#web hosting comparisons

[seomagicegy]

Hostinger Web Hosting is Your Best Choice

Discover why Hostinger web hosting stands out from the competition. Read our guide to see if it fits your needs!

Why Hostinger Web Hosting is Your Best Choice

In the competitive world of web hosting, Hostinger web hosting stands out as one of the most reliable and affordable providers. Known for its user-friendly platform, low prices, and feature-rich plans, Hostinger has quickly gained popularity among beginners and professionals alike. In this article, we’ll dive into why Hostinger might be the best web hosting solution for your needs.

Hostinger hosting good for eCommerce websites?

Yes, Hostinger’s Business and Cloud Hosting plans are great for eCommerce websites due to higher performance and security.

[i4uagencyegy]

Why Hostinger Web Hosting is Your Best Choice

Discover why Hostinger web hosting stands out from the competition. Read our guide to see if it fits your needs!

Why Hostinger Web Hosting is Your Best Choice

In the competitive world of web hosting, Hostinger web hosting stands out as one of the most reliable and affordable providers. Known for its user-friendly platform, low prices, and feature-rich plans, Hostinger has quickly gained popularity among beginners and professionals alike. In this article, we’ll dive into why Hostinger might be the best web hosting solution for your needs.

Hostinger hosting good for eCommerce websites?

Yes, Hostinger’s Business and Cloud Hosting plans are great for eCommerce websites due to higher performance and security.

[wjmdigitaldesign]

WordPress.com vs WordPress.org: What’s the Difference and Which One Should You Choose?

If you’re thinking about launching a website or starting a blog, chances are you’ve come across WordPress. But there’s a common point of confusion: WordPress.com vs WordPress.org. At first glance, they sound like the same thing — but they’re actually quite different platforms with distinct features, pros, and cons.

In this blog post, we’ll break down the differences between the two, help you understand which one suits your needs, and guide you toward the best choice for your website goals.

What is WordPress.org?

WordPress.org is the self-hosted version of WordPress. It’s the open-source software that anyone can download for free and install on their own web hosting server. With WordPress.org, you have full control over your website.

Key Features:

Complete Customization: Install any theme or plugin, modify the code, and design your site exactly the way you want.

Ownership: You fully own your website and all its content.

Monetization Freedom: Use any ad network, sell products, offer memberships, or add affiliate links with no restrictions.

Advanced Functionality: Great for eCommerce (using plugins like WooCommerce), custom development, SEO tools, and more.

Pros:

Total control and flexibility

Thousands of free and premium plugins/themes

Full access to your site's backend and data

Ideal for business, large blogs, and complex websites

Cons:

Requires web hosting (usually $5–$15/month)

You handle security, backups, and updates (though plugins can automate much of this)

Slightly steeper learning curve for beginners

What is WordPress.com?

WordPress.com is a hosted platform created by Automattic (the company behind WordPress). It offers a simplified, all-in-one solution for building a website without worrying about hosting, maintenance, or technical tasks.

Key Features:

No Hosting Needed: Hosting is included. No need to buy a separate plan or domain (though custom domains are available on paid plans).

Easy to Start: Perfect for beginners who want a fast and simple setup.

Maintenance-Free: WordPress.com handles updates, security, and backups.

Pros:

Free basic plan available

No setup or maintenance required

User-friendly dashboard

Great for hobby blogs, personal websites, or simple portfolios

Cons:

Limited customization (especially on the free plan)

Cannot upload custom themes or plugins unless on Business or higher plan

Limited monetization options on lower-tier plans

WordPress.com branding unless you upgrade

WordPress.com vs WordPress.org: Quick Comparison Table

Feature

WordPress.com

WordPress.org

Hosting

Included

You provide (self-hosted)

Cost

Free with paid upgrades

Free software, hosting cost

Custom Themes & Plugins

Limited (paid plans only)

Unlimited

Monetization Freedom

Limited

Full control

eCommerce

Only on paid plans

Full eCommerce support

Maintenance

Handled for you

You manage it

Suitable For

Beginners, personal blogs

Businesses, pros, devs

Which One Should You Choose?

Choose WordPress.com if:

You want a hassle-free experience and don’t want to manage hosting or security.

You’re a beginner with no technical background.

You just need a simple blog or portfolio site.

You’re okay with limited flexibility or willing to pay for premium features.

Choose WordPress.org if:

You want full control and the ability to customize everything.

You’re building a business website, store, or scalable project.

You need to monetize your content freely.

You're comfortable (or willing to learn) about managing your own hosting.

