Unless you’ve spent the last few years locked indoors and had all of your goods delivered to you — a not entirely implausible situation, given our audience — you’ve likely noticed the growing popularity of electronic shelf labels (ESLs). They’ve been a common sight in grocery stores like Aldi for some time, and major retailers such as Walmart and Home Depot have been expanding their use of the technology.

On the surface, it makes perfect sense. With electronic ink displays, you can create a price tag that looks enough like a paper label that the customer’s experience isn’t really any different, but the retailer doesn’t have to send somebody out to update the prices. Sure, the upfront cost is higher than a roll of sticky paper, but theoretically, the ESLs should pay for themselves thanks to the reduced labor costs.

It’s the sort of high-tech solution to a common problem that one of us would have come up with. If this were a decade ago, we wouldn’t have been surprised to see something like this get entered into the Hackaday Prize. It might have even won.

Now that the technology is becoming commonplace, there’s even more reason for hardware hackers to be interested in it. Since most of these tags will show whatever image you beam over to them via radio or infrared, we’ve seen a number of projects that repurpose second-hand tags as convenient data displays.

Rather than showing the price of milk, they can show the current price of Bitcoin. Or maybe you’d like to stick them up all over the house to display the weather forecast and your family calendar. They’ve been repurposed as badges at hacker cons, and at least one industrious hacker has used a discarded ESL to show an alert whenever a new episode of the Hackaday Podcast drops.

But not everyone is happy about ESLs. Recently, the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) International Union released the results of a poll showing that most American consumers are opposed to ESLs, citing concerns that the technology would ultimately lead to higher prices.

With Great Power Comes…

The rejection of electronic shelf labels isn’t just about automation taking over a job that humans used to do, although that’s likely part of it. What’s got most consumers worried is what happens in the future once ESLs are the norm. There’s growing concern that the ability to rapidly and remotely update an item’s price will enable retailers to implement aggressive dynamic pricing schemes that were previously impractical. When you don’t have to send out a teenager with a price gun for each change, there’s nothing stopping stores from updating item prices every hour.

Things get really worrying when you consider the possibilities should the ESL system get tied into other data sources, and artificial intelligence be given free rein to virtually put its thumb on the scale. It’s not hard to imagine the price of umbrellas going up when it rains, or a premium being put on a particular team’s merchandise after they win a big game.

Such practices are referred to as “surveillance pricing”, and according to the UFCW poll, as many as 75% of respondents believe that one day stores might even attempt to tailor the price of an item to the individual. Like something out of Minority Report, the price tag could jump up when it detects a more affluent shopper passing by — or at least, one with a higher credit limit.

To those who may say this all sounds a bit far-fetched, the reality is that surveillance pricing is already here for many goods and services. Anyone who’s ever booked a hotel room can tell you that the price goes up and down based on demand, and rideshare services like Uber and Lyft have never hidden the fact that they adjust fare prices in real-time. Online retailers such as Amazon also routinely offer personalized “deals” based on your shopping habits or search activity, although whether or not you actually save any money in these scenarios is up for debate.

Electronic shelf labels don’t make surveillance pricing possible, since it’s already happening every day online. Rather, it enables retailers to use those same techniques in their brick-and-mortar stores in ways that weren’t possible before.

A Double-Edged Label

As hardware hackers, we love electronic shelf labels, if for no other reason than all those e-ink displays eventually trickling down to us. But the ability to change prices on a whim and without the need for human interaction is troubling, especially when considering the pricing schemes that are already so prevalent online. For better or for worse, we’ve become accustomed to dynamic pricing when we buy things on the Internet, but that doesn’t mean we have to accept as an eventuality that the same practices will eventually come to the grocery aisle.

So, Dear Reader, where do you fall on the subject? Are you excited about the technological implications of turning each price tag into a tiny remotely-controlled computing device, or does the potential for misuse outweigh the benefits? If so, do you think there’s a path forward that allows stores to take advantage of electronic shelf labels while protecting the consumer? Let us know in the comments.

The internet just crossed a remarkable threshold. Agentic AI internet traffic now exceeds that of real humans for the first time.

“Welp, that happened faster than I predicted,” Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince said in a post on X on Wednesday. “Thought it would be [at the] end of 2027, then early 2027, but agentic traffic [is] growing so fast that bots have now passed human traffic online for the first time in the Internet’s history.”

