Aram ZS | Digital Garden

The Internet's Most Powerful Archiving Tool Is in Peril

2026-04-13T22:09:35Z

A number of other major journalism organizations have also recently moved to restrict the Wayback Machine from archiving their stories, including The New York Times. According to analysis by the artificial-intelligence-detection startup Originality AI, 23 major news sites are currently blocking ia_archiverbot, the web crawler commonly used by the Internet Archive for the Wayback project. The social platform Reddit is too. Other outlets are limiting the project in different ways

I think this is all pretty bad, and I actually argued against us blocking the Internet Archiver bot at my own workplace. I lost. I understand why.

Journalism is writing the first draft of history, it is incredibly important, and it is--in the digital age--more transient than ever. The Internet Archive is performing an immensely valuable service, for free, to media companies that often can't be bothered to run their own archives. Some news sites will have stories that no longer work even as little as a year later. That context of our recent past is badly needed, and the Internet Archive helps preserve it.

But that's an aftereffect of the other side of this problem: media companies are struggling and--at a very fundamental level--in a battle for survival with AI systems who will attempt to crawl them and repackage and resell their content with no recompense.

AI companies are playing a decades-old game that has penalized creative people on the internet, media companies, and journalists of all stripes: aggregation. They are attempting to aggregate the entire web and, unlike previous eras, they are barely linking back.

Whatever you think about our machine learning overlord corporations, there's no doubt that they are sucking immense value from journalists and giving almost none of it back. The only tool media companies really have in their arsenal is blocking. These systems are in desperate need of source material, especially up-to-date professionally written news. By blocking crawlers and demanding licensing fees, the media companies get a little leverage back. If they don't block the Internet Archive then the bots crawl journalists' work from that platform.

The Internet Archive is an open platform, the archives must be open licensed, copy left, to even exist. It can't really move on its position either and it doesn't want to end up in the position of being a cop for some parts of its sites and not others.

This isn't an easy conflict to resolve, and I don't have a great answer. There are some arguments to be made about some sort of conditional licensing maybe. Seems near impossible to enforce.

Other people believe in opening up media sites and hoping that links and AI Engine Optimization (AEO, the new younger sibling to SEO) will either lead to revenue or provide positive impact on their mission goals (especially true at non-profits). That's a nice idea, but I suspect it is naive in the long run.

Though I love and support the Internet Archive, it is in serious danger. I don't think the web can really work the same way anymore. Not so long as AI companies metastasize like a cancer, growing fat on the mutated content of the rest of the web while strangling the flow of users and resources. The Internet Archive is maybe in a position where it needs to consider an alternative approach to how things currently work.

Users of the internet also need to band together and archive things for themselves. If it is important, we can't rely on the Internet Archive capturing it anymore. We need to use in-browser tools to capture it ourselves. I did it with this article here (you can find the link at the bottom of the page), though WIRED might have preferred it if I didn't.

What advice to media companies desperately seeking leverage? I think some of them are doing the only thing they can do right now. I think the other thing they should be doing is taking better care of their archives as well. Consider opening up or delivering archives of older content to IA and anyone else who wants them. Old articles have much lower revenue value to media companies and are harder and less likely to be hit by AI crawlers, so there might be a compromise there.

We need to do something to save the first draft of history and right now few journalism outlets are doing a decent job of that. The IA has the capability, we just need to figure out a new way of working with them. Perhaps we should consider a return to archives with local libraries that need a human with a library card to show up and access those archives in-person and in the library only? I'm not sure.

This is a tough situation, it really sucks that the AI companies, who are worth billions based on sucking up the vast open web, are forcing the internet to close.

This week, advocacy organizations including the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Fight for the Future rallied journalists around the Wayback Machine’s cause. The coalition collected more than 100 signatures from working journalists who recognize the tool’s value and presented a letter of support to the Internet Archive. Signatories range from television mainstay Rachel Maddow to independent reporters like Spitfire News’ Kat Tenbarge and User Mag’s Taylor Lorenz. “In previous generations, journalists would turn to the physical archives of a local newspaper or of a local public library to access historical reporting and follow the threads of the present back into history,” the letter reads. “With many newspapers closed, and no clear path for local public libraries to preserve digital-only reporting, the work of safeguarding journalism’s record increasingly falls to the Internet Archive.”

