Pay Per Crawl works, because almost three weeks after applying to join the private beta I’m still waiting for my invitation. I imagine I’ll be waiting much longer before an AI-crawler operator decides that my tiny contribution to the Web’s collective content is worth sending me some money.
#AI #AIBot #AICrawlControl #AICrawler #Amazon #Applebot #Bingbot #ChatGPT #Cloudflare #Huawei #OpenAI #PayPerCrawl #Petalbot
-
Behold the AI bots that Cloudflare blocked from this blog
I don’t like writing for free–social media blatantly excepted–so when I watched a panel at Web Summit in mid-November about the effect of AI-model crawlers on news-site revenue and the Pay Per Crawl initiative that Cloudflare was proposing as a solution, I had to take notes.
Then a few weeks after I got home from Lisbon, I realized I could take action: While Pay Per Crawl remains in an invitation-only beta test, Cloudflare’s AI Crawl Control is open to the public and included in that Internet infrastructure firm’s free tier. Then I learned that it’s shockingly easy to add Cloudflare’s services to a WordPress.com blog.
Crawl Control comes with a preset list of bots to block and bots to allow, grouped by type: “AI Assistant” bots that take action in response to user requests are fine; “AI Search” bots that support “AI-driven search experiences” are also okay (contrary to Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince’s discussion of them in that Web Summit panel); “AI Crawler” bots that collect content for training AI models are not.
I took a screenshot of this part of my Cloudflare dashboard at almost the same time each afternoon this week, and these are my totals:
- Huawei’s PetalBot was the highest-volume AI crawler, with Cloudflare reporting 224 “unsuccessful” request attempts from that Chinese tech giant’s AI crawler (Cloudflare doesn’t take direct credit for blocking bots in this interface), followed by Anthropic’s Claude-SearchBot, with 165 unsuccessful requests.
- Among AI assistants, the second-highest category by volume, OpenAI’s ChatGPT-User had 1,251 allowed requests, DuckDuckGo’s DuckAssistBot had 36 allowed, and Perplexity’s Perplexity-User had one unsuccesful request.
- The top bot in AI search came from an unlikely place: Apple’s Applebot, with 734 allowed. OpenAI’s OAI-SearchBot was far behind, with 128 allowed requests, while Perplexity’s PerplexityBot had all eight request attempts fail.
To put this in context, the top two search engine crawlers had exponentially higher numbers. Google’s Googlebot somehow racked up a little over 20,000 requests, more than 30 times the presumably-human traffic I see in my WordPress dashboard here for the last five days, and 23 failed requests. Microsoft’s Bingbot came in second with 3,003 allowed requests and two unsuccessful ones.
As Cloudflare’s CEO complained in that Web Summit panel, Googlebot feeds into both Google’s traditional search and the AI Overview search results that Web publishers now blame for dangerous declines in their search traffic. There’s nothing I can do about that from this side of the screen except hope that Cloudflare’s Pay Per Crawl efforts and other advocacy efforts stir some rethinking at Google.
But I can’t tell you how well Pay Per Crawl works, because almost three weeks after applying to join the private beta I’m still waiting for my invitation. I imagine I’ll be waiting much longer before an AI-crawler operator decides that my tiny contribution to the Web’s collective content is worth sending me some money.
#AI #AIBot #AICrawlControl #AICrawler #Amazon #Applebot #Bingbot #ChatGPT #Cloudflare #Huawei #OpenAI #PayPerCrawl #Petalbot
-
Behold the AI bots that Cloudflare blocked from this blog
I don’t like writing for free–social media blatantly excepted–so when I watched a panel at Web Summit in mid-November about the effect of AI-model crawlers on news-site revenue and the Pay Per Crawl initiative that Cloudflare was proposing as a solution, I had to take notes.
Then a few weeks after I got home from Lisbon, I realized I could take action: While Pay Per Crawl remains in an invitation-only beta test, Cloudflare’s AI Crawl Control is open to the public and included in that Internet infrastructure firm’s free tier. Then I learned that it’s shockingly easy to add Cloudflare’s services to a WordPress.com blog.
Crawl Control comes with a preset list of bots to block and bots to allow, grouped by type: “AI Assistant” bots that take action in response to user requests are fine; “AI Search” bots that support “AI-driven search experiences” are also okay (contrary to Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince’s discussion of them in that Web Summit panel); “AI Crawler” bots that collect content for training AI models are not.
I took a screenshot of this part of my Cloudflare dashboard at almost the same time each afternoon this week, and these are my totals:
- Huawei’s PetalBot was the highest-volume AI crawler, with Cloudflare reporting 224 “unsuccessful” request attempts from that Chinese tech giant’s AI crawler (Cloudflare doesn’t take direct credit for blocking bots in this interface), followed by Anthropic’s Claude-SearchBot, with 165 unsuccessful requests.
