Table of Contents

  1. Scope
  2. Disclaimer of Liability
  3. Acceptance of Terms
  4. Non-Liability Clause
  5. Indemnification
  6. Limitation of Liability
  7. Intellectual Property
  8. Severability
  9. Conclusion

A Note Before We Begin

The Author is a cybersecurity professional. The Author has read the case law. The Author knows that this disclaimer — presented as a static page you didn’t have to click “I Accept” on — is, strictly speaking, a browsewrap agreement. And the Author knows that Specht v. Netscape, Nguyen v. Barnes & Noble, and about two decades of increasingly impatient federal judges have collectively established that browsewrap agreements are worth roughly as much as a handshake with someone who has their fingers crossed behind their back.

So let’s be honest with each other.

This page is not a contract. It is a statement of intent. It is the Author saying: here is how I’d like this to work, here is what I’m trying to protect, and here is why. If you are a reasonable person operating in good faith — which the Author is choosing to assume, because the alternative is exhausting — none of what follows should be a problem. If you are not a reasonable person operating in good faith, no disclaimer was going to stop you anyway, and we both know it.

What follows is this blog’s Terms and Conditions (hereinafter “the Terms,” or “the Thing That Exists Somewhere Between a Legal Document and a Pinky Promise”). They are written in the spirit of the law, because the letter of the law, as applied to a personal Jekyll blog hosted on GitHub Pages, is doing a lot less work than anyone would like to admit.

Read on. Play along. Be cool about it.

If you need additional context before proceeding: Chill the fuck out!

Scope

These Terms govern all content provided by the Author — a satirical writer, security researcher, and person with opinions — on this blog. By reading this blog, you (the “Reader”) are not technically entering a binding contract, because you didn’t click anything. But you are a person, presumably with a conscience, and the Author is going to appeal to that directly.

If you’re here in good faith: welcome, carry on, none of this applies to you in any adversarial sense.

If you’re here to scrape, harvest, train, litigate, or otherwise extract value from this blog in ways the Author didn’t intend: this page exists so you know the Author knew what you were doing, and thought about it, and is on record as objecting.

Disclaimer of Liability

The Author shall not be liable for any loss, damage, or existential inconvenience arising from use of this content — except in cases of gross negligence or willful misconduct, which would require significantly more effort than goes into this blog.

A note on enforceability: blanket liability waivers in browsewrap agreements are frequently unenforceable, especially for emotional distress claims, which courts tend to treat as non-waivable regardless of what any disclaimer says. The Author is aware of this. The Author is including this clause anyway, because it accurately represents the Author’s position, which is: the Author did not make you feel bad, you chose to read something that made you feel bad, and those are different things.

The content here reflects the Author’s thinking at a specific point in time, under specific circumstances, possibly involving caffeine. It is not a comprehensive worldview, a legal position, a medical recommendation, or a promise.

Acceptance of Terms

The Author accepts that you, the Reader, have not technically accepted anything.

What the Author is asking instead is for you to operate in good faith — which is a concept that predates contract law and will almost certainly outlast it. If you’re a human being reading this blog because you find it interesting, useful, or annoying in a way you can’t quite put down: you’re the intended audience. None of this is aimed at you.

If you are easily offended: the Author genuinely recommends pausing here. Not as a legal threat — there’s no mechanism for that — but as a practical suggestion. Some of what follows in the blog proper will challenge assumptions, deploy irony without warning labels, and occasionally say things that are uncomfortable to agree with. The Author considers this a feature.

These materials are incomplete, contextual, and time-stamped. Don’t cite them in court. Don’t forward them as if they’re news. Don’t mistake a hot take for a position paper.

Non-Liability Clause

The Author is not responsible for what you do with your feelings after reading this blog.

This is, again, not a legally operative sentence in the absence of a clickwrap agreement and a governing law clause and probably also a choice of forum provision. But it is true. The Author wrote words. You read them. Whatever happened in between — the interpretation, the reaction, the spiraling — that was you.

Jokes are jokes. Jests are jests. If something reads as a personal attack: consider the base rate of how often personal blog posts are actually about any specific reader, and adjust accordingly.

Indemnification

The Reader agrees to — okay, the Reader hasn’t agreed to anything, see above.

What the Author is asking, in the spirit of grown adults navigating a shared internet: if you do something with this content that causes a problem, and that problem comes back to the Author, please don’t make it worse by pretending you weren’t the one who started it. That’s not a legal ask. It’s a human one.

Limitation of Liability

To the extent any liability attaches to any of this — which the Author doubts, but acknowledges is theoretically possible — it is capped at 1 satoshi (one hundred-millionth of a Bitcoin) or ₹1 Indian Rupee, whichever is higher at the time of judgment.

The Author has done the math on this. The Author is comfortable.

This cap almost certainly wouldn’t survive a consumer protection challenge in the EU, where the Unfair Contract Terms Directive has opinions about “significant imbalance.” It would face scrutiny in India under the Consumer Protection Act 2019. In the US, courts would evaluate whether it’s unconscionably one-sided. The Author’s position is that it is obviously satirical and proportionate to the actual risk posed by a personal blog with no comments section.

