211–220 of 631 posts
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.
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…
Can we not just have a whitelist for allowed crawlers and ban the rest by default? Then places like DuckDuckGo and Google can provide a list of IP addresses that their crawlers will come from. Then simply just don't include major LLM providers like OpenAI
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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
All you need is a central clearing house service that can handle billions of 0.000001 transactions per day.
Incidentaly, I doubt the bitcoin chain could handle that...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 me…
I agree that the lack of monetization was important to the development and that it would have been chaos as proposed, but will the current setup be sustainable forever in the world of AI?
We have projects like Ethereum that are specifically intended to merge payments and computing, and I wouldn't be surprised if at some point in the future, some kind of small access fee negotiated in the background without direct user involvement become a component of access. I wouldn't expect people to pay ISPs but rather some kind of token exchange to occur that would benefit both the network operators and the web hosts by verifying classes of users. Non-fungible token exchanges could be used as a kind of CATPCHA replacement by cryptographically verifying users anonymously with a third-party token holder as the intermediary.
For example, let's say Mullvad or some other VPN company purchased a small amount of verification tokens for its subscribers who pay them anonymously for an account. On the other side, let's say a government requires people to register through their ISP, and the ISP purchases the same tokens on behalf of the user, and then exchanges the tokens on behalf of the user. In either case, the person can stand behind a third party who both sends them the data they requested and exchanges the verification tokens, which the site operator could then exchange for reimbursement of their services to their hosting provider.
This is just a high-level idea of how we might get around the challenges of a web dominated by bots and AI, but I'm sure the reality of it will be more interesting.
If you are hosting a Forgejo instance, I strongly recommend setting DISABLE_DOWNLOAD_SOURCE_ARCHIVES to true. The crawlers will still peg your CPU but at least your disk won't be filled with zip files.
To be clear, this is not an attack in the deliberate sense, and has nothing to do with AI except in that AI companies want to crawl the internet. This is more "FOSS sites damaged by extreme incompetence and unaccountability." The crawlers could just as well be search engine startups.
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.
To be clear, this is not an attack in the deliberate sense, and has nothing to do with AI except in that AI companies want to crawl the internet. This is more "FOSS sites damaged by extreme incompetence and unaccountability." The crawlers could just as well be search engine startups.
Yes, any crawler or some traffic peak can do this if your infrastructure is not well engineered
You could also get CloudFlare, or some other CDN, but depending on your size that might not be within your budget. I don't get why the rest of the internet should subsidize these AI companies. They're not profitable and live of venture capital and increase the operation costs of everyone else.
Nothing should be $$ free unless you already paid with your tax. Same principle -> As long as HN starts to charge every account, I'm happy to pay a small amount per month. This token amount of pay per account will also reduce the number of bots.