Dan Q
Today I learned that the quiet, high-pitched neighing sound horses sometimes make is called “nickering”.
I learned this from a subtitle which read “[horse nickers]”. Which, as a Brit, I can’t help but interpret as somebody making a misspelling while talking about equine underwear. 🤣
![Screengrab from Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. Paladmin Xenk Yendar, played by Regé-Jean Page, rides his horse through a forest. It's subtitled with him saying "I'm sorry." and also "[horse nickers]".](/_q23u/2023/05/d0a809c06b0d71981.png)
Last night I had a nightmare about Dungeons & Dragons. Specifically, about the group I DM for on alternate Fridays.
In their last session the party – somewhat uncharacteristically – latched onto a new primary plot hook rightaway. Instead of rushing off onto some random side quest threw themselves directly into this new mission.
This effectively kicked off a new chapter of their story, so I’ve been doing some prep-work this last week or so. Y’know: making battlemaps, stocking treasure chests with mysterious and powerful magical artefacts, and inventing a plethora of characters for the party to either befriend or kill (or, knowing this party: both).
Anyway: in the dream, I sat down to complete the prep-work I want to get done before this week’s play session. I re-checked my notes about what the adventurers had gotten up to last time around, and… panicked! I was wrong, they hadn’t thrown themselves off the side of a city floating above the first layer of Hell at all! I’d mis-remembered completely and they’d actually just ventured into a haunted dungeon. I’d been preparing all the wrong things and now there wasn’t time to correct my mistakes!
This is, of course, an example of the “didn’t prepare for the test” trope of dreams. Clearly I’m still feeling underprepared for this week’s game! But probably a bigger reason for the dream, and remembering it, was that I’ve had a cold and kept waking up to cough.
Right, better do a little more prep work!
Max props to the developer of puppeteer-extra-plugin-stealth, who I just
bought a coffee for.
The screen-scraper I wrote to bulk-export data from my Garmin sports tracker (because Garmin’s API is “only for corporate partners”, which is a magic spell you can say to make me write and open source a screen-scraper that targets your systems) stopped working today. Turns out Cloudflare could detect my automation.
Installed puppeteer-extra-plugin-stealth. Fixed instantly. Awesome.
This is an alternate history of the Web. The premise is true, but the story diverges from our timeline and looks at an alternative “Web that might have been”.
This is the story of P3P, one of the greatest Web standards whose history has been forgotten1, and how the abject failure of its first versions paved the way for its bright future decades later. But I’m getting ahead of myself…
Drafted in 2002 in the wake of growing concern about the death of privacy on the Internet, P3P 1.0 aimed to make the collection of personally-identifiable data online transparent. Hurrah, right?
Not so much. Its immediate impact was lukewarm to negative: developers couldn’t understand why their cookies were no longer being accepted by Internet Explorer 6, the first browser to implement the standard, and the whole exercise was slated as providing a false sense of security, not stopping actual bad guys, and an attempt to apply a technical solution to a political problem.2
Developers are lazy3 and soon converged on the simplest possible solution: add a garbage HTTP header like P3P: CP="See our website for our privacy policy." and your cookies work just fine! Ignore the problem, ignore the
proposed solution, just do what gets the project shipped.
Without any meaningful enforcement it also perfectly feasible to, y’know, just lie about how well you treat user data. Seeing the way the wind was blowing, Mozilla dropped support for P3P, and Microsoft’s support – which had always been half-baked and lacked even the most basic user-facing controls or customisation options – languished in obscurity.
For a while, it seemed like P3P was dying. Maybe, in some alternate timeline, it did die: vanishing into nothing like VRML, WAP, and XBAP.
But fortunately for us, we don’t live in that timeline.
In 2009, the European Union revisited the Privacy and Electronic Communications Directive. The initial regulations, published in 2002, required that Web users be able to opt-out of tracking cookies, but the amendment required that sites ensure that users opted-in.
As-written, this confusing new regulation posed an immediate problem: if a user clicked the button to say “no, I don’t want cookies”, and you didn’t want to ask for their consent again on every page load… you had to give them a cookie (or use some other technique legally-indistinguishable from cookies). Now you’re stuck in an endless cookie-circle.4
This, and other factors of informed consent, quickly introduced a new pattern among those websites that were fastest to react to the legislative change:
Web users rebelled. These ugly overlays felt like a regresssion to a time when popup ads and splash pages were commonplace. “If only,” people cried out, “There were a better way to do this!”
