Data preservationists and archivists have been working tirelessly since the election of President Donald Trump to save websites, data, and public information that’s being removed by the administration for promoting or even mentioning diversity. The administration is now targeting National Parks signs that educate visitors about anything other than “beauty” and “grandeur,” and demanding they remove signs that mention “negative” aspects of American history. 

In March, Trump issued an executive order, titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity To American History,” demanding public officials ensure that public monuments and markers under the Department of the Interior’s jurisdiction never address anything negative about American history, past or present. Instead, Trump wrote, they should only ever acknowledge how pretty the landscape looks.

Last month, National Park Service directors across the country were informed that they must post surveys at informational sites that encourage visitors to report "any signs or other information that are negative about either past or living Americans or that fail to emphasize the beauty, grandeur, and abundance of landscapes and other natural features," as dictated in a May follow-up order from Interior Secretary Doug Burgum. QR codes started popping up on placards in national parks that take visitors to a survey that asks them to snitch on "any signs or other information that are negative about either past or living Americans or that fail to emphasize the beauty, grandeur, and abundance of landscapes and other natural features." 

The orders demand that this “negative” content must be removed by September 17.

Following these orders, volunteer preservationists from Safeguarding Research & Culture and the Data Rescue Project launched Save Our Signs, a project that asks parks visitors to upload photos of placards, signage and monuments on public lands—including at national parks, historic sites, monuments, memorials, battlefields, trails, and lakeshores—to help preserve them if they’re removed from public view.

Trump and Burgum’s orders don’t give specific examples of content they’d deem negative. But the Colorado Sun reported that signs with the survey QR code appeared at the Amache National Historic Site in June; Amache was one of ten incarceration sites for Japanese Americans during World War II. NPR reported that a sign also appeared at the Civil War battlefield at Wilson's Creek in Missouri. Numerous sites across the country serve to educate visitors about histories that reflect fights for civil rights, recognize atrocities carried out by the U.S. government on Black and Indigenous people, or acknowledge contributions made by minority groups.   

Lynda Kellam, a founding member of the Data Rescue Project and a data librarian at a university, told 404 Media that the group started discussing the project in mid-June, and partnered with another group at the University of Minnesota that was already working on a similar project. Jenny McBurney, the Government Publications Librarian at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, told 404 Media that conversations among her university network arose from the wider effort to preserve information being modified and removed on government websites. 

In April, NIH websites, including repositories, including archives of cancer imagery, Alzheimer’s disease research, sleep studies, HIV databases, and COVID-19 vaccination and mortality data, were marked for removal and archivists scrambled to save them. In February, NASA website administrators were told to scrub their sites of anything that could be considered “DEI,” including mentions of indigenous people, environmental justice, and women in leadership. And in January, Github activity showed federal workers deleting and editing documents, employee handbooks, Slack bots, and job listings in an attempt to comply with Trump’s policies against diversity, equity, and inclusion.

“To me, this order to remove sign content that ‘disparages’ Americans is an extension of this loss of information that people rely on,” McBurney said. “The current administration is trying to scrub websites, datasets, and now signs in National Parks (and on other public lands) of words or ideas that they don't like. We're trying to preserve this content to help preserve our full history, not just a tidy whitewashed version.”

Save Our Signs launched the current iteration on July 3 and plan to make the collected photos public in October.

“In addition to being a data librarian, I am a trained historian specializing in American history. My research primarily revolves around anti-imperial and anti-lynching movements in the U.S.,” Kellam said. “Through this work, I've observed that the contributions of marginalized groups are frequently overlooked, yet they are pivotal to the nation's development. We need to have a comprehensive understanding of our history, acknowledging both its positive and problematic aspects. The removal of these signs would result in an incomplete and biased portrayal of our past.” 

The Save Our Signs group plans to make the collected photos public in October. “It is essential that we make this content public and preserve all of this public interpretative material for the future,” McBurney said. “It was all funded with taxpayer money and it belongs to all of us. We’re worried that a lot of stuff could end up in the trash can and we want to make sure that we save a copy. Some of these signs might be outdated or wrong. But we don’t think the intent was to improve the accuracy of NPS interpretation. There has been SO much work over the last 30 years to widen the lens and nuance the interpretations that are shared in the national parks. This effort threatens all that by introducing a process to cull signs and messaging in a way that is not transparent.”

Trump has focused on gutting the Park Service since day one of his presidency: Since his administration took office, the National Park Service has lost almost a quarter of its permanent staff, according to the National Parks Conservation Association. On Thursday, Trump issued a new executive order that will raise entry fees to national parks for foreign tourists. 

