Mastodawn

Corey Taylor

@onpubcom@techhub.social

56 Followers

290 Following

2.3K Posts

Website developer, protector of democracy. Likes: programming, open source software, news and publishing, music, gaming, art, sports, and politics. 🇨🇦🇺🇸

Corey Taylor 4h ago

Simon Willison 1d ago

If you ask the new Grok 4 for opinions on controversial questions, it will sometimes run a search to find out Elon Musk’s stance before providing you with an answer!
https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jul/11/grok-musk/

Grok: searching X for “from:elonmusk (Israel OR Palestine OR Hamas OR Gaza)”

If you ask the new Grok 4 for opinions on controversial questions, it will sometimes run a search to find out Elon Musk’s stance before providing you with an answer. …

Simon Willison’s Weblog

Corey Taylor 4h ago

Simon Willison 7h ago

I got quoted a couple of times in this AP
story about Grok searching for opinions by Musk https://apnews.com/article/grok-4-elon-musk-xai-colossus-14d575fb490c2b679ed3111a1c83f857

Musk's latest Grok chatbot searches for billionaire mogul's views before answering questions

Elon Musk's new AI chatbot, Grok 4, is raising eyebrows for its unusual behavior. The chatbot, released Wednesday by Musk's company xAI, sometimes searches Musk's views online before answering questions. Experts say this behavior appears to align Grok's responses with Musk's opinions, especially on controversial topics. For example, when asked about the Middle East conflict, Grok searched Musk's comments on the issue for guidance. Critics are concerned about the lack of transparency and the chatbot's alignment with Musk's personal values. While Grok shows strong technical capabilities, experts warn its unpredictable behavior could undermine trust in the tool.

AP News

Corey Taylor 4h ago

Mother Bones 5h ago

From @TheBulwark:

Corey Taylor 4h ago

Roger Moore 6h ago

@GottaLaff
The ruling doesn't say it in these exact words, but it's clear the judge believes ICE is violating clearly established Constitutional rights. That's a BIG DEAL, because it's the standard needed to overcome qualified immunity. IOW, the officers could be personally liable. No wonder they're so keen on hiding their identities.

Corey Taylor 4h ago

Keep ‘em coming!

Via Kyle Cheney:

#BREAKING: Judge rules that during its large-scale enforcement operation in LA, DHS/ICE has been arresting people without probable cause -- based on factors like accent and line of work.

She orders the agencies to stop.

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cacd.975351/gov.uscourts.cacd.975351.87.0.pdf

Corey Taylor 5h ago

Harry Dunn 16h ago

Do not let up on this Epstein list not only because orange dude is on it, but because anyone on it is a predator and those victims still deserve justice.

Corey Taylor 11h ago

Franklin López 14h ago

35 years ago, Mohawks at Kanehsatà:ke stood their fuckin’ ground against cops, soldiers, and colonial bullshit. Back in the day, I chopped it up with legendary comic artist and militant Indigenous historian Gord Hill to break down the Oka Crisis in under 5 minutes. This was from my old show It's the End of the World as We Know It and I Feel Fine for @subMedia . Still hits hard.

📽️ Watch it. Share it. Never forget that resistance is fucking fertile.

#OkaCrisis #Kanehsatake #IndigenousResistance #subMedia #GordHill

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ArOIdwcj2w8

The Oka Crisis in 5 minutes

YouTube

Corey Taylor 14h ago

Gabe Ortíz 18h ago

“A new poll from Gallup shows that 79% of Americans think that immigration is a good thing for the country, which is the highest number ever recorded in Gallup's 24-year history of measuring U.S. voters' attitudes on the immigration.”

Corey Taylor 22h ago

Crooks&Liars 23h ago

Alan Dershowitz On Epstein Files: I Know Documents Are Being Suppressed

https://crooksandliars.com/2025/07/alan-dershowitz-epstein-files-i-know?utm_source=social&utm_medium=twitter&utm_content=104516

Alan Dershowitz On Epstein Files: I Know Documents Are Being Suppressed

He was a guest on Epstein's Island.

Crooks and Liars

Corey Taylor 1d ago

“High Pentagon budgets are often justified because the funds are ‘for the troops’,” said William D Hartung, senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and an author of the report. “But as this paper shows, the majority of the department’s budget goes to corporations, money that has as much to do with special interest lobbying as it does with any rational defense planning. Much of this funding has been wasted on dysfunctional or overpriced weapons systems and extravagant compensation packages.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jul/08/pentagon-military-spending

Pentagon provided $2.4tn to private arms firms to ‘fund war and weapons’, report finds

Exclusive: Most of defense department’s discretionary spending from 2020 to 2024 went to military contractors

The Guardian

×

With Mastodon v4.4.0 instance owners can enable HTTP referrers. That means:

If somebody clicks a link in a Mastodon post (e.g. to a news article), the link target owner (such as the news site operator) can see that a user from that instance has visited their website.