It was Professor Lorie Cranor, one of the original authors of the underloved P3P specification and a respected champion of usable privacy and security, whose rallying cry gave us hope. Her CNET article, “Why the EU Cookie Directive is a solved problem”5, inspired a new generation of development on what would become known as P3P 2.0.
While maintaining backwards compatibility, this new standard:
<link> tags alone,
Set-Cookie2: headers, which nobody used anyway, and
Internet Explorer at this point was still used by a majority of Web users. It still supported the older version of the standard, and – as perhaps the greatest gift that the much-maligned browser ever gave us – provided a reference implementation as well as a stepping-stone to wider adoption.
Opera, then Firefox, then “new kid” Chrome each adopted P3P 2.0; Microsoft finally got on board with IE 8 SP 1. Now the latest versions of all the mainstream browsers had a solid implementation6 well before the European data protection regulators began fining companies that misused tracking cookies.
But where the story of P3P‘s successes shine brightest came in 2016, with the passing of the GDPR. The W3C realised that P3P could simplify both the expression and understanding of privacy policies for users, and formed a group to work on version 2.1. And that’s the version you use today.
When you launch a new service, you probably use one of the many free wizard-driven tools to express your privacy policy and the bases for your data processing, and it spits out a
template privacy policy. You need the human-readable version, of course, since the 2020 German court ruling that you cannot rely on a machine-readable privacy policy alone, but
the real gem is the P3P: 2.1 header version.
Assuming you don’t have any unusual quirks in your data processing (ask your lawyer!), you can just paste the relevant code into your server configuration and you’re good to go. Site users get a warning if their personal data preferences conflict with your data policies, and can choose how to act: not using your service, choosing which of your features to opt-in or out- of, or – hopefully! – granting an exception to your site (possibly with caveats, such as sandboxing your cookies or clearing them immediately after closing the browser tab).
Sure, what we’ve got isn’t perfect. Sometimes companies outright lie about their use of information or use illicit methods to track user behaviour. There’ll always be bad guys out there. That’s what laws are there to deal with.
But what we’ve got today is so seamless, it’s hard to imagine a world in which we somehow all… collectively decided that the correct solution to the privacy problem might have been to throw endless popovers into users’ faces, bury consent-based choices under dark patterns, and make humans do the work that should from the outset have been done by machines. What a strange and terrible timeline that would have been.
1 If you know P3P‘s history, regardless of what timeline you’re in: congratulations! You win One Internet Point.
2 Techbros have been trying to solve political problems using technology since long before the word “techbro” was used in its current context. See also: (a) there aren’t enough mental health professionals, let’s make an AI app? (b) we don’t have enough ventilators for this pandemic, let’s 3D print air pumps? (c) banks keep failing, let’s make a cryptocurrency? (d) we need less carbon in the atmosphere or we’re going to go extinct, better hope direct carbon capture tech pans out eh? (e) we have any problem at all, lets somehow shoehorn blockchain into some far-fetched idea about how to solve it without me having to get out of my chair why not?
3 Note to self: find a citation for this when you can be bothered.
4 I can’t decide whether “endless cookie circle” is the name of the New Wave band I want to form, or a description of the way I want to eventually die. Perhaps both.
5 Link missing. Did I jump timelines?
6 Implementation details varied, but that’s part of the joy of the Web. Firefox favoured “conservative” defaults; Chrome and IE had “permissive” ones; and Opera provided an ultra-configrable matrix of options by which a user could specify exactly which kinds of cookies to accept, linked to which kinds of personal data, from which sites, all somehow backed by an extended regular expression parser that was only truly understood by three people, two of whom were Opera developers.
I’ve resisted writing about the current trends in AI because, well, others are already doing it better.1 But I was inspired by Garrett‘s observation that – according to the Washington Post – the C4 dataset has tokenised his personal website.
-v (verbose mode) activated.
Much has been said about how ChatGPT and her friends will hallucinate and mislead. Let’s take an example.
Remember that ChatGPT has almost-certainly read basically everything I’ve ever written online – it might well be better-informed about me better than you are – as you read this:
When I asked ChatGPT about me, it came up with a mixture of truths and believable lies2, along with a smattering of complete bollocks.
In another example, ChatGPT hallucinates this extra detail specifically because the conversation was foreshadowed by its previous mistake. At this point, it digs its heels in and commits to its claim, like the stubborn guy in the corner of the pub who doubles-down on his bullshit.
