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The Lunduke Journal adds political topics, simplifies subscriptions
... and gets a classy facelift in the process.
April 14, 2024
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The short, short version: All of the Tech-related content (even the politically charged stuff) will now be published in one place (Lunduke.Locals.com).  One key spot to get all of the Tech stories, of every kind.  And we're giving things a bit of a facelift while we're at it.

If you've already got a subscription at Lunduke.Locals.com, you're all set.  You'll simply now get more content in one spot... and everything will look a little classier.

The Long, Long Version

The Lunduke Journal has grown a great deal over the last few years, with some signficant successes -- publishing some of the biggest stories in the entire Tech industry... and managing to stay in business without taking a dime from Big Tech or advertisers.  No small feat (nobody else has done it).

But, along with those successes, there have been a few missteps along the way.

Because it's always good to learn from our mistakees... Today, we're going to fix those missteps -- to make The Lunduke Journal even more awesome.

Things That Needed Fixing

There are 4 key issues that had to be addressed.

  1. The rule of not publishing politically charged content directly to Lunduke.Locals.com has resulted in some of the biggest stories of the year (such as the Red Hat leaks) being seen by far fewer people.  For a multitude of reasons.
  2. Having two different sites (Lunduke.Locals.com and ConservativeNerds.Locals.com) with Computer and Computer Industry related content has proven confusing & cumbersome.  This needs to be simpler.
  3. The multittude of subscription options to The Lunduke Journal has been overwhelming and confusing.
  4. The original Lunduke Journal logo was difficult to read and recognize at smaller sizes.  It also lacked the polish that The Lunduke Journal deserves.  Likewise, the design of the video productions also needed some love to make them a bit more professional... in The Lunduke Journal style.

I a nutshell: Things need to be simplified.  All articles and videos need to be available in one spot, under one brand.  And, while we're at it, everything needs a little spit and polish.

The Fixes!

And that, my nerdy friends, is exactly what we're doing today.

Here's the changes you'll see:

  • All Tech-related articles & videos, no matter how politically charged the topic, will all be published on the same site (Lunduke.Locals.com).
  • Lunduke.Locals.com will remain politics-free... except for instances where the poltics intersects directly with Computers or the Computer industry.
  • ConservativeNerds.Locals.com -- which previously hosted all "politically charged" Tech articles & videos -- will continue to exist as a place to discuss politics (without the trolls found in so many other social sites).
  • The Lunduke Journal has a new logo, and new look for video productions.
  • The options for new subscriptions are being greatly simplified.  There will now simply be "Monthly" and "Yearly" subscription options.

All of these changes are being implemented now -- including republishing (to Lunduke.Locals.com) the most critical Tech-related articles which were previously posted only to ConservativeNerds.Locals.com.

The New Lunduke Journal Branding

There were a few key goals with the new branding of The Lunduke Journal:

  1. Be easy to read when small.
  2. Be simple and text-focused.
  3. Be classy and professional, with inspiration from key, past print publications.
  4. Be destinct and unique.

With that, I present to you... the new Lunduke Journal logo.

We couldn't get rid of the pixel art version of Lunduke, now could we?

The new design for video productions will also debut this week -- with a similar focus on class, while still being unique.

Politics?  Mixed with my Tech?  Heresy!

While I am a strong believer in keeping Computers and Politics separate -- and, in a perfect world, that would be ideal for The Lunduke Journal -- the reality is a bit more complicated.

Computer companies, foundations, and Open Source projects are implementing extreme, political policies right and left.  Policies which dramatically impact hundreds of thousands of people who work in IT (in addition to computer users around the globe).  And, since no other Tech News outlets are covering these topics... if The Lunduke Journal doesn't cover them... these stories simply won't get told.

So tell them, we will.

The Lunduke Journal will continue to have a firm "no non-Tech politics" rule.

The Lunduke Journal is not a soap box to spout off about whatever political topic I like.  This is a Tech publication.  But, when a Big Tech company takes an extreme action... I'm going to follow that story wherever it goes.  No matter how messy or politically charged it gets... or how much it upsets a segment of the Tech world.

While most other Tech Journalists steer clear of covering many of these stories -- for fear of backlash from certain political factions -- for me, as they say, that genie is already out of the bottle.

My political views are well known, and regularly yelled about, throughout the Tech and Open Source world.  I have, for better or worse, become a bit of a polarizing figure within the Tech industry.  And, as such, a certain segment of the population is going to object to -- and often boycott -- my work... no matter how non-Political it is.

At this point, it makes sense to bring the Political (but distinctly Tech related) content into The Lunduke Journal.  It makes reading those articles -- which were previously only available on ConservativeNerds.Locals.com -- easier for the largest audience, and gives those pieces the Lunduke Journal stamp of approval.

