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How Film Industry Data Website The-Numbers.com Got Mauled By Bots

July 25, 2026 by 21 Comments

A lot has been made about the increase of automated traffic on the Internet, with the past years LLM-related crawlers having quite literally swarmed the picture here. Not only does this drive up traffic, it also increases load on web servers, whose owners find themselves faced with increased hosting costs. This recently led to The-Numbers.com going offline for a while as automated traffic was quite literally destroying their bottom line.

This saga is covered by [Stephen Follows], who had a chance to talk with the founder and CEO of the site, [Bruce Nash], after the site went basically offline for a few months. Since the website both licenses data for commercial purposes as well as offering the free access on its website, there were accusations of this being a ‘rug pull’.

The site was started in 1997, as a static HTML site on Geocities where [Bruce] provided box office analyses for investment purposes. Since that beginning traffic was generally polite, with human visitors and usually well-behaved search engine crawlers. Then around 2024 the first wave of scraper bots arrived, followed by a larger wave around December of 2025.

Despite implementing a few mitigations, such as LLM-targeted text, the increased traffic and the resulting load on a site architecture that was never designed for this ultimately led to a collapse. One of the major sources of traffic turned out to be from so-called ‘prediction markets’, like Polymarket, whose bots absolutely hammered the site.

Fortunately for [Bruce] and his team they do not rely on the free website for income, but they have had to massively rework the site’s architecture to bring back a semblance of the original features. As noted in the article, the amount of crawling traffic by these LLMs and ‘agentic AI’ tools is exponentially more than that for search engines, which makes this a major challenge.

Issues like these is why services such as Cloudflare are offering blocking features for such automated traffic. After all, unless such traffic is of use to you, you may as well treat it like a DDoS attack and cut it off at the root.

Thanks to [Ben] for the tip.

Codeberg Bans Cryptocurrency And LLM-Generated Code Projects

July 24, 2026 by 88 Comments

Community-led open source project hosting site Codeberg has formally announced that projects whose code is largely or fully machine-generated through LLMs and other ‘AI’ tools will no longer be welcome. This follows on the heels of a similar ban on cryptocurrency-related projects.

The community vote was on two issues, the first being the notion that scraping of project code for the use in LLMs should be forbidden, which was a motion that easily passed. The second motion was on disallowing projects whose code was substantially generated by LLMs like Claude, OpenAI Codex, and similar. This motion passed with 358 in favor versus 144 against.

In the earlier linked blog post the reasoning behind especially this second issue is expanded upon, covering not only ‘license whitewashing’, but also the direct and indirect hardware costs, with the expanding ‘AI’ datacenter hyperscaling having massively increased hardware costs for Codeberg over the past years, as the costs have been largely externalized.

Also covered is the aspect of these LLM-based tools destroying the OSS community, which is something that is backed up by recent studies. Even if we ignore that such LLM-tools are destroying the cognitive abilities of its users, there’s an argument to be made that if LLM-scraping is disallowed, then it’s consistent to also not allow LLM-generated code.

In the Terms of Use you can see these changes, both for LLMs and for cryptocurrency projects.

Thanks to [mk-fg] for the tip.

EU Adds Exemptions To User-Serviceable Batteries Rules

July 17, 2026 by 70 Comments

Built-in batteries put a timebomb inside devices, with especially the calendar aging feature of Li-ion chemistries setting a hard limit on when you’ll have to toss the device or figure out a way to replace the battery somehow. Here the EU’s Battery Regulation policy with the 2027 implementation of the user-serviceable battery requirement provided a lot of hope. Now six new categories of exemptions are diminishing what could have been a bonanza of easy repairability.

Most notable here are smartwatches, fitness trackers, wireless earbuds and other so-called ‘wet devices’, which as GSMArena also notes is an area where having a user-replaceable battery might affect features like being water-resistant. Something which is also relevant for e.g. outdoor wireless speakers. There’s also a new exemption for smartphones, where if its battery retains at least 83% of its original capacity after 500 charge cycles, battery replacement has to be only replaceable by professionals. Which is probably code for ‘glue, hotplates and prying tools’.

Considering just how daft of an idea built-in batteries are, this is somewhat disappointing to see. While it’s understandable that ‘wet devices’ get such broad exemptions, it should be noted here that advanced technologies like gaskets are neither complicated nor expensive. You can even hand the average user a tube of RTV silicone and let them go to town on a part in the happy knowledge that there’s never such a thing as ‘too much’ RTV silicone.

It is likely that there was some pressure from the industry on the EU to not change too much, but at the very least us happy few in the EU will be getting a new Nintendo Switch 2 with easily replaced battery in both the main unit and its controllers. For the average rechargeable device you keep kicking around the house this should also still apply as long as its manufacturer cannot squeeze it into one of these exemption categories.

The Right to Repair battles shall continue.