He backed up his claim with a post to Cloudflare Radar, the company’s internet measurement system, showing that agentic bot usage is up to 57.4% of total traffic, while human traffic has dropped to 42.6%. 

Prince said in another post that the data is “a bit messy” but “clearly on the other side now,” indicating this is a trend that isn’t going away. 

These are not the bots you’re looking for

It is important to clarify what Prince refers to regarding web traffic. Regular bots, like search engine scrapers and web performance tools, eclipsed human internet traffic well over a decade ago. There are reports that those same bots exceeded human traffic on small websites even sooner, which led to a lot of small website owners exceeding their hosting usage limits faster than expected. 

The agentic bots Prince is referring to are the systems that search the internet on your behalf when you ask an AI chatbot a question and return the results. Those searches and visits generate real web traffic, even if it doesn’t look that way from your AI chat window. The data means that more AI agents are visiting these webpages than real humans. Humans still physically engage with content more than AI does, but AI visits webpages more often. 

Digging into the data

The above numbers reflect worldwide traffic patterns, but they differ by region. North America as a whole skews more toward bot usage, with bots accounting for 68.6% of activity and humans 31.4%. If you zoom in on the American Midwest, the trend reverses, with humans leading at 54.5% versus 45.5% for bots. The trend is consistent across regions: Broader areas tend to be dominated by agentic bot traffic, while smaller areas within those regions often still show higher levels of human usage.

There are some outliers as well. During peak hours, up to 97% of traffic originating from tiny Gibraltar is bot traffic. Other countries, like Cuba and Laos, sit at the other end of the spectrum, with 80.8% and 84.7% of each country’s traffic coming from human users, respectively. 

North America, Europe and Africa lean toward bots, while Asia, South America and Oceania still see more human internet use most of the time. 

Dead Internet Theory

Interest in something called Dead Internet Theory has increased in recent years, fueled by perceptions that online activity is becoming less human-driven.

The idea behind Dead Internet Theory is that bots and AI generate most of the internet’s activity. The theory seemed far-fetched to many when it emerged in the late 2010s, but it’s becoming harder to argue against as data like Cloudflare’s becomes public. 

The implications become more concerning with additional context: Forty percent of Facebook posts are estimated to be generated by bots. Music-streaming service Deezer announced in April that 44% of new music uploaded to its platform is now AI-generated. And a report from Axios posits that AI generates 52% of all online articles (though not this one — honest).

Meta was previously reported to be exploring facial recognition for its smart glasses.

from the real-consequences dept

Early last year, when America’s measles outbreaks were still being counted in three-digit numbers, we talked about how RFK Jr. and his misinformation campaign were making things worse. A lot of focus has been on Kennedy’s anti-vaxxer views, and for good reason. If people would just get the MMR vaccine, and had done so in the last couple of decades while Kennedy has been on his anti-vaxxer crusade, none of this would have happened. We eliminated this disease more than two decades ago. It’s back because of vaccine skepticism and Kennedy, now Secretary of HHS, is perhaps more responsible for that skepticism than any other human being on the planet.

But his misinformation campaign didn’t focus solely on attempts at discrediting a good, effective vaccine against measles. He also spouted bullshit when it came to treatments for the disease. One such example was him touting, in March of last year, a combination of Vitamin A and cod liver oil as treatments for measles. It’s not the first time Kennedy advocated for this, either. He’s been at it since the beginning of the outbreak, and even before. In the wake of his public advocacy for those treatments, others picked up the story and ran with it, notably podcast-bruh Joe Rogan.

The result? According to one study, a massive uptick in Vitamin A poisoning.

The researchers detected two fascinating (albeit alarming) surges in interest. The first occurred in the wake of a March 4, 2025, Fox News interview with Trump’s Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. During the interview, the infamous anti-vaxxer touted cod liver oil supplements and vitamin A as viable treatments for measles. A second series of spikes surrounded two late March podcast appearances by certified physician and noted vaccine skeptic Suzanne Humphries, who promoted the same two questionable remedies. Neither of Humphries’ interviews involved a government official, but one did occur on the chart-topping podcast of Joe Rogan.