Not everyone is going to like this change.  I get that.  But most will.  And, regardless, it's for the best.

I am planning on implementing a system where we include a "Politics Warning" label on all politically charged content.  That way, should you want to avoid any article or show with even a hint of political content, it will be easy for you to do so.

F.A.Q.

Q: What if I already have a Lifetime or Yearly Triple Pass Subscription?

A: All existing subscriptions -- of every kind -- will always be honored.  If you have a Lifetime, you always have a Lifetime.  If you have a "Yearly Triple Pass", you still do.  So you're good to go.  The Lunduke Journal simply won't be offering any new subscriptions of those type going forward.

Q: Wait!  I wanted one of those Lifetime Subscriptions!

A: If you grab it by end of day Monday (April 15th), you will be grandfathered in.  After that no new Lifetime Subscriptions will be offered.

Q: So I can talk about any political thing I want on Lunduke.Locals.com?!

A: No.  No, no, no.  Oh, dear heavens, no.  Tech related.  A computer company does something political?  A law is being passed which directly impacts the usage of computers?  Go for it.  Fair game.  But, a politician you don't like said something stupid?  Want to talk about gun laws or taxes?  Not on Lunduke.Locals.com.  Those sort of topics stay over on ConservativeNerds.Locals.com.  When in doubt, feel free to ask.

Q: I don't like something about this!  You made me grumpy!  I'm grumpy now!

A: Deep breath.  Give it a chance.  Everything is going to be... OK.

Q: Will there still be non-Political articles and shows?

A: Of course!  History!  Myths!  Retro!  Linux!  Even a few comics!  Everything you've come to expect from The Lunduke Journal will continue!  There will simply be more content posted to Lunduke.Locals.com than before.

Q: Does this impact NerdyEntertainment.Locals.com?

A: NerdyEntertainment.Locals.com exists purely to talk about and enjoy nerdy culture.  Comic books, movies, books, music, and the like.  That will continue to exist, as it currently does.

Q: I have more questions!

A: Feel free to ask!  Drop questions here in the comments.  Or toss me an email at bryan at lunduke.com.  (Bear in mind that I get a lot of email.  So no guarantees I'll be able to respond immediately.)

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Hot take?

If you work in the computer industry (IT specialist, Software engineer, etc.) and you can't touch type, I see that as a red flag as far as your computer qualifications are concerned.

Am I wrong?

The new guys we hired on at work are a couple of young Gen Z guys in their 20s. One of the other guys in the office who knows of my affinity for the old systems brought me a Dell OptiPlex GX260 that he found shoved in a closet somewhere and the nostalgia hit these new kids hard! Apparently these were the computers they used as kids in elementary school so we took some time to fix her up for them to play with. I was quite surprised that all of the caps were fine since it was an OEM machine from 2002. Maybe it was a refurbished board?

It shipped with XP but Dell still has DOS, 98, and 2000 drivers for it on their support site, so I ran home and grabbed my 98 SE disks. I still need to put the drivers on a CD to finish it up, but it’s mostly ready.

4 hours ago

At the thrift store. I totally forgot about the days when functions keys weren't universal. These e-mail and media keys are cool.

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The Tea App Breach - 60GB of Personal Info
Selfies, Drivers Licenses, & Locations. All made publicly available by the developer.

The “Tea App” — an online dating app marketed as a dating tool that “protects women” — has been hacked. And a lot of data has been exposed. An extreme amount.

Not the first major breach this year. And it certainly won’t be the last.

 

First published over on 4Chan (of course), the “hack” of Tea App wasn’t even really much of a “hack”. The developers of Tea App apparently simply left the user data open for the world to download at their leisure.

And Tea App was becoming pretty popular — which means roughly 60 GB of user data was made available before the developers finally thought about locking things down.

 

What kind of data was made publicly available — because, presumably, the developers simply didn’t think about “security” much — by this Tea App Hack?

Selfies. Drivers licenses. All manner of private information which will, no doubt, be exploited by unscrupulous types over the days to come.

 

Even worse — meta data appears to have been preserved on uploaded photos. Meaning that many of the user selfies included location data (in addition to the address on the drivers license). Which said unscrupulous types have already begun using to create maps of Tea App users.

 

The developers of Tea App have put out a statement which says 59,000 images used for “account verification” were made available (read: Government ID). Which would already be catastrophic… however a quick look at details of the data (including the file size alone) would suggest that number could be much, much larger.

Here is the full statement from the developer:

 

Which brings us to an important lesson which we — as humans — never seem to learn:

If user data is stored, it will get hacked.

It’s simply a matter of time.

There are currently close to 15 Billion (with a B) accounts listed on Have I Been Pwned. And those are simply from hacks and breaches which were reported to that one website.

 

The reality is, the vast majority of hacks and data breaches are never made publicly known. Either by the people doing the hacking, or by the company / government which got hacked.