This is an amplified story. Read this on aramzs.xyz or read the original article: The Internets Most Powerful Archiving Tool Is in Peril by Kate Knibbs

Newsmedia is the original everything app

2026-04-03T21:10:00Z

I think the true irony of the media business is that for years the tech industry has been desperately re-creating what almost every media company started throwing away in the aughts. Your hometown newspaper was the very first Everything App. It had cars, it had marketplace, it had sports stats, etc...

The model of American news organizations was always to be the home base for everything you did. Local events, business announcements, local news, national news, international wire service news. Ads made sense in that package because they were part of the service, they were also providing you with information about your community and things you wanted to know, just from a different angle.

When Craig's List launched, media companies got it into their head that they should only be one thing. Just be the news. From basically that point continually to the present new money-making businesses would emerge organically from being a news organization and usually get spun off because they weren't The News.

But you shouldn't be spinning off your cars section, your obits, your conversational podcasts, your sports stats, your distribution tools; because the business model of News is more than news. The journalism is in a concrete block. You build on top of it because it is a stable necessary product in the modern world.

The New York Times success isn't because becoming an app foundry is somehow a surprise move that is antithetical to being a news organization, it's because that was always in the DNA of being a media company. Let's face it, that is why every social network succeeded by first being a news distribution platform and building from there.

The news is the foundation for a company. But it is very rarely the edifice. The dotcom boom convinced a lot of news organizations that specialist companies would always out-compete them, but it hasn't turned out well for most of the specialist companies. The companies that did survive have been continuously trying to de-specialize ever since.

The revelation of the 2020s is that different people want different windows into the world and the money is in providing them a window and a readout of the world entire, not just the News part of it. The news industry was the original everything app and the smart move is aiming back towards that again.

This is an amplified story. Read this on aramzs.xyz or read the original article: link

The SEO parasites buying, exploiting and ultimately killing online newsbrands

2026-04-02T22:02:46Z

I can't say that this story is surprising, but it does show an intense scale that is startling. Even more disturbing that Clickout Media/Finixio are tactically clever enough to abuse the Google copyright claim system. Thankfully the abusive DCMA claim was reversed (no doubt due to pressure on Google), but it seems like a bad sign for the capabilities of smaller outlets to cover these sort of fraud issues.

Clickout Media trades as Finixio. In the year to 30 September 2024, the most recent data available, turnover was £40m, although the company declared a loss of £3m and thus paid no tax.

This is such an old-school SEO hack, it's hard to believe that it still works, but I guess a big part of why it does is the scale, and the AI generated articles constantly being pumped out. It helps that it sounds like it is powered by gambling money.

Multiple freelance writers and employees at gambling, tech and football sites have described how their sites were sold to Clickout Media and rapidly transformed into casino review sites.

This is an amplified story. Read this on aramzs.xyz or read the original article: The SEO parasites buying, exploiting and ultimately killing online newsbrands by Rob Waugh

My Dog's Eyes by Zammuto

2026-03-27T21:44:40Z

"My Dog's Eyes" by Zammuto is another song that I could very easily run on loop many times in a row (and have). The way the computerized voice runs across the tones and timing of the underlying beat and piano line is just entrancing. A little after two minutes in they use the phrase "A fast train rushing" and screw down the beat while the voice also slows. Somehow the result exactly evokes the feeling of watching a train slow down in front of you.

It's the sort of song that I didn't really like the first time I heard it but enjoyed more and more as I listened to it. More importantly, I kept thinking about it. The effect is both electronic and shamanistic and I enjoy how it feels to have these phrases repeated at me in a way and methodology that shouldn't be musical, yet somehow only becomes more musical the more you hear it, with the phrases eventually blending perfectly and becoming their own strange but beautiful instrument.

I think it is truly wild what music we can make with the tools that computers give us that still feel incredibly human, reflecting some deep unalienable thing within us that, like in this case, make "water being cut at the bow of a boat" repeated over and over with the right tone and music perfectly create the picture of that very thing in one's head.

It is insane to me to read about the shitty AI music people are making, there are all these wonderful tools on our computer that could make amazing music even without ever having to learn an instrument or even sing. Tools that can maintain every inch of our humanity focused through the music. But people would choose to leverage a weird soulless imitator?