If you were to ask at the outset who wrote Notpron, ChatGPT would have gotten it right, but because it already mis-spoke, it’s now trapped itself in a lie, incapable of reconsidering what it said previously as having been anything but the truth:
Simon Willison says that we should call this behaviour “lying”. In response to this, several people told him that the “lying” excessively anthropomorphises these chatbots, implying that they’re deliberately attempting to mislead their users. Simon retorts:
I completely agree that anthropomorphism is bad: these models are fancy matrix arithmetic, not entities with intent and opinions.
But in this case, I think the visceral clarity of being able to say “ChatGPT will lie to you” is a worthwhile trade.
I agree with Simon. ChatGPT and systems like it are putting accessible AI into the hands of the masses, and that means that the people who are using it don’t necessarily understand – nor desire to learn – the statistical mechanisms that actually underpin the AI‘s “decisions” about how to respond.
Trying to explain how and why their new toy will get things horribly wrong is hard, and it takes a critical eye, time, and practice to begin to discover how to use these tools effectively and safely.3 It’s simpler just to say “Here’s a tool; by the way, it’s a really convincing liar and you can’t trust it even a little.”
Giving people tools that will lie to them. What an interesting time to be alive!
1 I’m tempted to blog about my experience of using Stable Diffusion and GPT-3 as assistants while DMing my regular Dungeons & Dragons game, but haven’t worked out exactly what I’m saying yet.
2 That ChatGPT lies won’t be a surprise to anybody who’s used the system nor anybody who
understands the fundamentals of how it works, but as AIs get integrated into more and more things, we’re going to need to teach a level of technical literacy about what that means,
just like we do should about, say, Wikipedia.
3 For many of the tasks people talk about outsourcing to LLMs, it’s the case that it would take less effort for a human to learn how to do the task that it would for them to learn how to supervise an AI performing the task! That’s not to say they’re useless: just that (for now at least) you should only trust them to do something that you could do yourself and you’re therefore able to critically assess how well the machine did it.
This checkin to GC5F425 Lovers Walk reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
My GPSr dropped me next to a far older bit of architecture than the one that hosts the cache, but found after a short search. I’m staying nearby as part of a charity hackathon for a nonprofit I’m involved with, but came out for a walk and an explore while between other tasks. SL, TFTC.
I got some great feedback to yesterday’s post about using FreshRSS + XPath to subscribe to Forward, including helpful comments from FreshRSS developer Alexandre Alapetite and from somebody who appreciated it and my Far Side “Daily Dose” recipe and wondered if it was possible to get the new Far Side content in FreshRSS too.
Wait, there’s new Far Side content? Yup: it turns out Gary Larson’s dusted off his pen and started drawing again. That’s awesome! But the last thing I want is to have to go to the website once every few… what: days? weeks? months? He’s not syndicated any more so he’s not got a deadline to work to! If only there were some way to have my feed reader, y’know, do it for me and let me know whenever he draws something new.
Here’s my setup for getting Larson’s new funnies right where I want them:
https://www.thefarside.com/new-stuff/1
//div[@class="swiper-slide"]
concat("Far Side #", descendant::button[@aria-label="Share"]/@data-shareable-item)
data- attribute of the “share” button, where it’s presumably used for engagement tracking. Still,
whatever works right?
descendant::figcaption
concat("https://www.thefarside.com",
./@data-path)
concat("https://fox.q-t-a.uk/referer-faker.php?pw=YOUR-SECRET-PASSWORD-GOES-HERE&referer=https://www.thefarside.com/&url=",
descendant::img[@data-src]/@data-src)
Referer: headers as an anti-hotlinking measure, which prevents us easily loading the images directly in an RSS reader. I use this tiny PHP script as a proxy to mitigate that. If
you don’t have such a proxy set up, you could simply omit the “Item thumbnail” and “Item content” fields and click the link to go to the original page.
normalize-space(descendant::div[@class="tfs-comic-new__meta"]/*[1])
normalize-space to tidy the whitespace up. The date format then looks
like “Wednesday, March 29, 2023”, which we can parse using a custom date/time format string:
l, F j, Y
I promise I’ll stop writing about how awesome FreshRSS + XPath is someday. Today isn’t that day.
