Ric Ford has announced that he’s putting MacInTouch on pause to stem costs while he reassesses his priorities in the face of the sweeping changes we’re all experiencing.
I understand all too well what he’s going through, and I wish him the best of luck in figuring out his next steps.
Adam,
What is your assessment of his sweeping indictment of bots?
Are TidBITS numbers about the same?
It’s sad to see a long time Mac resource go on hiatus, but (political commentary aside) it’s challenging, time consuming, and costly for individuals to keep up with the abuse that’s abundant on the Internet today. I can understand Ric wanting to take a step back.
That being said, I stopped reading MacInTouch a few years ago (switching here to TidBITS). The changes to their tone lost my interest. It seemed that everything was a chance to bash Apple instead of offering objective criticism or analysis. And they closed down discussion. At least here in TidBITS we can have a discussion - I have to give @ace lots of credit for maintaining this as a forum where we can comment.
Our hosting plans don’t have any visit-based limits so I only worry about bandwidth, and since we use Cloudflare for caching and bot protection, that’s generally not a huge issue. The big win recently was switching to Cloudlflare’s bot prevention to block what could literally be hundreds of spambot-created accounts per day.
Here’s what our bandwidth and attack prevention charts look like for the last 30 days. I don’t have a sense of how MacInTouch compares.
It was the closure of the Macintouch discussions that led me to subscribe here. Having access to a community of knowledgeable people to answer my questions is most valuable.
I run a phpBB forum for people with a certain form of leukemia, and I’m wondering about adding the free version of Cloudflare for bot protection. Recently I have seen a new form of spam. My forum is set up so that a new member’s first post has to be approved (by me) before it becomes visible to all. This lets me weed out spammers without the membership being bothered by them. But I have had several recent new members whose first post seems to be, superficially, authentic. Usually involving a detailed question about an arcane aspect of therapy or gene mutations. However, they have the flavour of an AI written post, and even so I would have approved them if I had not noticed that the final period was a link to a Polish crypto site! All accounts had e-mail addresses from the same server, so I simply banned that server. But if the issue becomes intrusive, I’ll investigate Cloudflare.
Have others seen other news/discussion groups closing, vanishing or just complaining about the torrent of bots, web scraping and other digital garbage making it difficult to operate? It’s hard to tell much about trends from a single site, even one that’s well established.
I sympathize. I’m one of the moderators of an active medically-related forum, and at least half of the new member sign-ups are spammers.
Moderating legitimate users can be a surprisingly big and unpleasant job. Especially as AI driven attacks proliferate, I can imagine a time in the not too distant future when the moderator team simply gives up and shuts down the forum.
I can’t believe the spammers see much return on their efforts. There’s a wet shaving forum of which I am an admin (not the owner) and we had a DDOS attack from Singapore two weeks ago, with five million plus requests in a day. The owner set up Cloudflare and all is normal again. But this is a forum that is now very quiet, with maybe one new post a day, so why bother?
I’ve never understood that either. When we were fighting off hundreds of spambot accounts per day, I was frustrated because an account doesn’t actually get you anything other than TidBITS via email.
I’d say some factors are the importance of an Internet-wide presence in online reputation and trust algorithms, search engine optimization and related tactics designed to maximize an entity’s online visibility, and persona bots.
Further, intelligence services and hackers have uses for these accounts, especially if direct messaging between users is possible. For anybody interested in this angle, this book written by the Director of the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto is a fine place to start:
I haven’t seen anything at Macintouch that I would describe as “bashing”. I know everything changes, but it has continued to be a site I visited daily until it paused, and I will miss it if it disappears.
Macintouch discussions were great while they lasted. What you are describing with regard to your forum is sad and disturbing. I hope you can get it sorted out because it sounds like you have created a valuable resource.
The big traffic hit that I’ve been made aware of in recent times has been AI systems hitting links repeatedly and intensively as part of their so-called training activities. They totally ignore anything in robots.txt files and ride roughshod across sites and servers, putting a heavy strain on infrastructure. These are being run by the likes of OpenAi, Meta, Microsoft and others. It is abusive, and there’s very little you can do to stop it.
I read Macintouch every single day for years and years. It was a precious resource.
Then, quite a few years ago, Ric started using it to attack Apple on a number of issues, some of which I agreed with and some I didn’t.
I wrote him a private email explaining that, in my view, he was effectively the referee of the website and should be unbiased, leaving the readers to commend or criticise.
He disagreed, so I haven’t looked at Macintouch since.
His site…his rules. Without getting into unnecessary details…it’s the same at Tidbits…Adam’s business…Adam’s rules. I don’t always agree with either Adam or Rick myself but the last few years macintouch has really gone downhill IMO content wise.
I sort of agree but I feel Ric’s rules should be that he sits on the fence more. He became stridently anti-Apple and I felt he wielded too much power, as he ran the website.
I know Adam voices his opinions but he does it much more carefully, recognising that others may not share his views.
Just as it is Ric’s or Adam’s right to say what they like on their websites, so it is my right to choose not to read.
I had a similar experience with an online forum that I ran for years. I gave up and closed it down a few years ago. At that time, more than half of the new membership request were from Russia and similar domains. Back then the bot thing wasn’t a problem, or at least not an obvious one.
Me too. I read it daily for years. I drifted away for different reasons, largely retirement, but I appreciate Ric’s perseverance.
Nature has a report on the extent of the problem at Web-scraping AI bots cause disruption for scientific databases and journals. It’s scary. This goes far beyond MacInTouch. I rarely call anything a “must read” but this is a must read if the Internet is important to you. Basically, the AI activity downloads everything it can reach over and over again, which may block other users. If it keeps going, the implication is that it could block everything and bring down the open Internet.
The news story mentions the possibility of blocking AI access, but gives no details on how this would work. Nor does Nature identify who is behind it. But Nature is a reputable publication that should be taken seriously, and it looks like trouble. We can hope for defense, but it’s too early to say what could be done and what side effects could ensure.
I have access to Nature so I can’t tell how much of the story is accessible to non-subscribers. I expect other news organizations will jump on this quickly.
Ric, like many of us oldies, remembers Apple of the 80’s. Much of what he voices in MacInTouch is his frustration that Mac is no longer the computer for the rest of us.
