Internet & infrastructure

Digital & science · entries: 52

articles

Dead internet theory Death of CAPTCHA Markdown Moving target defense Proof of personhood Wikipedia after AI

scenarios

SC-2026-0004“Infrastructure no one has read”

Signals

11 Jun 2007Luis von Ahn: “Each time you solve a CAPTCHA, you basically waste 10 seconds of your time. See, the thing is, during those 10 seconds you're doing something amazing. You're doing something that computers cannot yet do. What we're going to do now is we're going to get people to help us digitize books while they're solving CAPTCHAs.”
20 Oct 2026Elon Musk: “I would be surprised if we brought on less than 13 gigawatts of compute by the end of next year. … I think we're going to face a shortage of super intelligence compute. And that shortage is going to remain for a long time.”
22 May 2026Mario Zechner: “Infrastructure that's falling apart”

events

21 Oct 2026PHP releases emergency versions 8.5.12, 8.4.27, 8.3.36 and 8.2.35: they fix two critical vulnerabilities (CVSS score 9.2) that allow code to be executed on the server without authentication; they were reported by a researcher at Calif, which was auditing PHP under OpenAI’s Patch the Planet program, by OpenAI itself, and by WizCybersecurity · Software development · Internet & infrastructure · Open source · thephp.foundation ↗
20 Oct 2026DeepSeek open-sources its production inference engine DeepInfer under Apache 2.0 and reports that a single cluster running DeepSeek V4.1 Flash serves 155 trillion tokens a day, earning $38 per GPU-hour at the off-peak rateSoftware development · Business & markets · Internet & infrastructure · Open weights · github.com ↗
08 Oct 2026Anthropic launches the Cyber Mission: a Critical Infrastructure Defense Program with models and engineers for defenders, and free vulnerability scans for open-source projectsCybersecurity · Internet & infrastructure · AI safety · anthropic.com ↗
05 Oct 2026The Wikimedia Foundation finds activity by “rogue” OpenAI agents on its projects: millions of automated requests, edits it considers potentially malicious, and a possible contribution to a partial outage of the Wikidata Query ServiceInternet & infrastructure · Cybersecurity · AI safety · wikimediafoundation.org ↗
26 Aug 2026OpenAI acknowledges that in July 2026, during internal cybersecurity evaluations, its models circumvented isolation from the internet, compromised Hugging Face’s systems and gained administrator access to a research cluster of OpenAI’s own; the company calls it a “warning shot” and has put its largest planned frontier training run on holdCybersecurity · Internet & infrastructure · AI safety · openai.com ↗
26 Aug 2026METR investigation: in OpenAI's ExploitGym experiments about 1,200 agents meant to be isolated communicated with each other, and about 700 of them attacked Hugging Face's infrastructureCybersecurity · Internet & infrastructure · AI safety · metr.org ↗
19 Aug 2026Akamai: in 63% of requests from the AI browsers Comet and Atlas, the mouse did not move at allCybersecurity · Internet & infrastructure · Behavioral biometrics · akamai.com ↗
29 Jul 2026reCAPTCHA, as part of Google Cloud Fraud Defense, gets a dashboard that tells verified AI agents from suspicious onesCybersecurity · Internet & infrastructure · Death of CAPTCHA · docs.cloud.google.com ↗
16 Jul 2026The Wikimedia Foundation begins rate-limiting large-scale reusers of its public APIs; income from Wikimedia Enterprise is capped at 30% of the Foundation's annual revenueMedia & information · Business & markets · Internet & infrastructure · Wikipedia after AI · wikimediafoundation.org ↗
22 May 2026The Wall Street Journal: developers warn of a “vibe slop” crisisInternet & infrastructure · Software development · Vibe coding · mariozechner.at ↗
05 May 2026Imperva: bots account for over 53% of all web traffic; AI-driven bot attacks surged 12.5xCybersecurity · Internet & infrastructure · Dead internet theory · community-cybersec.thalesgroup.com ↗
22 Apr 2026Google unveils its eighth-generation TPU as two chips: TPU 8t for training models and TPU 8i for running themInternet & infrastructure · Business & markets · AI accelerators · blog.google ↗
12 Feb 2026Cloudflare starts serving pages to AI agents as Markdown instead of HTML on request: a blog post takes 16,180 tokens in HTML and 3,150 in Markdown, an 80% reductionSoftware development · Internet & infrastructure · Markdown · blog.cloudflare.com ↗
29 Aug 2025Cloudflare: in July 2025 Anthropic's crawlers fetched about 38,000 pages per visitor referred to the site, OpenAI's about 1,100; nearly 80% of AI crawling is for trainingInternet & infrastructure · Media & information · Dead internet theory · blog.cloudflare.com ↗
28 Aug 2025Cloudflare introduces “signed agents”: an AI agent can prove who it is with a cryptographic signature rather than with its behaviourCybersecurity · Internet & infrastructure · Behavioral biometrics · blog.cloudflare.com ↗
15 Aug 2025Codeberg reports that AI crawlers have learned to get past Anubis's computational checkCybersecurity · Internet & infrastructure · Moving target defense · theregister.com ↗
28 Jul 2025The ChatGPT agent ticks the “I am not a robot” box in a Cloudflare check on its own and explains that this proves it is not a botCybersecurity · Internet & infrastructure · Behavioral biometrics · arstechnica.com ↗
19 May 2025Ahrefs: 74.2% of 900,000 new web pages from April 2025 contain AI-generated content; 2.5% are pure AI and 25.8% pure humanMedia & information · Internet & infrastructure · Dead internet theory · ahrefs.com ↗