Meanwhile: if you used to use a feed reader but gave up when the Web started to become hostile to them and big social media systems started to wall you in, you should really consider picking one up again. The stuff I write about is complex edge-cases that most folks don’t need to think about in order to benefit from RSS… but it’s super convenient to have the things you care about online (news, blogs, social media, videos, newsletters, comics, search trends…) collated and sorted for you… without interference from algorithms that want to push “sticky” content, without invasive tracking or advertisements (or cookie banners or privacy popups), without something “disappearing” simply because you put off reading it for a few days.
As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a fan of Tailsteak‘s Forward comic. I’m not a fan of the author’s weird aversion to RSS, so I hacked a way around it first using an exploit in webcomic reader app Comic Chameleon (accidentally getting access to comics weeks in advance of their publication as a side-effect) and later by using my own tool RSSey.
But now I’m able to use my favourite feed reader FreshRSS to scrape websites directly – like I’ve done for The Far Side – I should switch to using this approach to subscribe to Forward, too:
Here’s the settings I came up with –
http://forwardcomic.com/list.php
HTML + XPath (Web scraping)
//a[starts-with(@href,'archive.php')]
.
./@href
./following-sibling::text()[1]
- Y.m.d
<a>s
separated by <br>s rather than a <ul> and <li>s, for example, leaves something to be desired (and makes it harder to scrape,
too!).
I continue to love this “killer feature” of FreshRSS, but I’m beginning to see how it could go further – I wish I had the free time to contribute to its development!
I’d love to see a mechanism for exporting/importing feed configurations like this so that I could share them more-easily, for example. I’d also be delighted if I could expand on my XPath rules to load pages referenced by the results and get data from them, too, e.g. so I could use an image found by XPath on the “item link” page as the thumbnail image! These are things RSSey could do for me, but FreshRSS can’t… yet!
I bought Zach Weinersmith‘s Bea Wolf for my kids (9 and 6, the elder of them already a fan of Beowulf). It arrived today, but neither of them have had a chance to because I wouldn’t put it down.
My favourite bit is when Bea and her entourage arrive near Treeheart and the shield-bearer who greets them says “Your leader sparkles with power and also with sparkles.” The line’s brilliant, clever, and accompanies the most badass illustration.
I’ll give it to my kids… eventually. But if you’re looking for a book recommendation in the meantime, this is it.
This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.
I edit all my posts before I publish them – I look for poor grammar, me rambling on (something which I’m terrible for) and things like typos, although some do still get through. I think that kind of editing is fine.
But when it comes to opinion pieces, I don’t think they should be edited. Yes, you should (in my opinion) check the spelling/grammar before posting, but I don’t think you should go back and edit your opinions retrospectively if they change.
Kev speaks my mind.
At almost 25 years ago, my blog’s ancient, and covering more than half my life it inevitably includes posts that I feel don’t accurately reflect me any more (or, perhaps, didn’t reflect me well even when I wrote them!). My approach has long been that it’s okay to go back and modify a post to:
But like Kev, to me it just doesn’t seem right to change opinion pieces after your opinion changes. I’m happy to write a retraction and link to it from the original, but making-out like I never said those things in the first place seems disingenuous.
Kev links a disclaimer from his older posts; that’s an interesting idea that I might adopt.
(Just want the instructions? Scroll down.)
A year and a half ago I came up with a technique for intercepting the “shuffle” operation on jigsaw website Jigidi, allowing players to force the pieces to appear in a consecutive “stack” for ludicrously easy solving. I did this partially because I was annoyed that a collection of geocaches near me used Jigidi puzzles as a barrier to their coordinates1… but also because I enjoy hacking my way around artificially-imposed constraints on the Web (see, for example, my efforts last week to circumvent region-blocking on radio.garden).
My solver didn’t work for long: code changes at Jigidi’s end first made it harder, then made it impossible, to use the approach I suggested. That’s fine by me – I’d already got what I wanted – but the comments thread on that post suggests that there’s a lot of people who wish it still worked!2 And so I ignored the pleas of people who wanted me to re-develop a “Jigidi solver”. Until recently, when I once again needed to solve a jigsaw puzzle in order to find a geocache’s coordinates.
Rather than interfere with the code provided by Jigidi, I decided to take a more-abstract approach: swapping out the jigsaw’s image for one that would be easier.
This approach benefits from (a) having multiple mechanisms of application: query interception, DNS hijacking, etc., meaning that if one stops working then another one can be easily rolled-out, and (b) not relying so-heavily on the structure of Jigidi’s code (and therefore not being likely to “break” as a result of future upgrades to Jigidi’s platform).
