notes

In their study »Dazed & Confused: A Large-Scale Real-World User Study of reCAPTCHA v2«, the authors Andrew Searles, Renascence Tarafder Prapty and Gene Tsudik argue for discontinuing the service. They justify this by generally poor user acceptance. They also criticize the significant resource demands in terms of time and data centers. Added to this is a troubling susceptibility to bots — a stark contradiction of its intended purpose. We explore the cost and security of reCAPTCHAv2 and conclude that it has an immense cost and no security. Overall, we believe that this study’s results prompt a natural conclusion: reCAPTCHAv2 and similar reCAPTCHA technology should be deprecated. ...

Jess Weatherbed writes in “Google’s shortened links will stop working next year” for theverge.com If you ever used Google’s URL shortening service goo.gl before it was shut down in 2019, be warned — those links will stop working on August 25th, 2025 It’s well known that Google occasionally discontinues services that were fairly popular. This time it’s the URL shortener goo.gl, which was widely used. With its disappearance, another part of the internet will become inaccessible. Thanks, Google. ...

The article »The Risks of Botshit« by Ian P. McCarthy, Timothy R. Hannigan, and André Spicer examines the risks and potential applications of chatbots within organizations. In summary, the following recommendation can be drawn: In these contexts, this risk can be managed through training and limiting the range of responses and vocabulary of the chatbot’s LLM model. To ensure reliability and avoid botshit risks, the scope of chatbot use should be more confined and the guardrails (i.e., rules, guidelines, or limitations for chatbot use) more restrictive. ...

Spotube is an open-source Spotify client that works cross-platform without requiring a Premium subscription or relying on Electron. Developed by Kingkor Roy Tirtho and his team, Spotube uses Spotify’s public API as well as YouTube, Piped.video, or JioSaavn as audio sources. This lets users enjoy their favorite songs on both desktop and mobile devices. ...

If you can’t make much use of starship1 or oh my zsh2, you might find a better alternative in oh my Posh3. There are several predefined themes that let you adjust the prompt in seconds. The program is compatible with BASH, PowerShell, CMD, Fish, Zsh and nushell. It is written in Go and can be installed on GNU/Linux, macOS, Windows and Termux (Android). Of course, ist auch diese engine open source. ...