Final Thoughts

Both WordPress.com and WordPress.org offer powerful tools for creating websites, but the right choice depends on your goals. If you’re starting out or want something easy and low-maintenance, WordPress.com is a solid option. If you're aiming for maximum control, customization, and scalability, WordPress.org is the way to go.

Still unsure? Start with WordPress.com to get your feet wet — and when you’re ready for more freedom, you can always migrate to WordPress.org.

Need help deciding or building your site? Contact WJM Digital Design for professional guidance, custom WordPress development, and support tailored to your goals. info@wjmdigitaldesign.com

[expphot0]

Managed WordPress vs Other Hosting: A Simple Guide for Business Owners

Introduction: Why Your Website Hosting Matters If you own a business with a website, you’ve probably heard terms like “WordPress” and “hosting” thrown around. But what does it all mean, and why should you care? Think of your website as a store – it needs to be built somewhere. That “somewhere” is your hosting. WordPress powers about 43% of all websites on the internet. It’s popular because it’s…

[introserv]

Company INTROSERV is dedicated server solutions with dynamic performance and static pricing. For details visit: https://introserv.com/

[not-terezi-pyrope]

Often when I post an AI-neutral or AI-positive take on an anti-AI post I get blocked, so I wanted to make my own post to share my thoughts on "Nightshade", the new adversarial data poisoning attack that the Glaze people have come out with.

I've read the paper and here are my takeaways:

Firstly, this is not necessarily or primarily a tool for artists to "coat" their images like Glaze; in fact, Nightshade works best when applied to sort of carefully selected "archetypal" images, ideally ones that were already generated using generative AI using a prompt for the generic concept to be attacked (which is what the authors did in their paper). Also, the image has to be explicitly paired with a specific text caption optimized to have the most impact, which would make it pretty annoying for individual artists to deploy.

While the intent of Nightshade is to have maximum impact with minimal data poisoning, in order to attack a large model there would have to be many thousands of samples in the training data. Obviously if you have a webpage that you created specifically to host a massive gallery poisoned images, that can be fairly easily blacklisted, so you'd have to have a lot of patience and resources in order to hide these enough so they proliferate into the training datasets of major models.

The main use case for this as suggested by the authors is to protect specific copyrights. The example they use is that of Disney specifically releasing a lot of poisoned images of Mickey Mouse to prevent people generating art of him. As a large company like Disney would be more likely to have the resources to seed Nightshade images at scale, this sounds like the most plausible large scale use case for me, even if web artists could crowdsource some sort of similar generic campaign.

Either way, the optimal use case of "large organization repeatedly using generative AI models to create images, then running through another resource heavy AI model to corrupt them, then hiding them on the open web, to protect specific concepts and copyrights" doesn't sound like the big win for freedom of expression that people are going to pretend it is. This is the case for a lot of discussion around AI and I wish people would stop flagwaving for corporate copyright protections, but whatever.

The panic about AI resource use in terms of power/water is mostly bunk (AI training is done once per large model, and in terms of industrial production processes, using a single airliner flight's worth of carbon output for an industrial model that can then be used indefinitely to do useful work seems like a small fry in comparison to all the other nonsense that humanity wastes power on). However, given that deploying this at scale would be a huge compute sink, it's ironic to see anti-AI activists for that is a talking point hyping this up so much.

In terms of actual attack effectiveness; like Glaze, this once again relies on analysis of the feature space of current public models such as Stable Diffusion. This means that effectiveness is reduced on other models with differing architectures and training sets. However, also like Glaze, it looks like the overall "world feature space" that generative models fit to is generalisable enough that this attack will work across models.

That means that if this does get deployed at scale, it could definitely fuck with a lot of current systems. That said, once again, it'd likely have a bigger effect on indie and open source generation projects than the massive corporate monoliths who are probably working to secure proprietary data sets, like I believe Adobe Firefly did. I don't like how these attacks concentrate the power up.

The generalisation of the attack doesn't mean that this can't be defended against, but it does mean that you'd likely need to invest in bespoke measures; e.g. specifically training a detector on a large dataset of Nightshade poison in order to filter them out, spending more time and labour curating your input dataset, or designing radically different architectures that don't produce a comparably similar virtual feature space. I.e. the effect of this being used at scale wouldn't eliminate "AI art", but it could potentially cause a headache for people all around and limit accessibility for hobbyists (although presumably curated datasets would trickle down eventually).

All in all a bit of a dick move that will make things harder for people in general, but I suppose that's the point, and what people who want to deploy this at scale are aiming for. I suppose with public data scraping that sort of thing is fair game I guess.