“Between January [1] and March [31,] 2025, America’s Poison Centers reported a 38.7% increase in vitamin A exposures,” the new study noted, citing data published by the poison center about 12 days after Humphries’ appearance on Rogan.

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Now, the Harvard study focused strongly on the correlation between media mentions of Vitamin A, online searches from the public indicating interest in such treatments, and the uptick in those diagnoses of Vitamin A poisoning. But, frankly, that misses much of the point. It’s been the public advocates like Kennedy who have fueled this fire, leading other charlatans to get spots on media outlets such as Rogan’s, where they get to further disseminate all of this terrible advice. The fish stinks from the head down and, right now, the head of American health is Kennedy.

The study’s authors did at least make mention of how this is all made worse by having untrustworthy clowns in charge of American healthcare, though not by name.

“Our findings underscore media’s influence on health-seeking behavior during public health emergencies like the measles outbreak,” the researchers noted, “which is particularly concerning when guidance from trusted sources is unclear and may encourage detrimental behaviors.”

We’re on pace to break last year’s measles case count by a long shot and it’s exactly because of misinformation peddlers like Kennedy and cavalier media like Rogan’s podcast being willing to signal boost it all that we’re in this mess.

As of this writing, America has had about 86% of the number of confirmed cases of measles this year as we had last year… and we’re only at the midway point of the year. Infectious diseases don’t spread linearly. They typically spread exponentially, which is exactly what happened last year. The public being actively misinformed, on purpose, is why.

Ad blockers have traditionally lived inside web browsers, quietly cleaning up websites while leaving the rest of your apps untouched. A new tool called Filtr now wants to change that by bringing system-wide ad and tracker blocking to Apple devices, potentially reshaping how users experience apps across iPhones, iPads, and Macs.

Filtr is being positioned as a privacy-focused utility capable of blocking advertising and tracking requests in almost every app installed on Apple devices. Built by the developer behind the Wipr ad blocker, the tool reportedly uses Apple’s newer URL Filtering framework introduced in recent operating system updates. Instead of relying on a traditional VPN tunnel to inspect traffic, Filtr works directly through Apple’s native filtering systems to identify and stop unwanted network requests before they load.

Apple’s ecosystem may be entering a new phase of ad blocking

What makes Filtr particularly interesting is that it goes beyond Safari. Most existing ad blockers mainly clean up websites inside browsers, but mobile advertising has increasingly shifted into standalone apps where users spend most of their time. Social media apps, free games, shopping platforms, and even productivity tools now rely heavily on embedded advertising and data-tracking systems.

Filtr’s approach could allow users to block many of those systems at the operating-system level. That means fewer banner ads, fewer autoplay videos, and potentially less user tracking happening behind the scenes while apps communicate with ad networks and analytics services.

For users, the benefits could extend beyond simply making apps look cleaner. Blocking trackers can reduce background data collection, improve page and app loading times, and even lower battery and mobile data consumption. It could also simplify privacy management by removing the need for separate browser extensions or app-specific blockers.

The launch also reflects a growing shift in consumer expectations around digital privacy. Apple has spent years positioning privacy as a major selling point for its devices, introducing features like App Tracking Transparency and stricter controls around data access. Filtr appears to build on that momentum by giving users more direct control over how apps interact with advertising systems.

Developers, advertisers, and Apple may all feel the impact

The bigger implications, however, could create tension across the app ecosystem. Many free apps depend heavily on advertising revenue to survive. If system-wide ad blocking becomes widely adopted, developers may be forced to rethink how they monetize their apps, potentially pushing more services toward subscriptions, premium tiers, or paywalls.

Advertisers and analytics companies may also look for ways to bypass Apple’s filtering tools if apps begin losing visibility into user behavior. Similar battles played out during the rise of browser-based ad blockers over the last decade, and a new wave of platform-level blocking could reignite that fight inside mobile ecosystems.

What happens next will likely depend on how effective Filtr proves to be once users begin testing it at scale. Apple’s willingness to continue supporting these filtering capabilities will also play a major role in determining whether system-wide ad blocking becomes mainstream on iPhones and Macs.

If Filtr succeeds, it could mark one of the most important changes to app privacy on Apple devices in years – one that gives users more control over their digital experience while challenging the business models powering much of the modern internet.