does anyone know who's behind "open.news"?

[ansuz@social.cryptography.dog]

it says "powered by Feedbrainer.ai", and while I didn't find any matches for that I did find https://feedbrain.ai/

I can't tell if open.news is a subsidiary of feedbrain, or just someone depending on their API. If it is them, they're based in Dubai:

https://feedbrain.ai/terms

[ansuz@social.cryptography.dog]

sysadmins should be able to grep for an "open.news" user-agent.

They're not generating enough traffic to cause any problems, but at this point I have zero patience left for LLM companies.

[ansuz@social.cryptography.dog]

looking deeper into my logs it seems like their first attempts to scrape my sites coincided with one of my threads that got picked up by an unusual number of "trending-bots".

my best guess at the moment is that this service is using these bots as a starting point for their scraping campaigns, so I might just start blocking them

[ansuz@social.cryptography.dog]

Update on this: open.news seems to be operated by the same people as "readily.news"

They have a "sign up" button, but if you click through that (do it in a container tab if you want to check) they ask you for your mastodon account's id.

Once you enter your account's id, you should be redirected to your instance's sign-in page.

I haven't gone further than that, but I guess this service is gaining full access to people's accounts in this way, then using those accounts to scrape the network so that their AI can provide a daily digest of what happened on fedi

[ansuz@social.cryptography.dog]

I'm kind of tempted to make a throwaway account on mastodon.social or something like that so that I can see how the rest of this works.

I did it with pixelfed.social, and the page loads as it normally would, but with an extra hidden iframe. I don't see that behaviour with mastodon.social.

Maybe this only works with particular fedi instances that lack some security feature?

[ansuz@social.cryptography.dog]

Okay, so it's just the standard OAuth workflow, but I was otherwise right, and their app basically gets full access to your account just as a mobile app for mastodon might 😬

[ansuz@social.cryptography.dog]

hey @Mastodon,

are you aware that https://readily.news/ is leveraging full access to users' mastodon accounts to scrape followers-only fediverse posts?

[ansuz@social.cryptography.dog]

I found a mastodon.social account with a link to readily.news in their bio:

https://mastodon.social/@librenews

I can't tell if he's affiliated with the project/company or if they've injected their link into his bio after he'd given them access to his account. Both seem plausible.

[ansuz@social.cryptography.dog]

Oh, and it seems readily.news was discussed at FediForum 2023:

https://fediforum.org/2023-03/session/4-c/

Do I know anyone who attended that who remembers any relevant details?

Matt's name appears there too, so it's really looking like it might be his project, but who knows 🤷

[ansuz@social.cryptography.dog]

I'm working on a (hopefully brief) write-up of everything I know about this latest fediverse scraper