Additionally, since making my first reply I've had a look at their website:

Used responsibly, Nightshade can help deter model trainers who disregard copyrights, opt-out lists, and do-not-scrape/robots.txt directives. It does not rely on the kindness of model trainers, but instead associates a small incremental price on each piece of data scraped and trained without authorization. Nightshade's goal is not to break models, but to increase the cost of training on unlicensed data, such that licensing images from their creators becomes a viable alternative.

Once again we see that the intended impact of Nightshade is not to eliminate generative AI but to make it infeasible for models to be created and trained by without a corporate money-bag to pay licensing fees for guaranteed clean data. I generally feel that this focuses power upwards and is overall a bad move. If anything, this sort of model, where only large corporations can create and control AI tools, will do nothing to help counter the economic displacement without worker protection that is the real issue with AI systems deployment, but will exacerbate the problem of the benefits of those systems being more constrained to said large corporations.

Kinda sucks how that gets pushed through by lying to small artists about the importance of copyright law for their own small-scale works (ignoring the fact that processing derived metadata from web images is pretty damn clearly a fair use application).

[mariacallous]

The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum appeared to condemn a statement made by NYC mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani in which he defended the phrase “Globalize the intifada,” saying the word “intifada” had been used in translations by the museum.

Mamdani, meanwhile, responded to the accusations of antisemitism he has received since the statement in a tearful address Wednesday, telling reporters “it pains me to be called an antisemite.”

While speaking on “The Bulwark” Tuesday, Mamdani defended the phrase “globalize the intifada,” which has been used by pro-Palestinian protesters and seen by many as a call for violence against Jews, telling the hosts that the phrase was often misunderstood.

“I think what’s difficult also is that the very word has been used by the Holocaust Museum when translating the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising into Arabic, because it’s a word that means struggle,” said Mamdani, who has a long record of pro-Palestinian activism. “And as a Muslim man who grew up post-9/11, I’m all too familiar in the way in which Arabic words can be twisted, can be distorted, can be used to justify any kind of meaning.”

In a post on X Wednesday, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum decried the comparison of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, a major Jewish uprising against the Nazis in 1943, with the phrase, though it did not explicitly mention Mamdani.

“Exploiting the Museum and the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising to sanitize ‘globalize the intifada’ is outrageous and especially offensive to survivors,” the post read. “Since 1987 Jews have been attacked and murdered under its banner. All leaders must condemn its use and the abuse of history.”

Mamdani’s statements appeared to reference an Arabic translation of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising that was used on the museum’s website up until May 2024, according to archived web pages found on the WayBack Machine.

Until that time, the Arabic translation on the website’s page for the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising translated “uprising” to “انتفاضة,” the Arabic word for intifada. It was then changed to “مقاومة,” or “muqawama,” the Arabic word for “resistance.”

The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the translation change.

Mamdani addressed the accusations of antisemitism that he has faced following his statements in an emotional press conference Wednesday morning in Harlem where he was repeatedly asked to respond to the accusations by reporters.

[stochastique-blog]

Okay, this is interesting

SpeedHost is India’s leading web hosting provider and they provide web hosting for the low cost. SpeedHost provides 24/7 email support, but phone support is barely throughout operating hours and weekdays.

http://www.webshosting.review/speedhost-reviews

[talenlee]

Game Pile: For The Queers

For the Queers is a Descended from the Queen game, which is focused on developing queer relationship dynamics, at least, according to its copy text. It was produced by Scholastic Dragon Games and it’s available on itch.io and it’s in that particular category of $3 print-and-play games. Its presentation is a little ropy, it’s not exactly a looker of a game, and I don’t feel like it’s reasonable to pick on it for looking like it was made in Google Docs.

It is a challenging comparison to strike, though, because For The Queers is modelled on the storytelling pseudo-TTRPG, ‘For The Queen,’ a storytelling card game lauded for being, well, pretty solid, and for what amounts to a game of sitting around in a circle telling stories, it has a truly beautiful presentation and excellent approach. In addition to its sumptuous visuals, For the Queen is extremely well constructed in terms of its approach.

It’s built around a single deck of cards that’s set up so the first time you start the game, it’s already in order to teach you how to play the game and get you playing the game in the same fluid exchange. You just flip the cards off the top and go around reading them, in turn, for each player, until suddenly a card asks a player a question and they need to answer it. Using these questions, the players then construct a narrative, integrating the answers to one another’s questions, all building up to a dramatic conclusion to the whole narrative with a final card that, in For The Queen, is simply ‘The Queen Is Under Attack: Do you defend her?’