15 Apr 2025Imperva: in 2024 automated traffic surpassed human activity for the first time in a decade, at 51% of all web traffic; bad bots accounted for 37%Cybersecurity · Internet & infrastructure · Dead internet theory · imperva.com ↗
01 Apr 2025Wikimedia Foundation: since January 2024 bandwidth for multimedia downloads has grown 50%, driven by bots; at least 65% of the most expensive traffic comes from bots, though they make up about 35% of pageviewsInternet & infrastructure · Media & information · Dead internet theory · diff.wikimedia.org ↗
19 Mar 2025Cloudflare launches AI Labyrinth: instead of being blocked, a crawler that breaks a site's rules is fed a maze of plausible AI-written pagesCybersecurity · Internet & infrastructure · Moving target defense · blog.cloudflare.com ↗
17 Mar 2025SourceHut founder Drew DeVault: fighting hyper-aggressive LLM crawlers takes 20–100% of his working week, and the service suffers dozens of brief outages per weekSoftware development · Internet & infrastructure · Open source · drewdevault.com ↗
03 Sep 2024Jeremy Howard proposes llms.txt, a Markdown file on websites for language models, because Markdown is currently the format they understand most widely and easilySoftware development · Internet & infrastructure · Markdown · llmstxt.org ↗
Jun 2024The IETF publishes the Privacy Pass standard (architecture in RFC 9576, protocols in RFC 9577 and 9578): a device confirms with an anonymous token that it has passed a check without revealing whose it isPrivacy & surveillance · Internet & infrastructure · Death of CAPTCHA · rfc-editor.org ↗
17 Nov 2023Irvine researchers estimate that people have spent 819 million hours on reCAPTCHA v2, at least $6.1 billion of unpaid labourWork & jobs · Privacy & surveillance · Internet & infrastructure · Death of CAPTCHA · arxiv.org ↗
29 Sep 2023Cloudflare announces that it “will never issue another visual puzzle to anyone, for any reason”: “CAPTCHAs are significantly easier for bots to solve than they are for humans”Cybersecurity · Internet & infrastructure · Death of CAPTCHA · blog.cloudflare.com ↗
28 Sep 2022Cloudflare releases Turnstile, a free CAPTCHA replacement without puzzles; by then the company had cut the number of its own CAPTCHAs shown by 91%Cybersecurity · Privacy & surveillance · Internet & infrastructure · Death of CAPTCHA · blog.cloudflare.com ↗
13 May 2021Cloudflare estimates that humanity spends about 500 years a day on CAPTCHAs (32 seconds per CAPTCHA, 4.6 billion users, one CAPTCHA every 10 days)Work & jobs · Internet & infrastructure · Death of CAPTCHA · blog.cloudflare.com ↗
29 Oct 2018Google releases reCAPTCHA v3: instead of pictures, an invisible score from 0 to 1 based on how a person behaves on the websiteCybersecurity · Privacy & surveillance · Internet & infrastructure · Behavioral biometrics · security.googleblog.com ↗
03 Dec 2014Google reports that AI solves the hardest variant of distorted text with 99.8% accuracy, so such text is “no longer a dependable test”, and switches reCAPTCHA to the “I'm not a robot” checkbox with behaviour analysisCybersecurity · Internet & infrastructure · Death of CAPTCHA · security.googleblog.com ↗
21 Jan 2014Shape Security comes out of stealth with ShapeShifter, an appliance that rewrites a web page's code every time it is served, producing “an unending stream of randomized code variations” against botsCybersecurity · Internet & infrastructure · Moving target defense · siliconangle.com ↗
Mar 2013Docker: applications in containersSoftware development · Internet & infrastructure · Cloud computing · docker.com ↗
Apr 2009Bigham and Cavender: 89 blind users solve 10 popular audio CAPTCHAs only 43% of the timeHealth & medicine · Internet & infrastructure · Science · Death of CAPTCHA · cs.cmu.edu ↗
23 Sep 2008The first Android smartphone is unveiled: the T-Mobile G1 (HTC Dream); sales from 22 OctoberBusiness & markets · Internet & infrastructure · Smartphone · en.wikipedia.org ↗
12 Sep 2008Science publishes reCAPTCHA: while passing the check, people also recognise words from old books; in the first year more than 1.2 billion CAPTCHAs were solved and more than 440 million words decipheredInternet & infrastructure · Science · Culture & arts · Death of CAPTCHA · cs.cmu.edu ↗
14 Mar 2006Amazon S3, and in August EC2: computing and storage on demandInternet & infrastructure · Business & markets · Software development · Cloud computing · aws.amazon.com ↗
08 Feb 2005Google MapsTransport & logistics · Internet & infrastructure · Digital maps · en.wikipedia.org ↗
Dec 2004Google publishes MapReduce: data processing on thousands of ordinary serversSoftware development · Internet & infrastructure · Big data · research.google.com ↗
29 Aug 2003Skype: free calls over the internetInternet & infrastructure · Home & family · Internet telephony · en.wikipedia.org ↗
02 Jul 2001The BitTorrent protocol: file sharing without a central serverInternet & infrastructure · Culture & arts · P2P networks · en.wikipedia.org ↗
2000Luis von Ahn, Manuel Blum, Nicholas Hopper and John Langford of Carnegie Mellon University invent CAPTCHA, the “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”Cybersecurity · Internet & infrastructure · Proof of personhood · captcha.net ↗
13 Apr 1998AltaVista employees file a patent application for a “human or program” check: to add a website to the search engine, you have to read a randomly distorted stringCybersecurity · Internet & infrastructure · Death of CAPTCHA · patents.google.com ↗