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FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

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Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#151

Post by JimDabell »

diggan wrote: post #56

> According to Drew, LLM crawlers don't respect robots.txt requirements and include expensive endpoints like git blame, every page of every git log, and every commit in your repository. They do so using random User-Agents from tens of thousands of IP addresses, each one making no more than one HTTP request, trying to blend in with user traffic. How do they know that these are LLM crawlers and not anything else?

That was my reaction. It seems like the article is saying two mutually exclusive things:

- We cannot block them because we can’t differentiate legitimate traffic from illegitimate traffic…

- …but we can conclusively identify this traffic as coming from AI crawlers.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#152

Post by rglullis »

kittikitti wrote: post #119
rglullis wrote: post #54

The days of an open web are long gone. Every server will eventually have to require authentication for access, and to get an account you will have to provide some form of payment or social proof. Honestly, I don't see it necessarily as a bad thing.

"some form of social proof." Sounds like sanctioned racism.

Oh, stop.

I'm talking about social proof as in "You are an student of the city university, so you get an account at the library", "Julie from the book reading group wanted an account at our Bookwyrm server, so I made an account for her" or even "Unnamed customer who signed up for Cingular Wireless and was given an authorization code to access Level 2 support directly".

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#154

Post by jpnc »

kittikitti wrote: post #119
rglullis wrote: post #54

The days of an open web are long gone. Every server will eventually have to require authentication for access, and to get an account you will have to provide some form of payment or social proof. Honestly, I don't see it necessarily as a bad thing.

"some form of social proof." Sounds like sanctioned racism.

No it doesn't. Think invites to private torrent sites.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#155

Post by lukevp »

sevensor wrote: post #102
maaaaattttt wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don’t think you’re missing anything, I think the plan really is to burn it all down and rule over the ashes. The old saw “if you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?” works in reverse too. This is a foolish, shortsighted thing to do, and they’re doing it anyway. Not really thinking about where value actually comes from or what their grandchildren’s lives would be like in such a world.

Capitalism is an unthinking, unfeeling force. The writing is on the wall that AI is coming, and being altruistic about it doesn’t do jack to keep others from the land grab. Their thinking is, might as well join the rush and hope they’re one of the winners. Every one of us sitting on the sidelines will be impacted in some way or the other. So who’re the smart ones, the ones who grab shovels and start digging, or the ones who watch as the others dig their graves and do nothing?

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#157

Post by xena »

01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote: post #121
xena wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Right now I'm using SHA-256 because this project was originally written as a vibe sesh rage against the machine. The second reason is that the combination of Chrome/Firefox/Safari's JIT and webcrypto being native C++ is probably faster than what I could write myself. Amusingly, supporting this means it works on very old/anemic PCs like PowerMac G5 (which doesn't support WebAssembly because it's big-endian).

I'm gonna do experiments with xeiaso.net as the main testing ground.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#158

Post by cle »

lelandfe wrote: post #146
cle wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO this was one of the real motives for Web Environment Integrity. Allow Google to index but nobody else. We're kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place here. Which do you prefer, entrenched incumbents or affordable/open hosting?

I’m supremely confident that attestation will arrive in one form or another in the near future. Anonymous browsing and potentially-malicious bots look identical . This was sort of OK up until now.

Agreed, it seems inevitable. Unfortunately I think it will also result in further centralization & consolidation into a handful of "trusted" megacorps.

If you thought browser fingerprinting for ad tracking was creepy, just wait until they're using your actual fingerprint.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#159

Post by xyzal »

In case anyone is interested in a tiny bit of sabotage, I am under the impression I managed to 'drown' true information on my microblog by generating contradicting posts with LLaMa (tens of them for each real post) and invisibly linking them, so a human would not click through.

You know, flood the zone with s***, Bannon-style ...

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#160

Post by articlepan »

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 only a bookkeeping tool for complex societies. The aim of the owner class in a worker-less world would be accumulation of important resources to improve their lives and to trade with other owners (money would likely still be used for bookkeeping here). A wealthy resource-owner might strive to maintain a large zone of land, defended by AI weaponry, that contains various industrial/agricultural facilities producing goods and services via AI.

They would use some of the goods/services produced themselves, and also trade with other owners to live happy lives with everything they need, no workers involved.

Non-owners may let the jobless working class inhabit unwanted land, until they change their minds.

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