I stumbled on AI music on Spotify for the first time (I think) yesterday and as I was listening to it, I was wondering "is this AI music?" and sure enough AI music, AI singer, AI all the way down. There is this entire layer of creativity and ... wonder that is lost when you tell a machine a few sentences and just take whatever slop it spits back. I'm sure there are some uses for AI in music that do make sense, but giving away your entire creative process to poke at a glob you have no real control over? That just isn't it.

I love this song because it is so simple and yet it leverages that simplicity to connect with our humanity, and so much of it comes from the use of these computerized sounds and voices.

"There are the children who have not yet lost their sense of wonder"

Indeed.

Another really great song along these lines from the same album and artist.

This is an amplified story. Read this on aramzs.xyz or read the original article: link

Iran attacks wipe out 17% of Qatar’s LNG capacity for up to five years, QatarEnergy CEO says

2026-03-23T21:42:03Z

Seems extremely troubling that the unnecessary war America has thrust itself into is creating the sort of impact on the energy and fuel landscape that will make everything that runs on gas be more expensive for nearly half a decade.

two of Qatar's 14 LNG trains and one of its two gas-to-liquids (GTL) facilities were damaged in the unprecedented strikes. The repairs will sideline 12.8 million tons per year of LNG for three to five years, he said in an interview.

This is an amplified story. Read this on aramzs.xyz or read the original article: Iran attacks wipe out 17% of Qatars LNG capacity for up to five years, QatarEnergy CEO says by Maha El Dahan, Andrew Mills and Yousef Saba

On the Farm, the Hidden Climate Cost of the Broken U.S. Health Care System

2026-03-18T22:18:43Z

Hey, check it out, I got to be a photographer for Jordan Gass-Pooré's latest article! Read about how America's terrible healthcare system even impacts our ability to grow food; and how Germany shows us a possible route to make farming and the planet healthier.

Even with health insurance, 43 million Americans live in rural areas with a shortage of primary care physicians, according to a recent study by the nonprofit Commonwealth Fund. And rural residents often have to travel long distances to get health care, often with limited public transportation options. During extreme weather events, fueled by the changing climate, rural health care systems can become overwhelmed.

[...]

Indeed, American farmers face pressure from every side. Climate change makes it harder to maintain a productive farm, health care cuts threaten farmers’ ability to work the land and cuts to the programs that could help with both mean their lives are more uncertain than ever

This is an amplified story. Read this on aramzs.xyz or read the original article: On the Farm, the Hidden Climate Cost of the Broken U.S. Health Care System - Inside Climate News by Jordan Gass-Pooré

Loose Change by Ellie Dixon

2026-03-16T01:33:36Z

I love Ellie Dixon's creativity with harmonies, it builds these amazing moving sequences, down the scale in this particular song. As someone with ADHD this song, which is about her diagnosis with ADHD, successfully feels like what it is to be attention skipping, moving from slow, to fast, and jumping from topic to topic. Especially fun because this song is on her renaissance-themed Tales of a Knight album, which is the album of her's Spotify originally recommended to me back in 2025.

There is this great sequence around each chorus where she runs from high to low pitched and then into a great drum line.

I love the way this song jumps around. Dixon's lyrics say it:

My thoughts just roll around like loose change up in my head My thoughts run, run

and a lesser artist might just speak the words, but what catches my attention is how closely the song's music feels exactly like that. Her thoughts run like loose change, and so does the music.

I haven't clicked as well with some of the other albums, but 2025's Tales of a Knight is a definitely a recommend from me. All the songs are great on there, but Renaissance and Guts--both tracks on the album--are absolute bangers, I've listened to them quite a few times and they're always fun to have on my playlist. This track and the full album has her skills on display, with all these wonderful little time changes and big shifts in tone and chord. It makes all her music on Tales of a Knight so much fun to listen to. I've liked a number of her other songs too, but I really need to make a focused effort to listen more.

This is an amplified story. Read this on aramzs.xyz or read the original article: link

We all start with a little hacking

2026-03-13T21:02:01Z

This is such a wonderful little essay about what it means to take on a computer, what inspires us is playing, hacking and mucking about with our tools. Never forget: no technology's intended purpose is more important than what you want to do with it.

That is not a bug in how he’s using the computer. That is the entire mechanism by which a kid becomes a developer. Or a designer. Or a filmmaker. Or whatever it is that comes after spending thousands of hours alone in a room with a machine that was never quite right for what you were asking of it.