Everyone answers.

Game ends.

For The Queen, which is already such a simple game engine that it’s functionally impossible to control access to, has a SRD, a system reference document. You can make your own games that invoke it and use the same engine, which, like, you can do that anyway, because game rules are not copyrightable, but if you do it this way, with the SRD and invoking its branding, then you can connect your game to For The Queen, which is, you know, that’s cool. I like that, because it means that you can openly and directly show connections between games. Good stuff.

The central relationship in the story of For The Queers is that the characters are all given a central truth to their prompts: You are in the retinue of a royal, the Queen, who is ‘free of gender,’ and they are travelling with you to again, to journey to a distant land to broker an alliance, but also, this queen, they hold your heart. You are in their retinue, and they love you.

There’s a deeply different materiality to this game being a print-and-play of a paper sheet and an ordinary deck of playing cards. The game For the Queers is modelled on makes sure the deck of cards gets to be this enchanted device, a physically perfect device that controls the focus entirely. You flip a card, and that card presents the question. The art of the Queen in that game gets to be centralised and all the players are engaging with the question in front of them and only the question in front of them.

By comparison, For the Queers requires you look at the card flipped, then a lookup table, which is multiple pages long, and which has all the questions on it present ahead of time, meaning that it’s not hard for a player to mistakenly look at a question that they’re not ‘meant’ to (and isn’t even necessarily going to show up in the game), colouring their experience of the question.

It’s a testament to how a game system is not just the system but also how that system is presented. By putting the rules material in the most convenient to make form (a big a4/letter-printable sheet), the game is diminished in how it presents things that aren’t relevant to the players in the play experience. It’s hardly a real problem either — after all, there are a host of different ways you can approach this. Heck, the whole thing could be a very convenient web applet, just a website you press a ‘next card’ button on, using a simple script to randomise the prompt.

The form the game takes informs the way the game plays.

For The Queers is a For The Queen variant that promises a focus on ‘queer relationships,’ which is a really loaded place to start with things in a way that makes me pre-emptively grimace emoji. Queer relationships are massively varied; my marriage to my partner of twenty years is a queer relationship which has never been particularly in any way interesting, but so to is the relationship of one of my friends who has a literal spreadsheet to manage the intersecting commitments of their different alters’ different polycules. Capturing the breadth of those things in a game simulation of this engine runs a risk of failing to catch either end.

After all, I am one of The Queers, and reading this game’s prompts, I found myself struck by how much none of these questions invited interesting answers, or, particularly, were informed by The Queerness. Now, of course I’m not going to be a great eye level character here; after all, in a podcast about Disney movies, I routinely called out how often the narrative of every movie was a terrible relationship and everyone deserved to be guillotined, but I like to think I can suspend my sense of disbelief and personal politics easily enough to engage with the game that exists in terms of its narrative framing. This is about people who are doing something very important generally (helping the Queen on their way to trying to save the kingdom through an alliance) and very important specifically (you are travelling with someone you are in love with and the many other people that they love, and dealing with the boundaries of that).

Which means that the most prominent form of queerness this game forwards is polyamry and being loved by a queen who is ‘free of gender,’ and what that means is an exercise for the reader. The polyamry element as a form of queerness is, you know, fine, I’m not one of the people who thinks polyamry doesn’t count as a queerness, it’s something that heteronormativity wants to attack and disempower, they can come in under the umbrella as long as they want to be. But that’s kind of the extent of queerness in this space, and since we are also talking about a gender-unclarified queen, with literally no other world building information imposed, that’s kind of the limits of what kind of queerness the game and its story mechanics actually include.

In some ways, it feels breathtakingly sweet, that this game feels its vision of queer relationships are the natural outcome of what happens when you play this game, with these rules. It speaks to the idea of a player community where there is no need for anything but the natural outcome of these prompts to be a queer relationship, because queer relationships are that obvious and easy, but also, the queerness is not defined by any kind of norm. It is Queer, because it says it is Queer.

Like, you know, Dungeons & Dragons.

Let me be extremely clear on this game, though: For all that this game has this verbiage out of me about its challenge, about the things I think it mis-steps on mechanically to achieve its ends, and the implications of what it chooses to be about, none of this is to dismiss the game as a game for its own sake. You can get this game for $3 and play it and if you play it with a bunch of people who want to tell stories about messy queers entangled around their royal love, grappling with their feelings and despairs, you will absolutely be able to have a good time!