Watch a video demonstrating the approach:
It’s not as powerful as my previous technique – more a “helper” than a “solver” – but it’s good enough to shave at least half the time off that I’d otherwise spend solving a Jigidi jigsaw, which means I get to spend more time out in the rain looking for lost tupperware. (If only geocaching were even the weirdest of my hobbies…)
To do this yourself and simplify your efforts to solve those annoying “all one colour” or otherwise super-frustrating jigsaw puzzles, here’s what you do:
The replacement image has the following characteristics that make it easier to solve than it might otherwise be:
To solve the jigsaw, start by grouping colours together, then start combining those that belong in the same column (based on the second digit on the piece). Join whole or partial columns together as you go.
I’ve been using this technique or related ones for over six months now and no code changes on Jigidi’s side have impacted upon it at all, so it’s probably got better longevity than the previous approach. I’m not entirely happy with it, and you might not be either, so feel free to fork my code and improve it: the legiblity of the numbers is sometimes suboptimal, and the colour banding repeats on larger jigsaws which I’d rather avoid. There’s probably also potential to improve colour-recognition by making the colour bands span the gaps between rows or columns of pieces, too, but more experiments are needed and, frankly, I’m not the right person for the job. For the second time, I’m going to abandon a tool that streamlines Jigidi solving because I’ve already gotten what I needed out of it, and I’ll leave it up to you if you want to come up with an improvement and share it with the community.
1 As I’ve mentioned before, and still nobody believes me: I’m not a fan of jigsaws! If you enjoy them, that’s great: grab a bucket of popcorn and a jigsaw and go wild… but don’t feel compelled to share either with me.
2 The comments also include asuper-helpful person called Rich who’s been manually solving people’s puzzles for them, and somebody called Perdita who “could be my grandmother” (except: no) with whom I enjoyed a conversation on- and off-line about the ethics of my technique. It’s one of the most-popular comment threads my blog has ever seen.
I wanted to play about with Listmonk and it’s available as a Docker image, so I figured I’d just install it on my Unraid box. It doesn’t have a recipe in Community Apps but it’s not usually hard to reverse-engineer an official installation guide into something that “just works” on Unraid. After a first attempt failed, I looked around for a quick how-to guide online and mostly found… a mixture of people similarly failing to get it working or else having a kindly stranger offer to help… but not on the open Web where the rest of us can benefit from their knowledge. Sigh.
So I resolved that when I figured it out, I’d document the steps so that the next person after me can have an easier job of it.
postgresql15 image from Community Apps.
CREATE USER listmonk WITH LOGIN PASSWORD 'my-listmonk-db-password';
CREATE DATABASE listmonk OWNER listmonk;
listmonk share and put it in there, calling it /listmonk/config.toml, but anywhere on your
Unraid server will do. There’s a sample configuration
in the repository. You’ll probably want to change:
0.0.0.0:9000 to listen on all interfaces so you can access it from elsewhere on your network (might not be needed if you
intend to proxy with a host-networked reverse proxy server)
listmonk/listmonk:latest
HTTP and Host Port: 9000. Then fill in 9000 as the value (or
whatever port you want to run Listmonk on)
Config and Container Path: /listmonk/config.toml. Set the Host
Path to wherever you put the Listmonk configuration file, e.g. /mnt/user/listmonk/config.toml.
docker run --rm -ti --net='host' -e TZ="UTC" -v '/mnt/user/listmonk/config.toml':'/listmonk/config.toml':'rw' listmonk/listmonk:latest ./listmonk -- --install
/mnt/user/listmonk/config.toml for whatever path your configuration file is at, if applicable. You’ll be prompted with the messages “** first time
installation **”, “** IMPORTANT: This will wipe existing listmonk tables and types in the DB ‘listmonk’ **”, and then asked “continue (y/N)?”. Press “y” and the installation will
complete.
Hope that helps somebody!
This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.
This was a delightful vlog. It really adds personality to what might otherwise have been a story only about technology and history.
I subscribed to Codex’s vlog like… four years ago? He went dark soon afterwards, but thanks to the magic of RSS, I got notified as soon as he came back from his hiatus.