This is an amplified story. Read this on aramzs.xyz or read the original article: This is not the computer for you by Sam Henri Gold

SEPARATION LOST - Alexandra Petri tries to be the government and discovers that we fly together or we crash.

2026-02-25T19:48:35Z

Who’s watching all of the airplanes? I play the simple games for aspiring air-traffic controllers that NASA (not the FAA, curiously) hosts on its website. These games offer all the fun of basic trigonometry, plus an ominous announcement, if you get the math wrong, reading, “SEPARATION LOST”—an aviation reference for occasioning a mid-air collision.

Alexandra Petri takes up a truly excellent idea for an article. The current administration is constantly telling people to do their own research, stare cows in the eye, trust your gut, and then uses that as an excuse to cut an endless amount of services. What do those services do? Petri tries to find out for at least some of them.

There is an impressive amount of work that she must do to cover even the small subsection of the government she tries to understand (not even counting dragging a geiger counter around everywhere).

Petri's writing is, as always, humorous and effective. You should read the whole article. While it is long, that length is effective at getting to the point: the government is needed, these people are doing things for us that we need to stay safe, healthy, sane and live in a country where you can get up go outside and take a walk.

You cannot measure a cow's healthiness for yourself, or predict the weather without data, or have safe and well-taken-care-of public parks--or any number of other vital things--without people, especially not without experts.

She explicitly draws the connection to the Antietam battlefield and the civil war. These are not requests that flow from some sort of philosophical do-it-yourself legitimate ideas of governance. These are people tearing down our government, destroying it. They are destroying democracy and functioning government. They are destroying the vast complicated processes that keep all of us flying smoothly and without which we are increasingly chancing crash. The illusion of our separate self-sustained lives is manufactured and maintained by these processes of the federal government running carefully in the background.

⁠People have tried to walk away from the federal government before. To break it up. And on this hill that I am mowing, some men died saying, “No. You don’t get to do that. You’re in this with us.”

When I think of civil servants in this current uncivil moment—the air-traffic controllers who worked during the shutdown; the NOAA weather chasers flying into a hurricane to measure it, paycheck or no paycheck; the Park Service employees scrambling to keep bathrooms clean despite the cuts to their ranks—I will now think of Antietam.

This is an amplified story. Read this on aramzs.xyz or read the original article: I Tried to Be the Government. It Did Not Go Well. by Alexandra Petri

Say Goodbye to the Undersea Cable That Made the Global Internet Possible

2026-02-24T20:03:22Z

It often feels like the world of tech is nothing but bad actors and bad news these days, it is always refreshing to read about something that is a fundamentally amazing example of technology and human ingenuity. This article about the process and people that sit behind the undersea cables that connect our world (and how they are productively recovered) is an example of that type of story. You should check it out!

I consider it my business to help people understand that the networks we rely on are made of physical things, created and maintained by people, so that we can stop saying infrastructure is invisible as if the people are invisible too.

This is an amplified story. Read this on aramzs.xyz or read the original article: Say Goodbye to the Undersea Cable That Made the Global Internet Possible by Jane Ruffino

C2PA is just the beginning. We can't yet see the end.

2026-02-23T23:36:11Z

This great piece doesn't even get into the biggest problem with C2PA, which is more images and videos we see will start with legit photos or videos with all the right provenance markers and pass through AI software at some point for both light touch and total transforms

C2PA theoretically provides signal on what the changes are, but in reality the message is pretty similar if it is a request to an AI to correct lighting in a shot or a more substantial misleading transform. Especially considering tools to create total fraud images are now built in to professional tools. Adobe, as one example, ships AI-transformation tools in its professional software that can create massively different images or simple touch-ups with basically the same action.

As is correctly identified in this article and others, C2PA is a system concerned with trustworthiness and provenance, but it started development a long time ago, far before any of these problems were even on the horizon. It really is struggling with the informational-landscape concerns that AI brings to the table.

It is also entirely unable to attack another major issue, which is that sometimes the photo metadata is dangerous to the photographer, especially in the most sensitive situations. The people leaking data, pushing out front-line reports from protests and wars, some times you don't want metadata on.

The real problem can only be solved by AI systems stamping their images with provenance, but the nature of how these systems are made to be reused by a million customers who are apps reselling their capabilities means that this is almost impossible to enforce.