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

[seomagicegy]

Hostinger hosting good for eCommerce websites? Yes, Hostinger’s Business and Cloud Hosting plans are great for eCommerce websites due to higher performance and security.

[i4uagencyegy]

Hostinger hosting good for eCommerce websites? Yes, Hostinger’s Business and Cloud Hosting plans are great for eCommerce websites due to higher performance and security.

[machine-saint]

i think one of the fundamental problems with the word "techbro" is that it has multiple meanings, some of which contradict each other.

the original term brogrammer referred to programmers who act in a very stereotypical masculine way, as a pejorative. the word "techbro" was sometimes used as a synonym for this. this is why the word "bro" is there, because it's a comparison to frat bros. this is also the only sense mentioned on the wikipedia page. this is also the sense i see the least usage of on tumblr; it was really more of a thing back in 2012-2013 or so.

people also use it to refer to people who are pushing the latest fad; web 3.0, blockchain shit, NFTs, LLMs, whatever. this usage does not require that the person actually knows anything about programming. some of these people genuinely believe in what they're advocating for, some of them are just hopping onto the latest money-making thing. this is the y combinator set.

a third usage is to refer to people who are very into self-hosting, and "own your hardware" type stuff and don't understand that computing is a compromise and not everyone wants to spend all their effort getting stuff to work. this is the rms type. unlike the second definition, this one requires the person to have fairly deep technical knowledge. theoretically you could have someone who doesn't know a lot about computers but is real big into this kind of stuff, but in practice that never happens.

(i'm broadly sympathetic to this type; i avoid music streaming and sync all my music using open-source software, that sort of thing. the "techbro" part, in theory, comes when they look down on others for not making the same choices. of course, the line between "you're looking down on me" and "you're arrogant for simply believing that you're right" is thin.)

in particular, sense-2 and sense-3 "techbros" have very opposite beliefs! one wants to run everything "in the cloud", the other wants to run everything locally. one wants to let chatgpt run your life, the other hates the idea of something they can't audit be that important. both tend to be very "technology will save us" types, but the way they go about that is very different. one makes very sleek-looking but extremely limited UI, the other will make ultra-customizable, ultra-functional UI that's the most hideous and hard-to-use thing you've seen in your life.

and so you can see here the problem: what can we actually say about "techbros" that's meaningful, other than "techbro is when i don't like someone who likes technology"? if a word isn't used as a self-descriptor, but only as an insult, what stops it from becoming broader and broader until it loses all usefulness?

[maybe-boys-do-love]

So far, Kidnap the series, is BL-ing in all the right ways. It's light fare, but that's exactly what it aims for, and its hitting near the bullseye every episode. Just because its light doesn't mean its bad. Consider this my plea to everyone--for the sake of romance, BLs, and Thai BLs in particular--to stop equating dramatic naturalism with 'good' art. Kidnap is silly, sweet, and such a throwback to classic BLs--it's already hit most of the BL tropes. More importantly, Kidnap understands a major 'why' of BLs and light fare, and the series, itself, is depicting that 'why': they can give an overwhelming sense of reparation for queer people's buried traumas.

On the podcast Boys Love Boys Love, hosts and gay married couple Adam and RJ have been recapping their first watch of ITSAY (which very much broke open many traditions of the BL genre) with guests. In all three recaps so far, the guests and hosts have detailed vividly how, despite feeling 'proud' of their sexuality, BL shows allowed them to revisit painful experiences of isolation and abandonment in adolescence that occurred because of homophobia and then re-imagine an adolescence in which they weren't constantly on guard but instead experienced genuine adult care, friendship, and uninhibited explorations of first love. BL shows and their happy endings help queer people process griefs we don't realize we've suppressed.

I see a parallel to this experience in Kidnap as Min aids Q in coping with his acute PTSD, especially in the play acting scenes. Q can safely engage with his past experience and gain a sense of control and compassion over what he couldn't manage originally. Because I'm a performance dork at heart, the context of Ohm, the 'king of BLs,' leading Leng, an entirely green actor, within the show and through the actual process of acting in BLs doubles down on the theme. With each clear-from-outer-space romance beat, the show promises that this is a safe place to be vulnerable.

In the latest episode (episode 5), the series even began to reveal plot-relevance to its BL levity. We've all joked about Min's incompetency with all the crime he's been drawn into. After the first episode, the people on the internet chucked it up to a cheesy show disinterested in researching and committing to the realities of crime, but then James walked in the next week and called him out on it all. It was just Min, not the show. His exuberant care and desperation to please has led him, unsurprisingly, into a web of deception with no way out.