The “Restoring Truth and Sanity To American History” order states that Burgum must “ensure that all public monuments, memorials, statues, markers, or similar properties within the Department of the Interior’s jurisdiction do not contain descriptions, depictions, or other content that inappropriately disparage Americans past or living (including persons living in colonial times), and instead focus on the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people or, with respect to natural features, the beauty, abundance, and grandeur of the American landscape.” Kyle Patterson, public affairs officer at Rocky Mountain National Park, told the Denver Post that these signs have been posted “in a variety of public-facing locations including visitor centers, toilet facilities, trailheads and other visitor contact points that are easily accessible and don’t impede the flow of traffic.”

Predictably, parks visitors are using the QR code survey to make their opinions heard. “This felonious Administration is the very definition of un-American. The parks belong to us, the people. ... Respectfully, GO **** YOURSELVES” one comment directed to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said, in a leaked document provided to SFGATE by the National Parks Conservation Association.

“To maintain a democratic society, it is essential for the electorate to be well-informed, which includes having a thorough awareness of our historical challenges,” Kellam said. “This project combines our expertise as data librarians and preservationists and our concern for telling the full story of our country.”

“The point of history is not just to tell happy stories that make some people feel good. It's to help us understand how and why we got to this point,” McBurney said. “And National Parks sites have been chosen very carefully to help tell that broad and complicated history of our nation. If we just start removing things with no thought and consideration, we risk undermining all of that. We risk losing all kinds of work that has been done over so many years to help people understand the places they are visiting.”

'Unvested shares' are something I didn't even understand last week but this week have been floored by

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Jack Dorsey has launched Bitchat, a decentralized, peer-to-peer messaging app that uses Bluetooth mesh networks for encrypted, ephemeral chats without requiring accounts, servers, or internet access. The beta version is live on TestFlight, with a full white paper available on GitHub. CNBC reports: In a post on X Sunday, Dorsey called it a personal experiment in "bluetooth mesh networks, relays and store and forward models, message encryption models, and a few other things." Bitchat enables ephemeral, encrypted communication between nearby devices. As users move through physical space, their phones form local Bluetooth clusters and pass messages from device to device, allowing them to reach peers beyond standard range -- even without Wi-Fi or cell service. Certain "bridge" devices connect overlapping clusters, expanding the mesh across greater distances. Messages are stored only on device, disappear by default and never touch centralized infrastructure -- echoing Dorsey's long-running push for privacy-preserving, censorship-resistant communication. Like the Bluetooth-based apps used during Hong Kong's 2019 protests, Bitchat is designed to keep working even when the internet is blocked, offering a censorship-resistant way to stay connected during outages, shutdowns or surveillance. The app also supports optional group chats, or "rooms," which can be named with hashtags and protected by passwords. It includes store and forward functionality to deliver messages to users who are temporarily offline. A future update will add WiFi Direct to increase speed and range, pushing Dorsey's vision for off-grid, user-owned communication even further.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

For someone who says she is fighting AI bot scrapers just in her free time, Xe Iaso seems to be putting up an impressive fight. Since she launched it in January, Anubis, a “program is designed to help protect the small internet from the endless storm of requests that flood in from AI companies,” has been downloaded nearly 200,000 times, and is being used by notable organizations including GNOME, the popular open-source desktop environment for Linux, FFmpeg, the open-source software project for handling video and other media, and UNESCO, the United Nations organization for educations, science, and culture. 

Iaso decided to develop Anubis after discovering that her own Git server was struggling with AI scrapers, bots that crawl the web hoovering up anything that can be used for the training data that power AI models. Like many libraries, archives, and other small organizations, Iaso discovered her Git server was getting slammed only when it stopped working.  

“I wasn't able to load it in my browser. I thought, huh, that's strange,” Iaso told me on a call. “So I looked at the logs and I figured out that it's restarted about 500 times in the last two days. So I looked in the access logs and I saw that [an] Amazon [bot] was clicking on every single link.”

Iaso knew it was an Amazon bot because it self identified as such. She said she considered withdrawing the Git server from the open web but that because she wants to keep some of the source code hosted there open to the public, she tried to stop the Amazon bot instead. 

“I tried some things that I can’t admit in a recorded environment. None of them worked. So I had a bad idea,” she said. “I implemented some code. I put it up on GitHub in an experimental project dumping ground, and then the GNOME desktop environment started using it as a Hail Mary. And that's about when I knew that I had something on my hands.”

