Issue 2361 - Tuesday 22 April 2025

Welcome to our mid-year gooch week everyone! I hope you’re not reading this. But if you aren’t relaxing somewhere and ignoring your inbox, I’ll be writing every day that isn’t a public holiday!

Also, I’m going to test including a random technology photo in these editions just for the sake of some Sizzle visuals. Enjoy!

The News

Most of the internet traffic is bots — but that’s OK?

The majority of internet traffic is from bots, according to a new report from cybersecurity firm Imperva (and shared in the Slack by MMC). Bot traffic isn’t necessarily a bad thing — bots do many useful things for people! — but apparently 37% of all traffic is “bad bots” to commit fraud, scrape data without permission and bypass security. Popular AI services and other tools disguised as crawlers including TikTok parent company ByteDance’s BytespiderBot or Apple’s AppleBot have all been seen doing mischief. The idea that most of the internet is bots is a good headline — and provides evidence for the ‘dead internet theory’ (The Guardian) — but I don’t think it really matters that much to users who aren’t affected by it. But, as I’ve covered a lot in the Sizzle recently, it’s a big deal to people who are paying for bandwidth being used for non-humans.

BONUS: I really recommend Max Read’s 2018 New York Magazine essay ‘How Much of the Internet Is Fake? Turns Out, a Lot of It, Actually’ (Intelligencer) which showed how bad some of this stuff was even before generative AI was a thing.

Microsoft’s revamped AI screenshot feature shows that complaining works

Microsoft is just about to release its AI “screenshot everything you do every few seconds” feature after delaying it for nearly a year (The Verge). When Microsoft announced Recall in June last year, people pretty quickly figured out that it was essentially a self-installed key-logger with terrible security (WIRED, $) which caused the company to pull the feature. Now, Microsoft is set to roll it out with improved security and respected cybersecurity researcher Kevin Beaumont has had a look (Double Pulsar). HIs verdict is that Microsoft has “significantly enhanced security and privacy”. Even still, it still presents a risk for most users, he said, but it might be a very useful accessibility feature for people with disabilities like Mild Cognitive Impairment. My takeaway? 1. Complaining about this stuff works. 2. AI’s benefits are most profound in specific use-cases, not when just rolled out to everyone.

Gamifying Australia’s energy transition

Here’s something to play around with on online record board for tracking Australia’s energy transition has been released by the Superpower Institute (Open Electricity). It captures things like highest renewables generation over a day, highest battery discharge and lowest ever coal generation, and can be broken down by region and period. It’s an offshoot of Open Electricity’s other tools which allow you to watch Australia’s energy market in real time (Tracker) or play around with various scenarios for the future of the market (Scenario Explorer). This stuff is cool as hell because it makes complicated discussions about energy so much easier to understand, and it drives home just how quickly the transition is happening: it feels like all the records are super recent!

Leftovers

Oh, Also

Hosting a blog on a Wii

I came across this blog entry because of the author’s delightful Mastodon post (infosec.exchange): some maniac is hosting a website on an old, soft-modded Nintendo Wii (infected.systems). In case you needed any reason to do this other than “it’s dumb and cool”, it’s apparently pretty energy efficient too. Plus, I got a real sick thrill seeing NetBSD on a Wii UI, too.

Bargains

Electrical & Electronics

Computing

Mobile

The End

😎 The Sizzle is written by Cam Wilson and emailed every weekday. It was created by Anthony “decryption” Agius.

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Always Was, Always Will Be Aboriginal Land

The Sizzle is created on Gadigal land and acknowledges the traditional owners of country throughout Australia, recognising their continuing connection to land, water and community. I pay my respect to them and their cultures and to elders both past and present.