Brother Mhen laid it flat out this week: just because Min takes care of him doesn't mean he doesn't also provide kinds of care for his brother. Min, like any human-being, has his own weaknesses and issues of self-worth, and Q, with his savvy and prerogative of self-preservation learned from his upbringing, is positioned perfectly to provide the care and encouragement Min needs. I don't think the show has invited this comparison as directly, but it does make me think about how we figure the lighter BL shows and people like Ohm, a particularly evocative representative for creators in the industry, who endure controversies and vitriol to bring their best attempts to lighten the burdens of audiences.

For all the intense feelings ITSAY or The Eight Sense or The On1y One produced in me, I can recognize that their 'cinematic' style, with its naturalistic performances and precise camera work, is still just a style. It's not inherently better than shows recorded on sound-stages with more theatrical performance styles, though many critics and scholars have trained us to think that way. I Love Lucy, The Golden Girls, and shows like them are undeniably celebrated series that have no interest in approaching cinematic style.

Stable cameras, broader characters, and more absurd situations allow for subversive problems to be broached and tackled (and laughed at) while maintaining audience comfort. The slapstick and screwball comedy is one of the things I've adored about Thai BLs, in particular. The audience can feel for but not with the characters. And, that healthy distance is not to be diminished. Comfort can be a vitally important aesthetic experience, and the rules for judging genres that prioritize it are very different than those used for judging prestige tv and *poetic cinema.*

Too much realism would be detrimental to an action rom-com like Kidnap because the audience would no longer feel safe to laugh and coo about these characters in their situation. Although GMMTV is leaning more into its cinematography for BLs recently with this series and The Trainee (maybe toss Moonlight Chicken in there), I personally appreciate how they've maintained the genre's unpretentious sentimental tone, even as they've allowed creators to expand the breadth of the genre and address its problems. That tonal lightness allows us, in Kidnap, to safely dive into PTSD and perhaps our own experiences as queer adolescents with parents who left us unseen as we suffered alone; we trust the show will leave us and the characters resolved in the end.

But I don't want to mistake that kind of depth as the main point of BLs. Those are the undercurrents but we're meant to have fun here. You don't pull-up Miss Congeniality on your TV to understand the human condition. We like these characters, feel safe to open up our hearts, and trust, even as threats of death loom, queer love will conquer all.

[3liza]

after my post yesterday about not sharing viral videos of "dancing dogs" because they're just videos of animals dying slowly of agonizing neurological disease I tried typing "canine distemper" into tumblr search and discovered another one of those weird little heatsinks of tumblr spam. 99% of the posts in the tag/search category (the latter actually, the tag itself doesn't seem to work/is blocked) were spam, mostly 0-note chatGPT rambling with unclear goals either for SEO or for sales. a lot of Indian spam in particular is on Tumblr, as well as either fake or real veterinary clinics posting filler articles about pet topics. none of this stuff gets any engagement and most of it seems to be referral dead ends, eg, it doesn't have any links out that are being clicked by either humans or crawlers, but I find it everywhere.

porn spam is very straightforward by comparison, porn bots are trying to farm leads in the form of live men who reply to them and can be added to databases of live leads, or they want conversions into account signups or sales off-site. sometimes actual adult content creators are doing their own marketing here and again the goals of their advertising is normal, and other times porn ads are malware or social account hijacking bait etc. but the generic marketing slop spam that comes up for terms like "canine distemper" is a little more puzzling.

I think some of these blogs are probably being used inside web templates off Tumblr to just host content elsewhere on the web, but as far as I'm aware thats not really a standard website building technique, most people just use a blog template or WordPress or something. if you go on the Black Hat World forum you'll find plenty of buying and selling of established accounts in good standing on various socials, either through hacked accounts or accounts that have been deliberately created and then farmed over months or years to look as real as possible, but Tumblr accounts aren't really in demand as far as I'm aware

I don't think it's particularly interesting and definitely not sinister, it's likely a case of lost automated processes or some sort of testing of marketing generators that's just using Tumblr as the planting bed.

[spacetimewithstuartgary]

Gargantuan black hole jets are biggest seen yet

Astronomers have spotted the biggest pair of black hole jets ever seen, spanning 23 million light-years in total length. That's equivalent to lining up 140 Milky Way galaxies back to back. 