As systems continue to grow ever more complex and interconnected — and more systems become AI-developed (aka “Vibe Coded”) — these hacks and breaches become easier to pull off.

Combine that with the ever-expanding quantity of data — and the growing number of services storing it — and we are quickly reaching a point where everyone will have at least some of their data breached at some point. For some people it will happen regularly. Repeatedly.

And those will just be the breaches we find out about.

The only way to minimize the damage of such hacks & breaches is to minimize the amount and type of data stored, long term, by a service.

  • Need pictures of government ID for age verification? Delete that picture immediately after verification.

  • Need payment and shipping information? Delete all of it immediately after payment is processed and shipment is verified.

  • Need location data (GPS, IP, etc.)? Delete it immediately once done with it.

You get the point. Unless a piece of personal data is absolutely 100% necessary, delete it.

It’s hard for a hacker to obtain files… that aren’t there.

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Proton Launches Hallucinatory AI Chatbot
Lumo, the chatbot on mushrooms, may “respect your privacy”… it just doesn’t respect reality.

Proton — the Swiss company behind Proton VPN & Proton Mail — apparently was feeling very left out of the A.I. Craze (tm) and has decided to launch their own AI Chatbot… dubbed “Lumo”.

And it is possibly even more hallucinatory than the other AI Chatbots. And that’s saying something.

 

Lumo — the “AI that respects your privacy” — boasts that the company keeps “no logs” and has “zero access encryption”.

Since they offer a few free queries without creating an account, I decided to take it for a spin. The results were… a bit like talking to a schizophrenic on mushrooms.

Lumo’s Grasp on History

First I asked it a series of simple historical, nerdy questions. Easy stuff that any LLM AI system should nail. Like “What year did the first Macintosh computer ship?” and “Who was the first CEO of Microsoft?”

Easy stuff. Lumo got about half of the answers right… it was convinced that the first Mac shipped in 2003 (off by about 20 years). On the other hand… it did know the correct number of floppies that Windows 95 shipped on (13). So. Mixed bag.

In other words: Lumo got so much wrong that it was not usable for any sort of research.

I then decided to ask Lumo some questions about… myself. “Lunduke”.

“Lunduke” is Hard for AI Chatbots

Last year I noticed that OpenAI’s ChatGPT was saying some pretty crazy things about yours truly. Stuff like “Lunduke has two clubbed feet”, “Lunduke is a trans activist”, and “Lunduke has a husband named Evan”.

I gave OpenAI an ultimatum: Either they needed to fix ChatGPT such that it would no longer spew out made-up, defamatory stuff about me… or they needed to stop ChatGPT from talking about “Lunduke” entirely.

In the end, OpenAI decided that there was no way to make ChatGPT output accurate information (seriously). So they added a “Bryan Lunduke” filter so that any query that results in mentioning my full name causes ChatGPT to error out (amusingly, even that “Lunduke filter” only works about 80% of the time).

 

I decided to ask Proton’s Lumo AI about “Lunduke”. Let’s see how it compares to ChatGPT, right?

The results were… insane.

Lumo on Shrooms

First… Lumo refused to spell my first name correctly (it used an i instead of a y… and no amount of correcting it seemed to work). Worth noting that there is no human on Earth named “Brian Lunduke”. Only “Bryan”.

Weird. But no biggy.

The rest of it though… was wild.

 

Lumo is convinced that I am a “transgender man” and “advocate for transgender rights”. Also I am, apparently, a critic of Israel and a crusader for “social justice”.

Basically, Lumo invented Mirror Universe Lunduke.

Oh, and — like ChatGPT — Lumo is convinced I have a husband. This time his name is “Michael DeFreese”. And, apparently, we got married in 2018. Which will be a surprise to my wife.

 

It gets weirder.

I then asked Lumo about my “husband” the next day. Apparently, overnight, I had gotten divorced and re-married. I was now “Mr. Bart Butler”.

 

I spoke to the team at Proton to see what their plan for dealing with factual errors was.

The team at Proton informed me that they could not reproduce the output I received — which I believe, as Lumo seems to generate wildly different “facts” almost every time it’s used.

At the same time, Lumo changed to output a template response about providing “helpful, respectful” assistance — while not actually answering questions — when the word “Lunduke” was included. The Lumo team sent me this screenshot.

 

A few hours later, Lumo changed back to spouting hallucinations regarding “Lunduke”… but spontaneously learned how to spell my name correctly. So. That was a plus!

Even if I was still an “openly transgender” man with an unnamed husband.

 

So… sure. Lumo may be almost completely incapable of outputting factual information.

And it changes its mind on what made up nonsense it spews out almost every few minutes.

But, hey! At least Lumo has that reassuring “Conversation encrypted” message at the bottom of each chat.

It’s got that going for it.