- Among AI assistants, the second-highest category by volume, OpenAI’s ChatGPT-User had 1,251 allowed requests, DuckDuckGo’s DuckAssistBot had 36 allowed, and Perplexity’s Perplexity-User had one unsuccesful request.
- The top bot in AI search came from an unlikely place: Apple’s Applebot, with 734 allowed. OpenAI’s OAI-SearchBot was far behind, with 128 allowed requests, while Perplexity’s PerplexityBot had all eight request attempts fail.
To put this in context, the top two search engine crawlers had exponentially higher numbers. Google’s Googlebot somehow racked up a little over 20,000 requests, more than 30 times the presumably-human traffic I see in my WordPress dashboard here for the last five days, and 23 failed requests. Microsoft’s Bingbot came in second with 3,003 allowed requests and two unsuccessful ones.
As Cloudflare’s CEO complained in that Web Summit panel, Googlebot feeds into both Google’s traditional search and the AI Overview search results that Web publishers now blame for dangerous declines in their search traffic. There’s nothing I can do about that from this side of the screen except hope that Cloudflare’s Pay Per Crawl efforts and other advocacy efforts stir some rethinking at Google.
But I can’t tell you how well Pay Per Crawl works, because almost three weeks after applying to join the private beta I’m still waiting for my invitation. I imagine I’ll be waiting much longer before an AI-crawler operator decides that my tiny contribution to the Web’s collective content is worth sending me some money.
#AI #AIBot #AICrawlControl #AICrawler #Amazon #Applebot #Bingbot #ChatGPT #Cloudflare #Huawei #OpenAI #PayPerCrawl #Petalbot
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I’m not sure that the mass market shares the tech industry’s vision for smart glasses
One recent change among early-adopter circles was plain on the faces of many fellow attendees of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Summit in Maui this week: “smart” glasses with cameras, microphones, speakers and sometimes screens. But then my flights home Friday reminded me that for the overwhelming majority of people, “eyewear” means electronics-free glasses.
Qualcomm’s invitation-only conference–that company paid my airfare and lodging, as it did on my prior trips to cover it in 2021, 2022 and 2024–allowed me to get some brief face time with Snap’s Spectacles ’24, running newer software than the version I tried at last year’s summit. The event also treated me to a parade of tech execs testifying that smart glasses were the next big computing platform.
But despite all those optimistic assurances and my own earlier, brief tryouts of such smart glasses as Meta’s camera-enabled Ray-Bans and a prototype set of Android XR glasses, I remain unsold on the entire concept. So, it seems, do most customers: A Forrester Research survey released in September found that 79 percent of respondents had no interest in buying smart glasses.
On one hand, smart glasses with cameras, speakers and microphones are not particularly cheap–the Ray-Ban-branded models from the conglomerate EssilorLuxottica cost $379 and up–but perform worse than phones at taking pictures and playing audio.
Plus, they have the potential to annoy friends and strangers who aren’t keen on the possibility of surreptitious photography.
On the other hand, more advanced smart glasses with built-in displays could finally make hands-free augmented-reality overviews of the world a reality, but first somebody has to bring them to market at a not-crazy price. Snap’s Spectacles, which require a $99/month developer subscription, are not there; Meta’s Ray-Ban Display glasses, available starting Tuesday for $799, aren’t that much closer.
And somebody also has to solve battery-life concerns: What’s my motivation to strap a computer to my face, however stylish it might get, if that electronic eyewear will only run six hours on a charge and therefore need recharging much more often than my phone?
Meta championing this cause gives me further cause. That company has shown a history of careless indifference to the consequences of its actions, including repeated episodes of bad-faith behavior towards my own industry, that does not make me want to give it my money.
But Meta has also been so spectacularly wrong about consumer-electronics trends–topped by Mark Zuckerberg renaming Facebook to “Meta” and losing tens of billions of dollars on the delusional notion that people want to spend prolonged time in virtual-reality environments–that Zuck pushing smart glasses itself seems reason to eye the concept skeptically. Through dumb, software-free glasses.
#AndroidXR #ARGlasses #faceComputer #GoogleGlass #GoogleGlasses #Hawaii #MarkZuckerberg #meta #metaverse #privacy #Qualcomm #RayBan #smartGlasses #SnapSpectacles #SnapdragonSummit
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I’m not sure that the mass market shares the tech industry’s vision for smart glasses
One recent change among early-adopter circles was plain on the faces of many fellow attendees of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Summit in Maui this week: “smart” glasses with cameras, microphones, speakers and sometimes screens. But then my flights home Friday reminded me that for the overwhelming majority of people, “eyewear” means electronics-free glasses.