I must be the last person on Earth to have heard about radio.garden (thanks Pepsilora!), a website that uses a “globe” interface to let you tune in to radio stations around the globe. But I’d only used it for a couple of minutes before I discovered that there are region restrictions in place. Here in the UK, and perhaps elsewhere, you can’t listen to stations in other countries without using a VPN or similar tool… which might introduce a different region’s restrictions!
So I threw together a quick workaround:
For those looking to get into userscripting, here’s a quick tutorial on what I did to develop this bypass.
First, I played around with radio.garden for a bit to get a feel for what it was doing. I guessed that it must be tuning into a streaming URL when you select a radio station, so I opened by browser’s debugger on the Network tab and looked at what happened when I clicked on a “working” radio station, and how that differed when I clicked on a “blocked” one:
When connecting to a station, a request is made for some JSON that contains station metadata. Then, for a working
station, a request is made for an address like /api/ara/content/listen/[ID]/channel.mp3. For a blocked station, this request isn’t made.
I figured that the first thing I’d try would be to get the [ID] of a station that I’m not permitted to listen to and manually try the URL to see if it was actually blocked, or merely not-being-loaded. Looking at a working station, I first found the ID in the
JSON response and I was about to extract it when I noticed that it also appeared in the request for the
JSON: that’s pretty convenient!
My hypothesis
was that the “blocking” is entirely implemented in the front-end: that the JavaScript code that makes the pretty bits work is looking at the “country” data that’s returned and using
that to decide whether or not to load the audio stream. That provides many different ways to bypass it, from manipulating the JavaScript to remove that functionality, to
altering the JSON response so that every station appears to be in the user’s country, to writing some extra code that
intercepts the request for the metadata and injects an extra audio player that doesn’t comply with the regional restrictions.
But first I needed to be sure that there wasn’t some actual e.g. IP-based blocking on the streams. To do this, first I took the
/api/ara/content/listen/[ID]/channel.mp3 address of a known-working station and opened it in VLC using Media
> Open Network Stream…. That worked. Then I did the same thing again, but substituted the [ID] part of the address with the ID of a “blocked” station.
VLC happily started spouting French to me: the bypass would, in theory, work!
Next, I needed to get that to work from within the site itself. It’s implemented in React, which is a pig to inject code into because it uses horrible identifiers for
DOM elements. But of course I knew that there’d be this tell-tale fetch request for the station metadata that I
could tap into, so I used this technique to override the native fetch method and
replace it with my own “wrapper” that logged the stream address for any radio station I clicked on. I tested the addresses this produced using my browser.
window.fetch = new Proxy(window.fetch, { apply: (target, that, args)=>{ const tmp = target.apply(that, args); tmp.then(res=>{ const matches = res.url.match(/\/api\/ara\/content\/channel\/(.*)/); if(matches){ const stationId = matches[1]; console.log(`http://radio.garden/api/ara/content/listen/${stationId}/channel.mp3`); } }); return tmp; }, });
That all worked nicely, so all I needed to do now was to use those addresses rather than simply logging them. Rather that get into the weeds reverse-engineering the built-in
player, I simply injected a new <audio> element after it and pointed it at the correct address, and applied a couple of CSS tweaks to make it fit in nicely.
The only problem was that on UK-based radio stations I’d now hear a slight echo, because the original player was still working. I
could’ve come up with an elegant solution to this, I’m sure, but I went for a quick-and-dirty hack: I used res.json() to obtain the body of the metadata response… which
meant that the actual code that requested it would no longer be able to get it (you can only decode the body of a fetch response once!). radio.garden’s own player treats this as an
error and doesn’t play that radio station, but my new <audio> element still plays it perfectly well.
It’s not pretty, but it’s functional. You can read the finished source code on Github. I don’t anticipate that I’ll be maintaining this script so if it stops working you’ll have to fix it yourself, and I have no intention of “finishing” it by making it nicer or prettier. I just wanted to share in case you can learn anything from my approach.
This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.
Automattic has acquired the ActivityPub plugin for WordPress from German developer Matthias Pfefferle, who will be joining the company to continue improving support for federated platforms. Pfefferle, who is also the author of the Webmention plugin, said his new role is to see how Automattic’s products can benefit from open protocols like ActivityPub.
…
This is so exciting I might burst. Want to know why?
Susan A. Kitchens expressed concern that this could increase the level of ActivityPub spam out there (which right now is very low). I worry about that too. But I’m still optimistic that we can make something awesome off the back of this acquisition and keep the interpersonal Web federated, the way it ought to be.