"This pair is not just the size of a solar system, or a Milky Way; we are talking about 140 Milky Way diameters in total," says Martijn Oei, a Caltech postdoctoral scholar and lead author of a new Nature paper reporting the findings. "The Milky Way would be a little dot in these two giant eruptions."

The jet megastructure, nicknamed Porphyrion after a giant in Greek mythology, dates to a time when our universe was 6.3 billion years old, or less than half its present age of 13.8 billion years. These fierce outflows—with a total power output equivalent to trillions of suns—shoot out from above and below a supermassive black hole at the heart of a remote galaxy. 

Prior to Porphyrion's discovery, the largest confirmed jet system was Alcyoneus, also named after a giant in Greek mythology. Alcyoneus, which was discovered in 2022 by the same team that found Porphyrion, spans the equivalent of around 100 Milky Ways. For comparison, the well-known Centaurus A jets, the closest major jet system to Earth, spans 10 Milky Ways.

The latest finding suggests that these giant jet systems may have had a larger influence on the formation of galaxies in the young universe than previously believed. Porphyrion existed during an early epoch when the wispy filaments that connect and feed galaxies, known as the cosmic web, were closer together than they are now. That means enormous jets like Porphyrion reached across a greater portion of the cosmic web compared to jets in the local universe.

"Astronomers believe that galaxies and their central black holes co-evolve, and one key aspect of this is that jets can spread huge amounts of energy that affect the growth of their host galaxies and other galaxies near them,” says co-author George Djorgovski, professor of astronomy and data science at Caltech. "This discovery shows that their effects can extend much farther out than we thought."

Unveiling a Vast Population 

The Porphyrion jet system is the biggest found so far during a sky survey that has revealed a shocking number of the faint megastructures: more than 10,000. This massive population of gargantuan jets was found using Europe's LOFAR (LOw Frequency ARray) radio telescope. 

While hundreds of large jet systems were known before the LOFAR observations, they were thought to be rare and on average smaller in size than the thousands of systems uncovered by the radio telescope.

"Giant jets were known before we started the campaign, but we had no idea that there would turn out to be so many," says Martin Hardcastle, second author of the study and a professor of astrophysics at the University of Hertfordshire in England. "Usually when we get a new observational capability, such as LOFAR's combination of wide field of view and very high sensitivity to extended structures, we find something new, but it was still very exciting to see so many of these objects emerging."

Back in 2018, Oei and his colleagues began using LOFAR to study not black hole jets but the cosmic web of wispy filaments that crisscrosses the space between galaxies. As the team inspected the radio images for the faint filaments, they began to notice several strikingly long jet systems. 

"When we first found the giant jets, we were quite surprised," says Oei, who is also affiliated with Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands. "We had no idea that there were this many."

To systematically search for more hidden jets, the team inspected the radio images by eye, used machine-learning tools to scan the images for signs of the looming jets, and enlisted the help of citizen scientists around the globe to eyeball the images further. A paper describing their most recent batch of giant outflows, containing more than 8,000 jet pairs, has been accepted for publication in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics. 

Lurking in the Past

To find the galaxy from which Porphyrion originated, the team used the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope(GMRT) in India along with ancillary data from a project called Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument(DESI), which operates from Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona. The observations pinpointed the home of the jets to a hefty galaxy about 10 times more massive than our Milky Way.  

The team then used the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawai‘i to show that Porphyrion is 7.5 billion light-years from Earth. "Up until now, these giant jet systems appeared to be a phenomenon of the recent universe," Oei says. "If distant jets like these can reach the scale of the cosmic web, then every place in the universe may have been affected by black hole activity at some point in cosmic time," Oei says.

The observations from Keck also revealed that Porphyrion emerged from what is called a radiative-mode active black hole, as opposed to one that is in a jet-mode state. When supermassive black holes become active—in other words, when their immense forces of gravity tug on and heat up surrounding material—they are thought to either emit energy in the form of radiation or jets. Radiative-mode black holes were more common in the young, or distant, universe, while jet-mode ones are more common in the present-day universe. 

The fact that Porphyrion came from a radiative-mode black hole came as a surprise because astronomers did not know this mode could produce such huge and powerful jets. What is more, because Porphyrion lies in the distant universe where radiative-mode black holes abound, the finding implies there may be a lot more colossal jets left to be found.

"We may be looking at the tip of the iceberg," Oei says. "Our LOFAR survey only covered 15 percent of the sky. And most of these giant jets are likely difficult to spot, so we believe there are many more of these behemoths out there."