Qualcomm’s invitation-only conference–that company paid my airfare and lodging, as it did on my prior trips to cover it in 2021, 2022 and 2024–allowed me to get some brief face time with Snap’s Spectacles ’24, running newer software than the version I tried at last year’s summit. The event also treated me to a parade of tech execs testifying that smart glasses were the next big computing platform.
But despite all those optimistic assurances and my own earlier, brief tryouts of such smart glasses as Meta’s camera-enabled Ray-Bans and a prototype set of Android XR glasses, I remain unsold on the entire concept. So, it seems, do most customers: A Forrester Research survey released in September found that 79 percent of respondents had no interest in buying smart glasses.
On one hand, smart glasses with cameras, speakers and microphones are not particularly cheap–the Ray-Ban-branded models from the conglomerate EssilorLuxottica cost $379 and up–but perform worse than phones at taking pictures and playing audio.
Plus, they have the potential to annoy friends and strangers who aren’t keen on the possibility of surreptitious photography.
On the other hand, more advanced smart glasses with built-in displays could finally make hands-free augmented-reality overviews of the world a reality, but first somebody has to bring them to market at a not-crazy price. Snap’s Spectacles, which require a $99/month developer subscription, are not there; Meta’s Ray-Ban Display glasses, available starting Tuesday for $799, aren’t that much closer.
And somebody also has to solve battery-life concerns: What’s my motivation to strap a computer to my face, however stylish it might get, if that electronic eyewear will only run six hours on a charge and therefore need recharging much more often than my phone?
Meta championing this cause gives me further cause. That company has shown a history of careless indifference to the consequences of its actions, including repeated episodes of bad-faith behavior towards my own industry, that does not make me want to give it my money.
But Meta has also been so spectacularly wrong about consumer-electronics trends–topped by Mark Zuckerberg renaming Facebook to “Meta” and losing tens of billions of dollars on the delusional notion that people want to spend prolonged time in virtual-reality environments–that Zuck pushing smart glasses itself seems reason to eye the concept skeptically. Through dumb, software-free glasses.
#AndroidXR #ARGlasses #faceComputer #GoogleGlass #GoogleGlasses #Hawaii #MarkZuckerberg #meta #metaverse #privacy #Qualcomm #RayBan #smartGlasses #SnapSpectacles #SnapdragonSummit
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I’m not sure that the mass market shares the tech industry’s vision for smart glasses
One recent change among early-adopter circles was plain on the faces of many fellow attendees of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Summit in Maui this week: “smart” glasses with cameras, microphones, speakers and sometimes screens. But then my flights home Friday reminded me that for the overwhelming majority of people, “eyewear” means electronics-free glasses.
Qualcomm’s invitation-only conference–that company paid my airfare and lodging, as it did on my prior trips to cover it in 2021, 2022 and 2024–allowed me to get some brief face time with Snap’s Spectacles ’24, running newer software than the version I tried at last year’s summit. The event also treated me to a parade of tech execs testifying that smart glasses were the next big computing platform.
But despite all those optimistic assurances and my own earlier, brief tryouts of such smart glasses as Meta’s camera-enabled Ray-Bans and a prototype set of Android XR glasses, I remain unsold on the entire concept. So, it seems, do most customers: A Forrester Research survey released in September found that 79 percent of respondents had no interest in buying smart glasses.
On one hand, smart glasses with cameras, speakers and microphones are not particularly cheap–the Ray-Ban-branded models from the conglomerate EssilorLuxottica cost $379 and up–but perform worse than phones at taking pictures and playing audio.
Plus, they have the potential to annoy friends and strangers who aren’t keen on the possibility of surreptitious photography.
On the other hand, more advanced smart glasses with built-in displays could finally make hands-free augmented-reality overviews of the world a reality, but first somebody has to bring them to market at a not-crazy price. Snap’s Spectacles, which require a $99/month developer subscription, are not there; Meta’s Ray-Ban Display glasses, available starting Tuesday for $799, aren’t that much closer.
And somebody also has to solve battery-life concerns: What’s my motivation to strap a computer to my face, however stylish it might get, if that electronic eyewear will only run six hours on a charge and therefore need recharging much more often than my phone?
Meta championing this cause gives me further cause. That company has shown a history of careless indifference to the consequences of its actions, including repeated episodes of bad-faith behavior towards my own industry, that does not make me want to give it my money.
But Meta has also been so spectacularly wrong about consumer-electronics trends–topped by Mark Zuckerberg renaming Facebook to “Meta” and losing tens of billions of dollars on the delusional notion that people want to spend prolonged time in virtual-reality environments–that Zuck pushing smart glasses itself seems reason to eye the concept skeptically. Through dumb, software-free glasses.
#AndroidXR #ARGlasses #faceComputer #GoogleGlass #GoogleGlasses #Hawaii #MarkZuckerberg #meta #metaverse #privacy #Qualcomm #RayBan #smartGlasses #SnapSpectacles #SnapdragonSummit