FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies • Hacker News Board

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#121

Post by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF » Thu, Mar 20, 2025, 1:48 PM UTC

xena wrote: post #84

KolmogorovComp wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless I am missing something, the result of that generated work has no monetary value though.

I was inspired by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash , which was proof of work for email to disincentivize spam. To my horror, it worked sufficiently for my git server so I released it as open source. It's now its own project and protects big sites like GNOME's GitLab.

That's cool! What if instead of sha256 you used one of those memory-hard functions like script? Or is sha needed because it has a native impl in browsers?

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#122

Post by falcor84 » Thu, Mar 20, 2025, 1:49 PM UTC

wyager wrote: post #47

roenxi wrote: post #7

We're close to finding a clear use-case for Bitcoin with this one.

Interesting. Basically moving the proof-of-work off the user's phone and to a dedicated mine. Websites could just have a lightning wallet or something and auto-charge the user 1e-7 bitcoin to access the page.

I would absolutely love this as an alternative to the ad-based model

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#123

Post by mdp2021 » Thu, Mar 20, 2025, 1:49 PM UTC

phkahler wrote: post #74

So I'll just float an idea again that always gets rejected here. This is yet another problem that could be solved completely by... Eliminating anonymity by default on the internet. To be clear, you could still have anonymous spaces like Reddit where arbitrary user IDs are used and real identities are discarded. People could opt-in to those spaces. But for most people most of the time, things get better when you can v…

> Yes there are downsides to this idea

Such as living under logging. Which, you know (you know?), some people will radically refuse, with several crucial justifications. One of them is that privacy is a condition for Dignity. Another is Prudence. Another one is a warning millennia old, about who you should choose as confident. And more.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#124

Post by pjc50 » Thu, Mar 20, 2025, 1:50 PM UTC

piokoch wrote: post #63

Copyright the content and sue those who use it for AI training. I believe there is a lot of low hanging fruit for lawyers here. I would be surprised if they weren't preparing to hit Open AI and alikes. Very badly. Google get away with deep linking issues as publishers after all had some interest in being linked from the search engine, here publishers see zero value.

It is copyrighted. There's ongoing lawsuits about whether AI training counts as copyright infringement; e.g. Thomson Reuters v. ROSS Intelligence https://www.debevoise.com/insights/publications/2025/02/an-e...

However, they could just do an end run round this. In the UK they're planning to get the government to help them just grab everything for free: https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/copyright-and-ar...

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#125

Post by szczepano » Thu, Mar 20, 2025, 1:50 PM UTC

there is simple solution for gentlemens:

robots.txt should allow to exclude all AI crawlers and AI crawlers should be forced to add "AI" to their crawl user agent headers and also respect robots.txt saying they can't crawl this website

right now we need to do this:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#126

Post by greenavocado » Thu, Mar 20, 2025, 1:50 PM UTC

maaaaattttt wrote: post #89

UncleMeat wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. And it is much more far reaching than that. Look at the primary economic claim offered by AI companies: to end the need for a substantial portion of all jobs on the planet. The entire vision is to remake the entire world into one where the owners of these companies own everything and are completely unconstrained. All intellectual property belongs to them. All labor belongs to them. Why would they need good will…

I have this line of thought as well but then I wonder, if we are all out of jobs and out of substantial capital to spend, how do these owners make money ultimately? It's a genuine question and I'm probably missing something obvious. I can see a benevolant/post-scarcity spin to this but the non-benevolant one seems self defeating.

Money is a proxy for control. Eventually humans will become mostly redundant and slated for elimination except for the chosenites of the managerial classes and a small number of technicians. Either through biological agents, famines, carefully engineered (civil?) wars and conflicts designed to only exterminate the non-managerial classes, or engineered Calhounian behavioral sinks to tank fertility rates below replacement.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#127

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Mar 20, 2025, 1:50 PM UTC

nzeid wrote: post #57

We need a project in the spirit of Spamhaus to actively maintain a list of perpetrating IPs. If they're cycling through IPs and IP blocks I don't know how sustainable a CAPTCHA-like solution is.

[deleted]

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#128

Post by ziddoap » Thu, Mar 20, 2025, 1:50 PM UTC

cudgy wrote: post #116

ziddoap wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Copyright the content and sue those who use it for AI training. This costs money, time, and ongoing commitment. FOSS isn't typically known for being overflowing with cash.

Good thing law firms are overflowing with the desire to make large amounts of cash from contingency based cases.

Even if the lawyer services are provided pro-bono, it is still a large time commitment and added stress for the non-lawyer people involved for cases that aren't guaranteed to win.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#129

Post by blibble » Thu, Mar 20, 2025, 1:50 PM UTC

QuadrupleA wrote: post #46

Isn't this just poor, sloppy crawler implementation? You shouldn't need to fetch a repo more than once to add it to a training set.

they're probably using their own garbage AI to write the crawler

the result? a mixed up version of 5000 plagiarised "baby's first webcrawler" github projects

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#130

Post by krapp » Thu, Mar 20, 2025, 1:50 PM UTC

ewzimm wrote: post #23

anthk wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And Usenet, and IRC with a registered user prereq to join. Also, set AI tarpits as fake links with recursive calls. Make then mad with non-curated bullshit made from Markov chain generators until their cache begins to rot forever.

This problem will likely only get worse, so I'd be interested to see how people adapt. I was thinking about sending data through the mail like the old days. Maybe we go back to the original Tim Berners-Lee Xanadu setup charging users small amounts for access but working out ISP or VPN deals to give subscribers enough credit to browse without issues.

Xanadu was Ted Nelson, not Tim Berners-Lee.

Also I would argue that not having capitalist incentives baked directly into the network is what made the web work, for good or bad. Xanadu would never have gotten off the ground if people had to pay their ISP then pay for every website, or every packet, or every clicked link or whatever.

Reading the Xanadu page on Wikipedia tells me "Every document can contain a royalty mechanism at any desired degree of granularity to ensure payment on any portion accessed, including virtual copies ("transclusions") of all or part of the document."

That would be absolute chaos at scale.