There are several ways people and organizations are trying to stop bots at the moment. Historically, robots.txt, a file sites could use to tell automated tools not to scrape, was a respected and sufficient norm for this purpose, but since the generative AI boom, major AI companies as well as less established companies and even individuals, often ignored it. CAPTCHAs, the little tests users take to prove they’re not a robot, aren’t great, Iaso said, because some AI bot scrapers have CAPTCHA solvers built in. Some developers have created “infinite mazes” that send AI bot scrapers from useless link to useless link, diverting them from the actual sites humans use and wasting their time. Cloudflare, the ubiquitous internet infrastructure company, has created a similar “AI labyrinth” feature to trap bots. 

Iaso, who said she deals with some generative AI at her day job, told me that “from what I have learned, poisoning datasets doesn't work. It makes you feel good, but it ends up using more compute than you end up saving. I don't know the polite way to say this, but if you piss in an ocean, the ocean does not turn into piss.”

In other words, Iaso thinks that it might be fun to mess with the AI bots that are trying to mess with the internet, but in many cases it’s not practical to send them on these wild goose chases because it requires resources Cloudflare might have, but small organizations and individuals don’t. 

“Anubis is an uncaptcha,” Iaso explains on her site. “It uses features of your browser to automate a lot of the work that a CAPTCHA would, and right now the main implementation is by having it run a bunch of cryptographic math with JavaScript to prove that you can run JavaScript in a way that can be validated on the server.”

Essentially, Anubis verifies that any visitor to a site is a human using a browser as opposed to a bot. One of the ways it does this is by making the browser do a type of cryptographic math with JavaScript or other subtle checks that browsers do by default but bots have to be explicitly programmed to do. This check is invisible to the user, and most browsers since 2022 are able to complete this test. In theory, bot scrapers could pretend to be users with browsers as well, but the additional computational cost of doing so on the scale of scraping the entire internet would be huge. This way, Anubis creates a computational cost that is prohibitively expensive for AI scrapers that are hitting millions and millions of sites, but marginal for an individual user who is just using the internet like a human. 

Anubis is free, open source, lightweight, can be self-hosted, and can be implemented almost anywhere. It also appears to be a pretty good solution for what we’ve repeatedly reported is a widespread problem across the internet, which helps explain its popularity. But Iaso is still putting a lot of work into improving it and adding features. She told me she’s working on a non cryptographic challenge so it taxes users’ CPUs less, and also thinking about a version that doesn’t require JavaScript, which some privacy-minded disable in their browsers. 

The biggest challenge in developing Anubis, Iaso said, is finding the balance. 

“The balance between figuring out how to block things without people being blocked, without affecting too many people with false positives,” she said. “And also making sure that the people running the bots can't figure out what pattern they're hitting, while also letting people that are caught in the web be able to figure out what pattern they're hitting, so that they can contact the organization and get help. So that's like, you know, the standard, impossible scenario.”

Iaso has a Patreon and is also supported by sponsors on Github who use Anubis, but she said she still doesn’t have enough financial support to develop it full time. She said that if she had the funding, she’d also hire one of the main contributors to the project. Ultimately, Anubis will always need more work because it is a never ending cat and mouse game between AI bot scrapers and the people trying to stop them. 

Iaso said she thinks AI companies follow her work, and that if they really want to stop her and Anubis they just need to distract her. 

“If you are working at an AI company, here's how you can sabotage Anubis development as easily and quickly as possible,” she wrote on her site. “So first is quit your job, second is work for Square Enix, and third is make absolute banger stuff for Final Fantasy XIV. That’s how you can sabotage this the best.”

Yesterday, the metal world sent a fond farewell to its Prince of Darkness, Ozzy Osbourne. Retiring after 50 years on the job, Ozzy has long struggled with worsening Parkinson’s Disease, causing him to step back from live performance. Held in Villa Park, Birmingham, England, where Black Sabbath first climbed from the primordial ooze to reinvent rock music, the Back to the Beginning concert was a day-long celebration of all things Ozzy. Osbourne welcomed many metal luminaries on stage to perform tributes to his incredibly influential career. Guns N’ Roses, Tool, and three quarters of the Big Four (Metallica, Anthrax, and Slayer) played; Chad Smith, Travis Barker, and Danny Carey staged a drum battle; English fans opened up their hate and let it flow into Disturbed singer David Draiman over his support of Israel, which includes signing warheads destined for Gazan hospitals; and Jason Momoa started a circle pit during Pantera. Most importantly, seated upon his throne, Ozzy performed four solo songs, and Sabbath performed four as well, marking the final time the original members would play together.