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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

#231

Post by diggan »

ferguess_k wrote: post #219

I dare to say the inconceivable, you shouldn't have free plans even for the community. This will also push FOSS projects to seek some money to pay for their infrastructures which probably leads to better pay for their maintainers. 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…

Are you saying that Gnome shouldn't offer access to their VCS for free, and all Gnome developers should pay a small sum to be able to access it?

FOSS is generally built on the idea that anyone can use the code for anything, if you start to add a price for that, not only do you effectively gate your project from "poor people", but it also kind of erodes some of the core principles behind FOSS.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#232

Post by alyandon »

xinayder wrote: post #148
alyandon wrote: post #80

I had a similar issue with a Gitea instance that has some public repos. Gitea doesn't follow best practices for a web application and the action to create an archive of a repo is an HTTP GET request instead of an HTTP POST. AI crawlers were hitting that link over and over again causing the server to repeatedly run itself out of disk space.

I'm pretty sure Forgejo had the same issue and it was fixed on their side.

I'll check that out - thanks for the pointer.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#233

Post by xena »

hartator wrote: post #222
diggan wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

Maybe a progress bar?

There's no way to really make a progress bar make sense, it's a luck-based mechanic.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#234

Post by Aachen »

aspir wrote: post #34

Just a callout that Fastly provides free bot detection, CDN, and other security services for FOSS projects, and has been for 10+ years https://www.fastly.com/fast-forward (disclaimer, I work for Fastly and help with this program) Without going into too much detail, this tracks with the trends in inquiries we're getting from new programs and existing members. A few years ago, the requests were almost exclusively relat…

I've been running into bot detection on at least five different websites in the past two months (not even including captcha walls)

Not sure what to tell you but I surely feel quite human

Three of the pages told me to contact customer support and the other two were a hard and useless block wall. Only from Codeberg did I get a useful response, the other two customer supports were the typical "have you tried clearing your cookies" and restart the router advice — which is counterproductive because cookie tracking is often what lets one pass. Support is not prepared to deal with this, which means I can't shop at the stores that have blocking algorithms erroneously going off. I also don't think any normal person would ever contact support, I only do it to help them realise there's a problem and they're blocking legitimate people from using the internet normally

Beware if you employ this...

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#235

Post by mrweasel »

megadata wrote: post #225
mrweasel wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You don't need to kick anyone off the internet. Just ban them for accessing your resources.

No, but the suggestion from the parent comment was to have the holder of the offending IP ranges kicked off the internet.

Technically I'm all for kicking AWS off the internet for a day or to, for failing to police their customers, but it would just break a lot.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#236

Post by isoprophlex »

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.

Loving it, great work as always.

Also

> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43422781

Integrate a way to calculate micro-amounts of the shitcoin of your choice and we might have the another actually legitimately useful application of cryptocurrencies on our hands..!

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#237

Post by diggan »

xena wrote: post #233
hartator wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe a progress bar?

There's no way to really make a progress bar make sense, it's a luck-based mechanic.

Maybe one of those (slightly misleading) progressbars that have a dynamic speed that gets slower and slower the closer to the finish it gets? Just to indicate that it's working towards something

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#238

Post by Eridrus »

lostpencil wrote: post #190
Eridrus wrote: post #131

I know a lot of FOSS people are hostile to AI in general, and this is an immediate problem, but I feel like a better solution for everyone would be for there to be some sort of central repo of this information that AI companies can pull from without externalizing their costs like this.

Are you suggesting that everyone move their projects to a single code forge (GitHub)? Also, isn't this basically just extortion? "I know you're minding you're own business FOSS maintainer, but move your code to our recommended forge instead so we can stop DDoSing you?"

I'm mostly suggesting a mirror to some centralized location. GitHub is probably a good place to mirror to for code, but it could be elsewhere.

I was actually thinking of a more general thing than just code, eg similar to CommonCrawl, but maybe a code specific thing is what is needed.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#239

Post by macinjosh »

pjc50 wrote: post #124
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...

Whatever happened to terms of use and EULAs? These big companies use them against individuals all the times, why can't small sites state in their Terms of Use or put up a EULA that states no crawling/copying is allowed. Shouldn't that open up avenues to sue?

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#240

Post by blibble »

01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote: post #105
blibble wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

these companies have more compute than everyone else in the world put together a proof of work function will end up selecting FOR them!

It'll still keep your site from getting hammered

until some drone working for the parasites (google/facebook/openai) sees this post and writes 5 lines of code to defeat it

and now you have an experience where the bots have it easier time accessing your content than legitimate visitors

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