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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

#341
post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are the crawlers identifying themselves? If it's user agent strings then they can be faked. If it's cryptographically secured then you create a situation where newcomers can't get into the market.

Google publishes the ip addresses that google bot uses. If someone claims to be google bot but is not from one of those addresses, it’s a fake.

And in that case both systems end up with a situation new entrants can't enter.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#343
post #300
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.

The entire reason bots are so agressive is because they are cheap to run.

If a GPU was required per scrape then >90% simply couldn't afford it at scale.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is called micropayments and doesn't need to have anything to do with blockchain. 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...

There are off-chain solutions to handle most of the payment, and only put a summary on-chain. I think there are already micropayments in Brave or something.

At this point, why even use bitcoin, or crypto at all. Just use a crypto that is better suited to micropayments.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#345
post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a clever (and hilarious) strategy that will probably sell at least a few licenses. As an anime hater I'd be motivated by this.

Just change the pictures in cmd/anubis/static/img/ to whatever you prefer, I think.

Or, alternatively, you know, pay the author for the work they've done

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#346

Can IPFS or torrent and large local databases decentralised by people be a solution to this? I personally have the resources to share and host TBs of data but didn't find a good use to it.

For that to work, a website has to push a mirror into that alternate system, and the scraper has to know the associated mirror exists.

That's two big "ifs" for something I'm not aware of a standardized way of announcing. And the entire thing crumbles as soon as someone who wants every drop of data possible says "crawl their sites anyway to make sure they didn't forget to publish anything into the 2nd system."

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#347

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…

The stated problem was about indexing, accessing content and advertising in that context.

> 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

That is not really solution. Since typical indexing still works for masses, your approach is currently unique. But in the end, bots will be capable of reading on web page context if human is capable on reading them. And we get back to the original problem where we try to detect bots from humans. It's the only way.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#348
post #217
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.

I really like this. I don't mind Internet acting like the Wild Wild West but I do mind there's no accountability. This is a nice way to pass the economic burden to the crawlers for sites who still want to stay freely available. You want the data, spend money on your side to get it. Even though the downside is your site could be delisted from search engines, there's no reason why you cannot register your service in a…

"why you cannot register your service in a global or p2p indexer"

Network effects anyone? So yes, we should work on a different way of indexing the web again, than via google, but easier said than done I think ..

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#349
> there's one user reporting one minute delay, and another - from his phone

> out of those only 3% passed Anubi's proof of work, hinting at 97% of the traffic being bots

This doesn't follow. If I open a link from my phone and it shows a spinner and gets hot, I'm closing it long before it gets to one minute and maybe looking for a way to contact the site's maintainer to tell them how annoying it was.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#350
I do wonder if it's a customer on Alibaba Cloud that's doing all this or if it's entirely Alibaba's own doing that's been wrecking havoc on everyone's sites (mine included)

I don't really like blocking an entire ASN, especially since I don't mind (responsible) crawling to begin with, but I was left with no choice

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