Ongoing Mysteries

How the jets can extend so far beyond their host galaxies without destabilizing is still unclear. "Martijn's work has shown us that there isn't anything particularly special about the environments of these giant sources that causes them to reach those large sizes," says Hardcastle, who is an expert in the physics of black hole jets. "My interpretation is that we need an unusually long-lived and stable accretion event around the central, supermassive black hole to allow it to be active for so long—about a billion years—and to ensure that the jets keep pointing in the same direction over all of that time. What we're learning from the large number of giants is that this must be a relatively common occurrence."

As a next step, Oei wants to better understand how these megastructures influence their surroundings. The jets spread cosmic rays, heat, heavy atoms, and magnetic fields throughout the space between galaxies. Oei is specifically interested in finding out the extent to which giant jets spread magnetism. "The magnetism on our planet allows life to thrive, so we want to understand how it came to be," he says. "We know magnetism pervades the cosmic web, then makes its way into galaxies and stars, and eventually to planets, but the question is: Where does it start? Have these giant jets spread magnetism through the cosmos?"

The Nature study, "Black hole jets on the scale of the cosmic web," was funded by the Dutch Research Council, the European Research Council, the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council, the UK Research and Innovation Future Leaders Fellowship, and the European Union. Other Caltech authors include graduate student Antonio Rodriguez. Additional authors are Roland Timmerman of Durham University; Reinout J. van Weeren, Huub J.A. Röttgering, and Huib T. Intema of Leiden University (Timmerman is also affiliated with Leiden University); Aivin R.D.J.G.I.B. Gast of the University of Oxford; Andrea Botteon and Francesco de Gasperin of the Institute for Radio Astronomy of Italy's National Institute of Astrophysics; Daniel Stern of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is managed by Caltech for NASA; and Gabriela Calistro Rivera of the European Southern Observatory and the German Aerospace Center.

IMAGE: An artist's illustration of the longest black hole jet system ever observed. Nicknamed Porphyrion after a mythological Greek giant, these jets span roughly 7 megaparsecs, or 23 million light-years. That is equivalent to lining up 140 Milky Way galaxies back-to-back. Porphyrion dates back to a time when our universe was less than half its present age. During this early epoch, the wispy filaments that connect and feed galaxies, known as the cosmic web, were closer together than they are now. Consequently, this colossal jet pair extended across a larger portion of the cosmic web compared to similar jets in our nearby universe. Porphyrion's discovery thus implies that jets in the early universe may have influenced the formation of galaxies to a greater extent than previously believed.  Credit E. Wernquist / D. Nelson (IllustrisTNG Collaboration) / M. Oei

[buddiesystempod]

We’re sorry, Shannon can’t come to the phone ☎️ right now. Why? 🤷 Oh, cus’ she’s dead! 🪦

🎧 Listen on Spotify: LOML (2x17: Careful What You Wish For) 📺 Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/EJD9UED3FEE

This week, hosts Han, Cil, and Rachel bid farewell to Shannon Diaz and say hello 👋 to Eddie’s rose-colored glasses. 👓 “I guess she was the love of your life.” “I guess she was?” Oh, we’re so sure. 😏

Get in losers, we’re discussing Season 2 Episode 17 of 9-1-1, “Careful What You Wish For” and unpacking the tangled web 🕸️ of relationships, expectations, and the harsh realities of life that hit harder than a runaway vehicle at a crosswalk. 💥🚗

This episode explores how characters cope with tragedy while navigating their own emotional inner worlds, showing us that amidst life’s unpredictability, friendship and support are what truly matters and sometimes, it’s okay to not have all the answers.

We dive deep into Eddie’s avoidance of what he truly wants, instead he’s focusing on his perceived responsibilities to Christopher and Shannon. We’re not sure Eddie has ever actually asked himself what he wants or prioritized himself.

Meanwhile, Maddie is grappling with the unfinished aspects of her job at dispatch and missing being able to see that she’s making a difference. Things come full circle 🔃 when Josh and Sue organize the sweetest (and possibly illegal 😅) intervention, helping her to see her job from a new perspective. 

For our scene dissection we look at the 118’s visit to Bobby for Therapy Hour to gripe and groan about Chim’s leadership and deal with the temporary loss of Bobby in their professional lives.

We pit Buddie against Bobby & Athena, Maddie & Chimney, and Eddie & Shannon to play the “is this platonic or romantic” 👀 comparison game. Spoiler alert, Buck and Eddie are NOT normal about each other.

Buck-le up, and look both ways before you cross, as we drive into the emotional wreckage that Eddie is still reeling from 6 years later—she’s the loss of his life. 💔