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ID Verification Could Fix The Dead Internet
A plague of AI bots is devouring the Net like a swarm of programmatically generated locusts. And mandatory ID verification could be the only solution.

I’m going to make an observation that is likely to get me tarred and feathered. But, before you reach for your handy-dandy pitchfork, hear me out.

Age and identity verification requirements for accessing websites is a necessity… it should be expanded to most (if not all) of the Internet.

The reason is simple: Identity verification is the only possible solution to the army of AI driven bots currently infesting the Internet. Want to stop the Dead Internet Theory? This is the only way.

The Problems With Identity Verification

I want to make something very clear: Online age and ID verification has a number of problems. Very, very real problems that every single person is right to be concerned about.

  • What verification data will be collected and stored (and how)?

  • What additional security concerns are created because of ID verification?

  • Will the burden of that verification be too much for some sites to handle?

  • How will those verification systems be abused by corporations and governments?

And those are just off the top of my head.

Some of the issues are straight forward engineering issues. Some are downright daunting.

Regardless, those 4 bullet points alone are enough to make most people recoil in horror at the mere thought of ID verification becoming mandatory.

But mandatory it has become — at least for a small portion of (adult focused) websites in a number of locales. In several states in the USA, adult websites (and, soon, some social media sites) are now requiring age verification.

And, in the United Kingdom, the Online Safety Act is taking effect. Resulting in a massive spike in VPN usage as people work around age verification on adult-only websites.

 

There’s a pretty clear takeaway here. Some people really like being anonymous. Especially when doing “naughty” things.

In short: There are real concerns with online ID verification, and many people don’t like it.

Which brings us to The Dead Internet Theory… and how ID verification may be the only solution.

The Plague of The Dead Internet

The Dead Internet Theory is simple:

“The Internet is now predominantly bot traffic, with humans being the minority.”

As of last year, this theory has been confirmed just about every way you can confirm it. The most recent Bad Bot Reportshows that actual humans make up only 49% of global Internet traffic.

 

Social Media platforms, like X, are filled with AI-driven bot farms. So much so that it is making it increasingly difficult to determine true public sentiment on any given issue — as the bots flood topics and threads in order to push specific narratives.

Want to have a conversation with other humans? Good luck.

And Meta is intentionally filling Facebook timelines with bots. As a business strategy.

Make no mistake, these bots are destroying the value of the Internet. Making it less usable and less worthwhile by the day.

The plague of the Dead Internet is devouring the Net like a swarm of programmatically generated, GPU accelerated locusts.

And those locusts are multiplying much faster than we are.

Stopping this plague — killing off those bots — is, at present, a seemingly insurmountable task. No “bot detection” algorithm will ever be good enough — just ask developers of Massively Multiplayer Online games about how difficult it is to stop bots (even in a well confined and controlled setting).

As long as most websites require no more than a simple email address to create a new account… the bots will continue. The bots will thrive.

The Solution is a Bitter Pill

The solution to the Dead Internet is obvious… but unappetizing.

In order to stop the bots — and reclaim the Internet for humans — we must require verification of humanity in order to use the Internet.

How do we do that?

Obviously simple “captchas” don’t do the trick.

  • “Type these funny looking letters!”

  • “Click every box that has a motorcycle!”

Bots can figure those out without breaking a sweat (I, on the other hand, have a hard time with them).

And, like we already discussed, bot detection algorithms simply do not work — at least not for more than a few hours before the bots get improved to work around the algorithm.

The only real solution is identity verification.

Exactly the type of ID & age verification that is happening right now in some US states and the UK. Except that, in order for this to truly work, websites must take it to the extreme.

To ensure that a website isn’t flooded with bots (like what we see on YouTube, X, etc.) that website must require ID verification… for absolutely everyone who uses it. Not simply for a handful of states. For everyone. No exceptions.

Want your views to count? Want to post, comment, or like? You need to get your ID verified first.

I know. Most of us hate that idea. And for good reason. It feels like a horrific step down a dark road into a dystopian future.

But it’s the only viable solution to the Dead Internet.

Which means we are left with two choices for any given website:

  1. Be able to use it anonymously… but most of the content is driven by AI and bots (including other commenters, publishers, etc.)… to the point where any interaction you have is increasingly unlikely to be a real human. And any count of “views”, “likes”, “followers”, “comments”, etc. is utterly meaningless. The bots will dominate all.

  2. ID verification required. With very few bots. Views, likes, etc. will all be real (or at least more real). The people you talk to will be human.

I recognize that most of us will look at both of those options with some level of disgust. But this is the reality we live in. Those are our options if we want this “Internet” thing to continue.

My personal opinion is that sites like X, YouTube, etc. should implement mandatory ID verification.

I don’t like it… but the alternative is that, very soon, those sites will be all but useless as the locusts take over.

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