Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

thelibre.news

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 631 posts

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#311

Post by kevindamm »

ferguess_k wrote: post #181
gnz11 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OP’s linked blog post mentioned they got hit with a large spike in bandwidth charges. Sending them garbage information costs money.

Yeah you have a point, hmmm, wish there were a way to somehow generate those garbages with minimum bandwidth. Something like, I can send you a very compressed 256 bytes of data which expands to something like 1 mega bytes.

there is -- but instead of garbage expanding data, add in several delays within the response so that the data takes extraordinarily long

Depending on the number of simultaneous requesting connections, you may be able to do this without a significant change to your infrastructure. There are ways to do it that don't exhaust your number of (IP, port) available too, if that is an issue.

Then the hard part is deciding which connections to slow, but you can start with a proportional delay based on the number of bytes per source IP block or do it based on certain user agents. Might turn into a small arms race but it's a start.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#312

Post by pjc50 »

rectang wrote: post #252
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…

> Look at the primary economic claim offered by AI companies: to end the need for a substantial portion of all jobs on the planet. And this is why AI training is not "fair use". The AI companies seek to train models in order to compete with the authors of the content used to train the models. A possible eventual downfall of AI is that the risk of losing a copyright infringement lawsuit is not going away. If a court d…

There's already been an interesting ruling that a pure AI output is not, in itself, copyrightable.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#313

Post by sozforex »

billy99k wrote: post #264
sozforex wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At some point in the future, if you aren't AI, you won't be able to compete in the job market.

Sure, maybe in 50 years. At the moment, it's a productivity tool. Strangely, by the look of the down votes, the HN community doesn't quite understand this.

How confident are you that you will not be outcompeted by AI's in 3-7 years?

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#314

Post by Suppafly »

ericholscher wrote: post #3

Yep -- our story here: https://about.readthedocs.com/blog/2024/07/ai-crawlers-abuse... (quoted in the OP) -- everyone I know has a similar story who is running large internet infrastructure -- this post does a great job of rounding a bunch of them up in 1 place. I called it when I wrote it, they are just burning their goodwill to the ground. I will note that one of the main startups in the space worked with us direct…

>which I then emailed 3x and never got a reply.

Send a bill to their accounts payable team instead.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#317

Post by xena »

vhcr wrote: post #300
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.

Anubis is only going to work as long as it doesn't gets famous, if that happens crawlers will start using GPUs / ASICs for the proof of work and it's game over.

Author of Anubis here. If that happens, I win.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#318

Post by DamonHD »

napolux wrote: post #21

In the past month, I've had to block LLM bots attacking my poor little VPSs — not once, but twice. First, it was Facebook https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23490367 and now it's these other companies. What's worse? They completely ignore a simple HTTP 429 status.

Almost no one pays attention to 429 for general Web pages. Eg on an RSS file Googlebot speeds up repolling. Amazon RSS feed puller does pay some attention to 429.

503 is at least apparently understood by more crawlers/bots, but they still like to blame the victim: YouTube sends me a condescending (and inaccurate) email when it gets a 503 for ignoring cache headers and other basics it seems...

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#319

Post by BigParm »

outside1234 wrote: post #291
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…

The thing is that this will be their destruction as well. If workers don't have any money (because they don't have jobs), nobody can afford what the owners have to sell?

The human population will be decimated just as the work horse population was.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#320

Post by abound »

zoobab wrote: post #262
Ndymium wrote: post #215

I was also under attack recently [0]. The little Forgejo instance where I host my code (of several open source packages so it needs to be open) was run into the ground and the disk was filled with generated zip archives. I'm not the only one who has suffered the same fate. For me, the attacks subsided (for now) when I banned Alibaba Cloud's IP range. If you are hosting a Forgejo instance, I strongly recommend setting…

"disk was filled with generated zip archives" That's bad software design to generate ZIP files on the fly.

They could very well just be temp files, I know the Go standard library will write large multi-part file uploads to temp disk, for example.

It'd be better to totally stream it of course, but that's not always an option for one reason or another.

Post reply on HN