This also doesn't address one of the core problems: C2PA arose in a time where we were having a hard time determining fraud because bad actors were sharing real images without clear information about where they came from. The solution at the time was trustworthy messaging from known gatekeepers for news. But fewer people trust mainstream journalists now than ever. All the fancy digital metadata in the world cannot defeat this problem where the sources are not trusted by the audience, especially at times when they must enact confidentiality, which are often the moments it is most important to get this right.

Even if more synthetic content is embedded with C2PA information, everyday people are still largely expected to manually hunt for it themselves across the images and videos they see online, despite many not even being aware that C2PA exists. If anything, it seems like AI providers are using C2PA to distance themselves from the problem, while continuing work on their own slop factories.

It's hard to see how even the best intentions here could give us something better than real, significant, guardrails at the level of the image or video generator. The AI systems really need to do more work at a deeper level, but it doesn't seem like they are willing.

In fact, anything that ensures synthetic materials won’t be mistaken for something human-made goes against the business interests of every company that’s throwing money into AI, especially if it paints the technology in a bad light. How much responsibility can you really take with such a conflict of interest?

This is an amplified story. Read this on aramzs.xyz or read the original article: Does Big Tech actually care about fighting AI slop? by Jess Weatherbed

The sound produced by data centers is making people sick

2026-02-18T16:32:18Z

Benn Jordan has been on an amazing run doing investigative journalism about tech lately. This piece which explores the huge impact of sound pollution from the growing number of data centers in America is horrifying.

We have an unchecked, unconsidered, expansion of data centers in America and to the end of some pretty unnecessary stuff. The human impact of these projects continues to get worse, and for what?

This is an amplified story. Read this on aramzs.xyz or read the original article: Datacenters Behaving Like Acoustic Weapons - YouTube by Benn Jordan

Everything is Slop, Nothing is Slop. Bullshit jobs in the end of capitalism.

2026-02-12T02:10:00Z

I understand why people are exhausted by AI hype, and why those of us squarely in the corner of "human dignity uber alles" see AI doomerism as self-serving hype, but I really think people on the left broadly need to start thinking seriously about the possibiltiy of the hype being...true.

What I mean by "hype being true" is that the models actually are able to replace millions of workers - which is the core economic promise that tech oligarchs are making.

via Chris Hayes

There's an ongoing discussion in the art world about how it is vulnerable to slop because so much "art" created under capitalist incentives is already slop. I think there's some of that when it comes to the question of AI job replacement too. Bullshit Jobs may be replaceable by AI. Not b/c AI is good, but because we have produced bad jobs.

In Bullshit Jobs, Graeber interviews many people who understand their job exists mainly to justify managers' power structure and t/f paperwork is basically invented for them to pointlessly do, when they get work at all. These jobs are likely very replaceable by AI because they aren't real jobs.

You can easily imagine a world where Bullshit Jobs are replaced by a bullshit AI budget as a signal of managerial power. But it doesn't address the reason those jobs actually exist & get filled: we live in a world where we must work to live and actual managerial usefulness is not well aligned w/power

In reality, replacing bullshit jobs with bullshit AI does not solve for anything and eventually the manager with a bullshit AI budget will be rendered useless to the manager above them, who realizes they can get more budget and power by firing a useless bullshit middle-manager.

None of this solves the underlying problem which is that we live in a system where we must be employed to survive; where slop jobs exist pre-AI because the system must render itself relevant; where we force people into doing shit work for no reason.

AI questions about copyright, art, slop, jobs, etc... but they're all the same question: capitalism is too broken to provide a stable platform for humanity. What is the alternative?

These are not separate issues. They are one issue: Why does the world work this way? Why is everything slop?

Capitalism is the problem. AI merely makes that problem more visible than it was before because now, instead of millions of areas and people where the market has fundamentally failed, there are now about a dozen products.

Capitalism will not provide the solution.

AI Slop == Alienation from labor == Bullshit Jobs == Copyright Impossible to Enforce == Bombing people for Oil == replacing vaccines with BS supplements == so on & so on.

They are all one problem. Capitalism has failed. We are living in it unraveling. Our lives sit in the gasp of its collapsed lung.

