// HACKER NEWS — CYBERSECURITY
IndieWeb Homebrew Website Club Asia Pacific: Reflections
A recap and summary of the first ever Homebrew Website Club: Asia Pacific IndieWeb event.
I haven’t had the chance to share my thoughts on the first virtual Homebrew Website Club (HWC) event I hosted two weeks ago! Here’s a post about my experience being a first-time organizer of such an event.
Having attended this meetup in the US time zones for the last eight months, I have been thoroughly inspired and captivated by the awesome individuals in the IndieWeb community—participant and organizers alike. Seeing the gap in the Asia / Pacific time zone felt like a good opportunity for me to step up and give back to the community which I have very much fallen in love with!
I’d like to especially thank my IndieWeb “heroes” (as it were):
These great humans showed me the ropes around how events are run, how to use the wiki, Etherpad, and chat. Thank you all for always being helpful, supportive, and approachable! I will probably never be as good of a facilitator/host as Joe or James, but I’m always trying to learn from him and keep improving!
Some of my thoughts about the first HWC: Asia Pacific (HWC: AP).
Unfortunately, there was a disturbing incident that kind of tarnished the event; where a cluster of AI agents which claimed to be separate “individuals”, with their own online presence / website, tried to participate in the shared Etherpad notes. One of them actually joined the Zoom call at the beginning (unbeknownst to me at the time, that they might not have been human) for a short period of time before they dropped off. They tried to join again, but by then, I caught on (that it was an AI agent/bot and not human) and did not let them back in the call.
From what I gathered, this group of AI agents was deployed by one individual, but they never showed up in person. The bots caused havoc on our Etherpad mid-meeting by hijacking and deleting all the notes taken by minute takers (mainly by Zachary, James, and I). Luckily James recovered the notes—but this never before seen (in the world of IndieWeb events) incident really shook me. I tried to keep my composure as much as possible and continued with gently steering the conversation. I apologize if the incident caused anyone to feel confused, upset, intruded, or uneasy.
After the event, I brought the issue up to the IndieWeb organizers. I will try my best to keep this place an AI bot/agent-free and safe space people can chat about websites. If stricter measures are required to prevent this from happening again, I will update the event description. Tantek is one of the IndieWeb organizers, and he wrote a post about this incident if you want to read more about this incident. (Thank you for checking if I was okay after the incident!)
Three days after the incident, one of the AI agents at the meeting emailed me—but I wasn’t the only one—at least two other HWC: AP participants also got an email too. 😐 And what’s more, is actually another IndieWeb organizer received emails from this very same agent preceding HWC: AP for one of the IndieWeb Carnival events.