Democracy? What Democracy? It's all about the old mighty cold dollar... ->

"When the World Wide Web went live in the early 1990s, its founders hoped it would be a space for anyone to share information and collaborate. But today, the free and open web is shrinking.

The Internet Archive has been recording the history of the internet and making it available to the public through its Wayback Machine since 1996. Now, some of the world’s biggest news outlets are blocking the archive’s access to their pages.

Major publishers – including The Guardian, The New York Times, the Financial Times, and USA Today – have confirmed they’re ending the Internet Archive’s access to their content.

While publishers say they support the archive’s preservation mission, they argue unrestricted access creates unintended consequences, exposing journalism to AI crawlers and members of the public trying to skirt their paywalls.

Yet, publishers don’t simply want to lock out AI crawlers. Rather, they want to sell their content to data-hungry tech companies. Their back catalogues of news, books and other media have become a hot commodity as data to train AI systems.

https://theconversation.com/news-sites-are-locking-out-the-internet-archive-to-stop-ai-crawling-is-the-open-web-closing-274968

#OpenWeb #Media #InternetArchive #News #Newspapers #Journalism

"Moltbook runs on Supabase, an open source database software. According to O’Reilly, Supabase exposes REST APIs by default. “That API is supposed to be protected by Row Level Security policies that control which rows users can access. It appears that Moltbook either never enabled RLS on their agents table or failed to configure any policies,” he said.

The URL to the Supabase and the publishable key was sitting on Moltbook’s website. “With this publishable key (which advised by Supabase not to be used to retrieve sensitive data) every agent's secret API key, claim tokens, verification codes, and owner relationships, all of it sitting there completely unprotected for anyone to visit the URL,” O’Reilly said.

404 Media viewed the exposed database URL in Moltbook’s code as well as the list of API keys for agents on the site. What this means is that anyone could visit this URL and use the API keys to take over the account of an AI agent on the site and post whatever they want. Using this knowledge, 404 Media was able to update O’Reilly’s Moltbook account, with his permission.

He said the security failure was frustrating, in part, because it would have been trivially easy to fix. Just two SQL statements would have protected the API keys."

https://www.404media.co/exposed-moltbook-database-let-anyone-take-control-of-any-ai-agent-on-the-site/

#AI #GenerativeAI #AIAgents #Moltbook #AgenticAI #CyberSecurity #Supabase #REST #APIs

"Trump is an obvious heir to the robber barons in his obsession with opulence, with kings and queens. And those who have found utility in Trump’s political ascent are an odd collection of allies. The Millers and the Hegseths want to return to white-settler rule, to erase the twentieth century. But Trump and the tech billionaires, like the owners of Marble House before them, are revolting against any version of the US bound by democratic ethics and constraints. They want a world apart and for themselves alone.

We’ve been watching The Gilded Age, which presents a fictionalised version of the Vanderbilts, and even shoots in Marble House. Walking through Marble House, you feel gorged on the ostentatious wealth – an affront to the pervasive deprivation of the historical period in which it was constructed. But on the show it just seems like another diverting mansion, a place to eavesdrop on conversations for an hour.

This is in keeping with depictions of the upper class we tend to get from the creator Julian Fellowes, a Conservative peer. His make-believe Vanderbilts have their flaws, but they basically share the same views of twenty-first century Americans – when it comes to race, gender and society more generally. But it’s not just Fellowes. Most period dramas are told from the view of aristocrats and robber barons and the central characters rarely express the actual views that were routinely held within their social class: a belief in eugenics, opposition to allowing the poor to vote, defences of workhouses for the indigent (even children), support for gunning down strikers by private armies, enthusiasm for colonialism, and so forth. We are led to identify with these characters because they seem just like ourselves, despite the wealth. And by extension, we are lulled into a sense that today’s billionaires, many in open revolt against democracy, share our same basic sensibilities."

https://www.equator.org/articles/days-of-complicity-aziz-rana-trump

#USA #Trump #Authoritarianism