Evan Boehs

Evan Boehs

@boehs.org

The idea is to die young as late as possible 🐘 https://social.coop/@eb 🌐 https://boehs.org

352 followers99 following169 posts

Windows 7 traffic on my site has dramatically increased over the past 3 months. This was widely reported in the news, and frequently attributed as a statscounter glitch. But I don't use statscounter, and my Windows 7 traffic is still increasing. Why? A thread;

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Maybe I block w7 users in Singapore. But I only identified this in the first place bc of the odd Windows 7 UA. What % of other visitors are bots? Not all, but some? Most? I can't detect them well, evidently. I don't know who's running them. And I don't want to fingerprint humans to find out.

Windows 7 traffic on my site has dramatically increased over the past 3 months. This was widely reported in the news, and frequently attributed as a statscounter glitch. But I don't use statscounter, and my Windows 7 traffic is still increasing. Why? A thread;

Over 90% of my Windows 7 "visitors" are Chrome users in Singapore with no referrer and 1280x1200 displays. These users *do* execute JS, but do not engage with the page. They appear to visit pages at random. Unless my website is shockingly popular with Singaporean Windows 7 users, these are bots...

But for what? They aren't DDoSing me, but they are executing JavaScript and evading my (admittedly lax) bot mitigations. Maybe they are stealing my copyrighted content to train an AI model.

Evan Boehs reposted

Replying to @python.org

as a condition of funding, we were asked to affirm that we wouldn’t undertake any diversity, equity, and inclusion work, whether or not we used the government funds to do so. The PSF simply couldn’t agree to that statement,

Call me a doomer but with 17 years of entrenchment and no corporate buyin iOS will never be fully interoperable. The DMA is great but it’s the sum of a bazillion little things that makes a product feel at home. Death by a thousand cuts.

Like the now playing widget has a separate icon for AirPods. Only Apple Maps is able to stay open when you lock your phone. HDR in HEIC is completely undocumented so every photo editing app fucks it up. The list goes on and on.

I do wonder about the interoperability request form. Why haven’t all these little cuts been fixed? Does it involve a lot of legalese so only big corps can afford it? Is the scope too small? Does Apple reject things overzealously? Surely if it was easy the indies would’ve requested everything by now

Using wired headphones bc my wireless ones went for a swim. First, wired headphones are a PITA. I don't like the tether. I miss ANC. I don't like the weight of the wire. But oddly, they sound just as good, maybe better. Definitely better than the wireless ones before an equalizer. They cost $20.

The wireless headphones are back. I tried charging them once a day for the past week. Yesterday, I smacked it on my desk 5 times and plugged it in again and that little shit started charging

As I correctly predicted, fare evasion increased. The MBTA says that “a loss of $30m threatens a lifeline,” and that “every dollar is important to us.” If that really was so, you wouldn’t have spent $1b to lose an additional $30m each year forever. Free the fucking T. boehs.org/node/free-th...

Evan Boehs reposted

Replying to @boehs.org

In sum, tangled feels like a solution in need of a problem. GitHub offers a thin social layer on top of a decentralized protocol. If GitHub is threatened, decentralized alternatives already exist. Afaik tangled has no discernible value-add over these alternatives, other than “wow atproto”.

Evan Boehs reposted

American war planning usually takes place in highly secure facilities. But the Trump administration planned its strikes on the Houthis using a group chat—and accidentally included The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg. theatln.tc/IuULQFiY

theatln.tcThe Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War PlansU.S. national-security leaders included me in a group chat about upcoming military strikes in Yemen. I didn’t think it could be real. Then the bombs started falling.

Evan Boehs reposted

They're called public records for a reason. Starting today, WIRED will *stop paywalling* articles that are primarily based on public records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, becoming the first publication to partner with @freedom.press to offer this for our new coverage.

freedom.pressWired is dropping paywalls for FOIA-based reporting. Others should followAs the administration does its best to hide public records from the public, Wired magazine is stepping up to help stem the secrecy

Evan Boehs reposted

If you’re in the US federal government and facing blocked news web sites on gov’t hardware — apropos of nothing I might remind folks about Google’s official proxy browser (aka Google Translate). translate.google.com?op=websites Works great when you translate a language into the same language.

In 2017, a much younger Evan attended the march for science. It saddens me that we must march again, but I’ll be there. So should you. #standupforscience2025

Evan Boehs reposted

Yeah, you can probably manufacture viral content by playing into current trends, but that generally means forgoing what you care about, riding off fads, and becoming unauthentic. People come to social media looking for short hits of dopamine, whereas RSS users come looking for longform