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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

#171

Post by renegat0x0 »

lelanthran wrote: post #42

The big takeaway here is that Google's (and advertisement in general) dominance over the web is going away. This is because the only way to stop the bots is with a captcha, and this also stops search indexers from indexing your site. This will result in search engines not indexing sites, and hence providing no value anymore. There's probably going to be a small lag as the current knowledge in the current LLMs dry up…

This cannot be further from the truth. Ad business is not going anywhere. It will grow even bigger.

OpenAI goes through initial cycle of enshittification. Google is too big right now. Once they establish dominance you will have to see 5 unskippable ads between prompts, even for paid plan.

I solved user problems for myself. Most of my web projects use client side processing. I moved to github pages. So clients can use my projects with no down time. Pages use SQLite as source of data. First browser downloads the SQLite model, then it uses it to display data on client side.

Example 'search' project: https://rumca-js.github.io/search

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#173

Post by [deleted] »

pjc50 wrote: post #150
ziddoap wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which organizations are willing to take on that burden (time, expenses, stress, etc.) for free, with no guarantee that they will win? There is not really any incentive or reward for 3rd-party organizations to step in and do this.

That's what GNU was originally for, and why they requested copyright assignment from contributors to their projects.

[deleted]

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#174

Post by noosphr »

brushfoot wrote: post #39

At this rate, it's more than FOSS infrastructure -- although that's a canary in the coalmine I especially sympathize with -- it's anonymous Internet access altogether. Because you can put your site behind an auth wall, but these new bots can solve the captchas and imitate real users like never before. Particularly if they're hitting you from residential IPs and with fake user agents like the ones in the article -- or…

You don't need an authorization wall to have your stuff behind, you can just as easily use an anonymous micropayment service for each request.

That we live in an internet where getting too many visitors is an existential crisis for websites should tell you that our internet is not one that can survive long.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#176

Post by bovermyer »

Yeah, I've had to mitigate this problem too, on a tiny forum serving a very niche audience. It was brought to its knees by a handful of LLM bots that completely ignored robots.txt.

Thankfully, these bots were easy enough to block at the firewall level, but that may not work forever.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#177

Post by diggan »

xena wrote: post #33

It's really surreal to see my project in the preview image like this. That's wild! If you want to try it: https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis . So far I've noticed that it seems to actually work. I just deployed it to xeiaso.net as a way to see how it fails in prod for my blog.

Nice work :)

One piece of feedback: Could you add some explanation (for humans) what we're supposed to do and what is happening when met by that page?

I know there is a loading animation widget thingy, but the first time I saw that page (some weeks ago at the Gnome issue tracker), it was proof-of-work'ing for like 20 seconds, and I wasn't sure what was going on, I initially thought I got blocked or that the captcha failed to load.

Of course, now I understand what it is, but I'm not sure it's 100% clear when you just see the "checking if you're a bot" page in isolation.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#178

Post by 3029aGfqgaF »

Open source licenses are no longer strong enough. The copyright laundering use case was not been anticipated when the licenses were written.

All licenses need a clause like the following:

  This software is for humans. AI training is prohibited and carries a default
  penalty of $1 trillion.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#179

Post by diggan »

bovermyer wrote: post #176

Yeah, I've had to mitigate this problem too, on a tiny forum serving a very niche audience. It was brought to its knees by a handful of LLM bots that completely ignored robots.txt. Thankfully, these bots were easy enough to block at the firewall level, but that may not work forever.

Were these bots also using random IPs and random User-Agents and if so, how do you know they are LLM agents?

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#180

Post by mrweasel »

immibis wrote: post #50
MartijnBraam wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't really work if crawlers are coming from the IP ranges of AWS and Azure etc...

Traditionally, holders of IP ranges that attack the internet at large get kicked off the internet by having those ranges blacklisted everywhere. This can also get them in serious trouble with the places they got their IP ranges (I assume AWS has them directly from ARIN, so maybe not) and their upstream bandwidth providers and so on, as well as making them less attractive hosts because they are blocked everywhere.

Kicking AWS of the internet would effectively break half of everything. So much stuff is relying on services running on AWS that it's not even funny.

We've seen random stuff break when AWS has had outages, not because we used AWS ourselves, but because suppliers do.

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