GOES-19 Goes Down, NOAA Investigating

July 16, 2026 by 17 Comments

Some breaking news from geostationary orbit, as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has announced that its newest Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) satellite unexpectedly went offline last night, and as of this morning, remains stuck in safe mode.

Launched in June of 2024, GOES-19 is one of four operational weather satellites that NOAA operates to provide forecast data and severe weather monitoring for the entire Western Hemisphere. The satellite is specifically responsible for covering the continental United States, Central and South America, as well as the Atlantic Ocean. This makes it a particularly critical asset even under normal circumstances, but the fact that it’s gone blind during the Atlantic hurricane season and while smoke from the raging Canadian wildfires is drifting over the Northeast and making the skies over Boston and New York City look like Mars is something of a worst-case scenario.

The good news is that two of the four satellites operate as orbital spares — the satellite that GOES-19 replaced in 2024, GOES-16, is still operational and can stand in as a backup for its coverage area. Obviously, it’s quite a bit older, having launched back in 2016, but it’s of the same design as GOES-19, and in good health, so there should be no degradation of service.

Still, getting GOES-19 back online will be critical for NOAA and the National Weather Service, and we expect they’ll be providing regular updates as the situation develops. Stay tuned.

Open Book Touch Makes Crowd Funding Debut

July 14, 2026 by 22 Comments

If you have even the slightest interest in open hardware e-readers, you’ve certainly heard of [Joey Castillo]’s Open Book project. We’ve covered his efforts to develop an affordable reader that delivers a Kindle-like experience without the Orwellian megacorp trappings for several years now, and watched with great interest as the core hardware has evolved.

So we were particularly excited over the weekend to see the Open Book Touch finally hit Crowd Supply, and judging by the fact that the campaign for the $149 device has already blown past 60% of its funding goal in just a few days, it seems like we weren’t the only ones.

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2026 Hackaday Supercon: Call For Proposals

July 13, 2026 by 10 Comments

We are absolutely stoked to announce that the Hackaday Superconference is taking place this year November 6th through 8th in glorious Pasadena California, and we want to see you there!

If you’ve been to any of the previous nine Supercons, you know that it’s a fantastic gathering of the most motivated and interesting hackers around — but it’s also been a relatively small gathering. And while we love the very high signal-to-noise ratio of folks who show up, we’re always a little bit sad when the tickets sell out because it represents hackers who couldn’t be there.

So this year, we’re celebrating Supercon Ten by expanding out of our traditional location at the Design Lab so that we can accommodate 20% more hackers, while still keeping the cozy nature of the event intact. So if you’ve been wanting to come to Supercon, but procrastinated the ticket sales every year, this year is looking 20% better.

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Porting The Nvidia GPU Driver To Haiku For 3D Acceleration

July 12, 2026 by 3 Comments

As good as a desktop OS may be, at some point it has to feature accelerated 3D graphics. This has been a bit of a sticking point for Haiku OS, as none of the big names in GPU cards are likely to start putting out drivers for this OS any time soon. Fortunately there is the Linux open source driver code from Nvidia that can be used as a jumping-off point for a port, which is what [X512] and the community over at the Haiku forums did over the course of more than a year.

In a recent video [Action Retro] takes a poke at the fruits of these efforts, trying out the driver with an RTX2070 Super GPU. Of note is that this driver requires the GSP (GPU System Processor) controller that got added by Nvidia with the Turing series of GPUs, meaning that you need at least a GTX16 or RTX20 series card.

You can get an installation package from the GitHub repository, such as for the v0.0.2 pre-release that was created in January of 2026. In this pre-release state quite a few things are working, with the ability to play 3D games at a reasonable FPS being the biggest improvement over plain VESA mode. Features like CUDA are not available as they’re not in the open sourced section, of course.

In the [Action Retro] video the whole installation process is demonstrated, starting with a fresh nightly Haiku build. First the gaming performance in software-rendered VESA mode is demonstrated before the GPU driver is installed. This shows a marked improvement in performance, although Minecraft needs to be updated for the newest Mesa library that omits OSMesa, so that couldn’t be tested. Overall it shows that Haiku has made another massive leap forward in becoming a viable daily driver OS.

Meanwhile, over on the ReactOS side of things we just saw a Half-Life 2 playthrough by [Aotori Hibiki], on an Intel Sandy Bridge PC with GeForce 8400GS graphics. Here ReactOS has the advantage of being Windows NT-compatible, including WDDM-style GPU drivers, allowing it to use the same drivers as Windows. Simultaneously, ReactOS is now implementing its first NT6 kernel API calls to make it compatible with modern  (Vista+) Windows.

The upshot here is that for people who want to daily drive an open source OS with all the creature comforts imaginable, things have never seemed more promising. Especially for people who don’t want Yet Another Linux Distro but just an utterly boring desktop-centric, single-user focused OS that Just Works™ these are great tidings.

Continue reading “Porting The Nvidia GPU Driver To Haiku For 3D Acceleration” →