Nothing is slop, nothing is enshittified. Those are new words for old problems. It was always like this. It has been like this for 20 years, at least. We will live through it. The next generation may not. It is a moral imperative to fix it.

You can't slap a patch on it. It is too far gone. What's next?

I'm so tired of getting a new name for the same phenomenon every 3 to 5 years. The phenomenon is 'too big to fail', slop, bullshit, enshittification, regulatory arbitrage, gig economics, surveillance capitalism, etc... it's our economic system, its how we've decided to run the world. It's capitalism.

Join the DSA, it won't solve everything, but that's the thing, the problem is massive and we need every person working on it that we can. In every way we can approach it. Gotta start somewhere and at least this is a preexisting organization that recognizes the fundamental problem.

This is an amplified story. Read this on aramzs.xyz or read the original article: link

Most Americans don’t pay for news and don’t think they need to

2026-02-11T23:16:05Z

I think this is really interesting to see in more detail, but not a surprise. The trend of Americans paying has been downward facing for a long time. It's not to say subscriptions isn't an important part of the revenue mix, but that it just can't be the only part. While we had a peak--that was strongly ideologically focused in 2016--it wasn't sustainable and it's hard to imagine it will come back.

Revenue has to come from more places than asking your fellow Americans to pay for it. Advertising is clearly a big piece of the puzzle, but there's a major gap in distribution. The model media has seen success in has been the news stand, pay for the front page or cover that catches your eye. The economics of that--because of the difficulties payment processors present--with micropayments doesn't seem to have played out well across the industry. But the space is contested by all sorts of apps and sites.

Events and local engagement seem to have seen some major success as hybrid ways to both distribute the news message and engage users.

But there are new places to distribute to and new ways: 404's paid RSS feeds; ATProto's Standard.Site schema and Feeds; The Verge's social-style feeds; etc...

People do seem willing to pay for news to meet them where they are, but what form that takes may be different for different news companies.

In 2026 I think the thing to take forward is that there is no one model. Every successful media company is fundamentally different. Sometimes they occupy a niche no one else could compete for. Sometimes there's room for maybe a few more (perhaps geo-limited). In any case, I'm not sure that media companies have as much to teach each other as they used to, or at least not as broadly. The New York Times, The Atlantic, Semafor, Bloomberg, The Philadelphia Inquirer, they're all "media companies" but while they might share some techniques or technical frameworks, they aren't actually in the same businesses anymore (along with many others). Be careful who you try to imitate out there.

The audience clearly doesn't understand what the media business is, or what shape it is in, or why they should pay for news. Don't make their mistakes. Try to teach them otherwise.

For a new report released Wednesday, the Pew Research Center surveyed 3,560 U.S. adults in December 2025 about their relationship to the news and how they perceive its value in everyday life. The study found “no consensus about the importance of following the news,” but there was one thing Americans seemed to agree on: they don’t pay for news.

This is an amplified story. Read this on aramzs.xyz or read the original article: Most Americans dont pay for news and dont think they need to by Hanaa Tameez

ICE Pretends It’s a Military Force. Its Tactics Would Get Real Soldiers Killed

2026-02-10T19:59:43Z

This article is comprehensive in its analysis and quite depressing in what it determines about the meaning behind (and history behind) ICE's tactics.

Personally, ICE’s operations seem like a fever dream of the worst parts of the war on terror coming back home to roost. From ineffective facial recognition scans (BATS and HIIDES, anyone?) to “geardos” who spent more time at Ranger Joe's (a military outfitter) than the range to late-night raids to catch a local terrorist leader who, half the time, was just a random guy trying to get through the day. We brought the mechanisms of a surveillance state to war with us, and they snuck into our duffel bags and followed us home. We emphasized accomplishing the mission no matter what and bred a generation of yes-men. We drove in heavily armed convoys down neighborhood streets, and now those trucks roll through our streets.

My generation spent its youth at war. We volunteered to do this, I acknowledge, but with the somehow implied belief that we could do some good. And that what we did mattered and that we stood for something. Something significant and unique. But as we watch the least effective and most morally objectionable of our tactics come home and be used amongst and against us, we are left with a profound feeling of betrayal. This, too, is a result of misaligned tactics.

This is an amplified story. Read this on aramzs.xyz or read the original article: ICE Pretends Its a Military Force. Its Tactics Would Get Real Soldiers Killed by John Publius