Poland Visitors, This Is Not The Site You Are Looking For

| 0 Comments

Since 16 Feb 2024 the vast majority of visitors are from Poland, and they are all referrals.

If you don’t know how you got here, you probably don’t actually want to be here.

This image contains two data visualizations related to website visitors from Poland. On the left, there is a line graph showing a sharp increase in the number of visitors over time, starting from February 8th and peaking around February 18th. On the right, there is a donut chart displaying the percentage of visitors by country, with Poland accounting for 72.8% of the traffic, which is the largest share. The chart indicates that there are 289 users from Poland, marking a 100% increase. Other countries represented in smaller percentages are the United States, France, China, and a category labeled as Others. The colors corresponding to each country are indicated at the bottom: Poland is yellow, United States is blue, France is purple, China is green, and Others is gray. The chart segments are also labeled with their respective percentages.

The referring site is news.grets.store, which redirects to another site, td.redl-sot.net

And that site has an invalid TLS cert, and is blocked by my firewall as a phishing site.

Bar chart showing 'Top First user source by Users' for the week of February 13-19, 2024. The highest referrer is 'news.grets.store' with 305 users, highlighted in blue on the chart.
Browser security warning indicating the connection to the site 'td.redl-sot.net' is not secure, advising not to enter sensitive information as it could be stolen by attackers. Options for certificate choices, site permissions, automatic downloads, cookies, and tracking prevention are shown. Tracking prevention is set to 'Balanced' with zero trackers blocked.

All of which is pretty odd, unless my site is serving up malware, which would be unexpected. Not because WordPress is great at security, but I use FlyWheel and CloudFlare, both of which I’d expect to catch any malware on the site.

Google also isn’t flagging this site as malicious, which it is typically quick to do.

Alabama: IVF Embryos are Children

| 0 Comments

Alabama’s Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos are children, with the right to life. This case came to the court after some embryros were accidentally broken/;

The Alabama case focused on whether a patient who mistakenly dropped and destroyed other couples’ frozen embryos could be held liable in a wrongful-death lawsuit. The court ruled the patient could, writing that it had long held that “unborn children are ‘children’” and that that was also true for frozen embryos, affording the fertilized eggs the same protection as babies under the Wrongful Death of a Minor Act.

This post isn’t an essay, but here are some initial thoughts:

  1. This is consistent with the belief that life begins at conception. You don’t have to like the decision, or even many in the pro-life movement, but it is a consistent belief.
  2. It isn’t new. While I’m sure this is a new viewpoint to many, there are already embryro donation centers, where couples can donate embryos created with IVF but not “use.” Other couples can “adopt” these embryros. My wife and I financially support The National Embryo Donation Center, a non-profit in Knoxville that handles embryro donations and adoption.

Cynically, I view anything in the pro/anti-abortion arena as part of the cultural wars, issues meant to further someone’s power, not about the issue itself. This isn’t to say that there are no true believers on the pro-life side, but most of the news seems to be about life/abortion as a wedge issue.

But the poltiical implications here are not clear to me: leftover embryros from IVF is a super niche issues, even in the pro-life crowd. Personally, I identify as pro-life but not with the pro-life movement (more on that someday). It doesn’t seem like a political win for any side, and probably only a minor loss for the pro-abortion side. The case advances legal and intellectual arguments, but assigning the status of children to (frozen) embryos doesn’t directly affect abortion, or the right to choose.

There is a lot more that could be discussed about the case (is accidental death an appropriate charge? Is it OK for the chief justice to use theology in his opinion? Will it affect IVF more broadly?) but that is all beyond the scope of today’s post.

Jon Stewart Back on Mondays

| 0 Comments

Screenshot of a news article headline reading "Jon Stewart Returns as 'The Daily Show' Host, Roasts Biden, Trump and Himself" with a subheading stating "On his first night back, he joked about President Biden and Donald Trump's ages—and his own." The image shows a man, presumably Jon Stewart, seated at a desk with the show's title displayed in the background. The interface includes a 5-minute read indicator and sharing options. The top of the screenshot displays stock market indices with the NIKKEI index up by 2.89% and the STOXX EURO 600 down by 0.52%.

I can’t wait. But, there is potentially a political component. If Stewart has the same influence over younger demographics as he did in his heyday — if he has 10% of it — it could be a problem for Democrats.

While he is unabashedly left-leaning, satirical attacks on both parties are more likely to land on Biden. (1) Because the audience is left-leaning, (2) Trump’s supporters are more baked in, and (3) even intelligent people manage to talk themselves into the currently fantastical idea that there is more than one presidential option on the left.

In short, taking away even a handful of votes from Biden turns comical problems into electoral ones.

Etsy Dropped the Deepfakes

| 0 Comments

Last fall I wrote a story on that explored the deepfake pornography for sale on Etsy. Hundreds — if not thousands — of deepfaked nude photos of celebrities like Taylor Swift, Emma Watson and Emilia Clarke were available to purchase as digital downloads. Etsy didn’t return requests for comments. As of December, all of the stores were still available.

In the wake of the nudes of Taylor Swift blowing up X last week I decided to see if the stores were still up. None of the stores that sold deepfakes were still live, as far as I could tell. In fact, it looks like most — but by no means all — of the stores selling AI porn have been removed.

It looks like a slapdash effort: Etsy is still suggesting you search for “Emma Watson No Clothes” as soon as you type in “emma w” :

Screenshot of Etsy search bar with partial text input, displaying a dropdown of suggested search terms.

Searching for obvious terms such as “NSFW” and “AI Generated Art” don’t turn up deepfakes, at least not on the first few pages.

Their policies have not changed since the post (prohibited items “Last updated on Oct 9, 2023”) .

Etsy still has purchased images available for download, which of course includes Ms. Swift:

I'm sorry, I can't provide assistance with that request.

A couple things:

  1. I don’t think that sellers will try too hard to return. It will be comparatively easy to make money on Patreon or Gumroad that are less likely to chase sellers off.
  2. I think Etsy still has a problem as long as it tolerates AI nudity. Completely skipping over the absurdity of an artist-focused site allowing cheap AI porn, there are two big problems. (A) sellers can still create photos of “country stars” or 2024 nude calendars that don’t specify any particular persons, but still have a striking resemblance to them. (2) It is possible to create and sell photos that appear to depict minors, even if they are minors that don’t exist. The law on that is murky, but it is super creepy and horribly unethical either way.
  3. Etsy should openly ban AI generated nudes or near-nudes of people or humanoids. (You make just want to take my word on why the definition needs to be this expansive). First, Etsy isn’t about this, so why allow it? Second, Etsy has a ban on “porn” which is clearly NOT enforced. Porn vs art can be gray, “AI nudes” is not.

I’m not holding my breath that Etsy will make any changes. Maybe PR pressure (or the risk of it) will be enough to get them to do the ethical — and business-minded — thing.

I reached out to Etsy for comment and I will update if I hear back.

Most Read