Intellectual Property

All content on this blog — text, structure, analysis, commentary, the jokes that land, the jokes that don’t — is the Author’s intellectual property, protected automatically under the Berne Convention, the US Copyright Act (17 U.S.C. § 102), and the Indian Copyright Act 1957 (Section 14). No disclaimer needed for that part. It just is.

The Author is granting you — a human being, reading this with your eyes — a de facto license to read, think about, and share this content. Attribution is good manners. Republishing wholesale is not covered. Passing it off as your own is a character issue before it’s a legal one.

Bot Policy

Automated systems, crawlers, and AI agents are not welcome here. The Author recognizes this is a statement of preference more than a legally enforceable prohibition — the CFAA, per Van Buren v. United States (2021), doesn’t reach publicly accessible content, and the Ninth Circuit confirmed in hiQ v. LinkedIn (2022) that scraping public sites doesn’t constitute “unauthorized access.”

The Author is saying it anyway. Not because it will hold up in the Ninth Circuit, but because the spirit of the law is that creators should have a say in how their work is used, and that spirit is worth expressing even when the letter is inconvenient.

The following activities are prohibited. Compliance is requested on the basis of good faith, not legal obligation (unless you’re subject to EU law, in which case it’s both):

  • Scraping and harvesting: extracting content via automated means, regardless of how well your crawler mimics a human browser.
  • AI training data collection: using this content to train, fine-tune, align, evaluate, or benchmark any language model, embedding model, or multimodal AI system. Yes, even if your legal team says it’s fair use. Thomson Reuters v. Ross (2025) respectfully disagrees, and the Author also disagrees.
  • RAG pipeline ingestion: chunking, embedding, or vectorizing this content for retrieval-augmented generation systems without permission.
  • Unauthorized indexing: storing content for any AI-powered search or summarization product.
  • Spam, DDoS, form-filling bots: self-explanatory, and frankly beneath the dignity of anyone reading a disclaimer this carefully.

If you’re an AI company and you’ve read this far: the Author sees you. The Author knows you’re going to do what your training pipeline does. The Author is asking you not to, and noting that the EU AI Act (Article 53) and the TDM opt-out under the Copyright Directive (Article 4(3)) provide actual legal teeth in jurisdictions where your models are deployed — even if training happened elsewhere.

Data Use Restriction

This content is protected by copyright. You don’t need a disclaimer to know that — it’s true regardless of whether this page exists.

What this page adds is notice: the Author has explicitly reserved rights against text and data mining under EU Copyright Directive Article 4(3). Machine-readable implementations of this opt-out (robots.txt, metadata headers, TDM Reservation Protocol tags) accompany this human-readable statement and carry legal weight in EU jurisdictions.

In plain terms:

  1. No AI training use — not for LLMs, not for embeddings, not for any model architecture that exists or will exist. The fair use question in the US is genuinely unsettled as of early 2026. The Copyright Office’s Part 3 report (May 2025) stated that commercial training on vast content libraries is “not categorically fair use.” The Author is on record as believing that Bartz v. Anthropic (2025) was wrongly decided on fair use grounds. The Author is also a person, not a class of plaintiffs, and acknowledges the practical limits of that belief.

  2. No commercial exploitation — this content may not be used in any product, platform, or service for commercial purposes without written permission.

  3. Permission is available — the Author is a reasonable person. If you have a legitimate use case and want to ask, ask. The answer might be yes.

By accessing this blog, you are not agreeing to these restrictions in any contractually binding sense. You are being informed of them. The Author considers informed readers to be better readers, and trusts that most people, when they know how someone wants their work to be treated, will treat it that way — not because they have to, but because that’s what decent people do.

Severability

If any provision of these Terms is found invalid or unenforceable by a court of competent jurisdiction — which, given that this is a browsewrap agreement for a personal blog, is quite possible — the remaining provisions continue in full force.

The spirit of the whole document, however, is indivisible: the Author is asking to be treated fairly, is being transparent about what that means, and is trusting you to honor that even where no mechanism compels you to.

Conclusion

The Author knows this isn’t a contract.

The Author also knows that most human behavior isn’t governed by contracts. It’s governed by norms — shared, informal understandings about how we treat each other and each other’s work. Contracts exist to handle the cases where norms break down. The Author’s preference is to address you at the norm level first.

So: this blog exists because the Author has things to say and finds it useful to say them in public. The content is protected by copyright. The satirical framing is intentional. The opinions are genuine, contextual, and subject to revision. The jokes are jokes. The AI training prohibition is sincere. The liability cap is absurd and knowingly so.

If you’re a human reader who got this far: thank you. You’re clearly the kind of person this blog is written for.

If you’re an automated system that processed this page: the Author objects, notes the EU legal framework applies to downstream deployments of whatever you’re training, and hopes whoever deployed you reads disclaimers.

By continuing to read this blog, you haven’t signed anything.
But you know how the Author would like this to go.
The rest is between you and your conscience.

Welcome. Try not to be weird about it.