Over the past couple of months, "Average Position" in Google Search Console has shot up across loads of sites.

Normally great news! Except impressions and clicks are often down. 🤔

So what's going on under the hood here?

LinkedIn have taken to sending notifications warning you of notifications you may have missed. Potentially useful! In practice, not so much.

They're not warning of useful ones (connection requests, post responses), but "person you don't know is playing game Y/posting in group Z you're not in" etc.

I'm excited to be speaking at Build Stuff in Vilnius this December!

"Digital Cat & Mouse: Strategies to Outsmart Phishers, Scrapers, and Thieves" covers the (mis-)adventures that taught me how to protect digital assets in the wild (selling 10 Downing St, moving the Eiffel Tower to Dublin, and more)

The latest example of this time wasting nonsense - apparently the badge worn by the police service of Northern Ireland is actually private content generated by an onlyfans creator. Whoever is selling the Venus Group & co their image rec tech is getting money for old rope here, absolute garbage.

The DMCA requires “good faith” belief in a claim. But when bots are filing at scale, there’s no faith involved - no human in the loop, no sanity check.

One of these services managed to DMCA their own admin tool. Doesn't seem like that happens when you've got any real oversight.

Because they automate everything, there’s no marginal cost to them for flooding Google with claims.

But every bad claim creates real work for publishers. These firms are filing huge numbers of claims (Lumen result total stops counting once it hits 10k)

The image recognition in these tools is... not great.

Unless there’s a particularly spicy angle to this statue that I'm just not seeing, it's unlikely that we’ve ripped off OnlyFans here. Same with the distillery - nice photo, but the odds of it legitimately being paywalled content? Low.

So why are statues & road signs getting flagged as stolen from OnlyFans creators?

DMCA bots are to blame. Companies like Takedowns AI or Venus Takedowns use AI to scan for leaked paywalled content and auto-file takedown requests.

Good idea in theory. In practice? Not so much.

Lately, Google’s been hitting us regularly with copyright violation notices. The alleged crimes? Posting photos like... a traffic sign, a Dublin statue, and some houses under construction.

Apparently we stole them from OnlyFans creators.

I’m excited to share that I’ll be speaking at the International PHP Conference Munich @phpconference.bsky.social 2025!

📅 October 27–31, 2025 | 📍 Munich, Germany
🗣 Topic: Modern PHP Features You’re Probably Not Using (But Should Be)
🔗 Details: phpconference.com/php-core-cod...

Gary Neville was ahead of his time

Aer Lingus has announced a lot of new routes to the States. I suspect this particular plane won't be the first choice to make the transatlantic trips though.

DNS entries are complex, and need to be read super-quickly. So I thought why not use a payment processor's simple key-value store to save the data?

But does it work? Kind of! There are a number of limitations, but it's been a useful way to explore the limits of metadata, and write-then-read flows.

🌐 Stripe Is My DNS Provider Now (or "When Good APIs Meet Bad Ideas")

Inspired by @quinnypig.com's famous post about Route 53 being a database, I wondered what's the opposite? If DNS can be a db, what's the most absurd way to implement a DNS server?

By building it using Stripe metadata, obviously!

🎉 Excited to announce that I've been accepted to speak at the Dutch PHP Conference in Amsterdam on March 21st!

🌐 I'll be giving a talk on idempotency – what it is, why it’s so useful, and how big players like Stripe and AWS leverage it in production.

🎟️ On sale now:
egeniq.paydro.com/dpc-2025

It's something I've talked about a lot with our team, but could never re-find the original post to point at. So I was very happy to see @destraynor.bsky.social publish the below on the same theme - The different types of people you work with

destraynor.com/writing/2025...

It uses a smaller 6x6 grid, and emojis in theme packs to spark kids' imaginations. The app is mobile-friendly and can also be installed directly to a device's home screen for easy access.

If you've a young puzzler in your house, give it a go, and let me know your thoughts!

www.kidssudoku.com