They do _only_ get the instance domain (e.g. metalhead.club). No information about the user!

I've enabled this setting, because I am sure that it will increase awareness of Mastodon's existence. 💪

Edit: (in previous versions, Mastodon did not send referrer-Headers)

#mastodon #mastoadmin

Nico Berlo 3d ago

@thomas where is that setting ? Thanks

@nico in "Server settings" > "Discovery" > "Privacy" section.

Nico Berlo 3d ago

@thomas thanks !!

Ben Zucker 🍰3d ago

@thomas Good catch. Found and enabled.

@thomas good stuff! 👍

BurnYourEars Webzine 3d ago

@thomas Ah, cool - danke 😄

Efi (nap pet) 🦊💤3d ago

@thomas how was this not a thing already? isn't this how links work normally?

@efi I guess the referrer has been removed in previous versions. That seems to be possible via "rel="noreferrer"" in the link tag.

Efi (nap pet) 🦊💤3d ago

@thomas ah, that's understandable for privacy, but still... it's not dark magic to set it to just the domain...

ocdtrekkie 3d ago

@efi @thomas IMHO it's probably very safe for large servers like mastodon.social, where a small site seeing traffic from it probably can't identify a single visitor to an individual account. I do imagine smaller servers probably should keep it off: What's the chance someone links to a site they can see where they get referrers from, and can identify a small number of users on your server likely to see it?

Efi (nap pet) 🦊💤3d ago

@ocdtrekkie @thomas I was thinking more of token leaks, but those aren't even in the url on masto, right? auth is done after the first http get

Emelia 👸🏻2d ago

@efi @ocdtrekkie @thomas you might want to see the implementation: it is only the domain, not path and querystring: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/blob/v4.4.0/app/controllers/concerns/web_app_controller_concern.rb#L63

mastodon/app/controllers/concerns/web_app_controller_concern.rb at v4.4.0 · mastodon/mastodon

Your self-hosted, globally interconnected microblogging community - mastodon/mastodon

GitHub

Rihards Olups 3d ago

@richlv o, nice! Domāju, ka rīt upgreidošu, tad ieslēgšu šito

Kristoffer Lawson 3d ago

@thomas better late than never! I do wonder, though, if we should also send a new custom header like “Social-Media-Source: mastodon” so that it would be possible to really track all traffic from a #mastodon source.

Vicente ⁂3d ago

@thomas
> I've enabled this setting, because I am sure that it will increase awareness of Mastodon's existence.

oddly enough, I'd do the opposite because of the same reason :)
(no shade tho)

@thomas So this still doesn't fix the UX hell that happens if, say, a news site puts "Share on fedi" links on their articles... and then fedi users click on them.

You may think its an 'awareness' issue with those orgs not adopting Mastodon... but many of them have already covered it during the initial surge and they know that user adoption is very low because of the bad UX that Linux geeks like us can hopscotch over almost without thinking.

@thomas Here is a site that puts a link to their Mastodon account on their front page: https://www.euractiv.com

But notice the articles have a Share button that does not include Mastodon or anything ActivityPub. @euractiv

EURACTIV.com – EU news and policy debates across languages

@thomas I can see it working in my blog statistics

John Ahlroos 3d ago

@thomas For small instances this pretty much allows direct tracking of users which I doubt most people don't want.

Would been better if the referrer would just be "mastodon" for all instances so small instances would blend in with the bigger ones.

For publisher stats it wouldn't matter, as a publisher you are more interested in comparing referrer platforms, not specific instances I think (as you already did in your post).

But great they added an option to toggle it. For me it'll stay off.

Emelia 👸🏻2d ago

@john @thomas that's unfortunately not how HTTP Referer headers work, docs: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Reference/Headers/Referrer-Policy#directives

And the usage in mastodon: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/blob/v4.4.0/app/controllers/concerns/web_app_controller_concern.rb#L63

Referrer-Policy header - HTTP | MDN

The HTTP Referrer-Policy response header controls how much referrer information (sent with the Referer header) should be included with requests. Aside from the HTTP header, you can set this policy in HTML.

MDN Web Docs

@thomas Some media outlets already use UTM codes for Mastodon to make it easier to track statistics.
This's an improvement, but will the average web traffic analyst be able to put 1+1 together to understand that these random domains are all Mastodon.

@thomas Oh good. I’ve always been interested in those referrers

Cedric Rossi 1d ago

@thomas @jeremy

Jeremy Garniaux 1d ago

@cedric @thomas Merci ! J'étais passé à côté. Ça fait sens en effet. C'est activé :)

Laberpferd 1d ago

@thomas Thats an AMAZING Improvement

Im tired of reading "Webstats show that we dont have mastodon users here, but 37% of our ticket sales comes from Instagram users"