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FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

thelibre.news

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Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#391
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.

The AI anime girl has 6 fingers btw, combating AI bot with AI girls.

Edit: I will probably send a pull request to fix it.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#392
post #7

We're close to finding a clear use-case for Bitcoin with this one.

So the idea is each request would require the client to pay a toll of some amount of work towards mining a cryptocurrency? That's actually brilliant. I'd take this over ads any day. But I do see a few problems...

1. Using the web would become much more compute/energy intensive and old devices would quickly lose access to the modern web.

2. Some hosts would inevitably double-dip by implementing this and ads or by "overcharging" the amount of work. There would have to be some kind of limit on how much work can be required by hosts - or at least some way to monitor and hold hosts accountable for the amount of work they charge.

3. There would need to be a cheap and reliable way to prove the client's work was correct and accurate. Otherwise people will inevitably find a way to spoof the work in order to reduce their compute/energy cost.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#393
At some point we'll have to create our own walled gardens and throttle traffic to non-logged-in users heavily or outright forbid them.

Its sad that it has to come to this. But especially when those "scrapers" are in a foreign country, you can't even do anything legally.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Most normies just think everyone has a Facebook/Instagram account and can't even imagine a world where that is not the case. The people without a basic internet presence aren't likely to be customers anyway so it's not a huge loss. It's trivial to setup a basic account for any site that doesn't contain any personal data you want to keep hidden, if you aren't willing to do that, you're in a tiny minority.

I don't have a Facebook or Instagram account, but I definitely eat tacos and I was put off when I couldn't see a new taco place's opening hours without an instagram accoutn. I'm not sure why you think why people who don't have a Facebook account wouldn't eat at restaurants

You're in a tiny enough minority that it doesn't matter to them. It's like Amish complaining that they can't use a drive-thru window or something. Except it'd take you 30 seconds, one time, to solve your problem forever.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#395
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.

Maybe I'm missing something, but doesn't this mean the work has to be done by the client AND the server every time a challenge is issued? I think ideally you'd want work that was easy for the server and difficult for the server . And what is to stop being DDoS'd by clients that are challenged but neglect to perform the challenge? Regardless, I think something like this is the way forward if one doesn't want to throw…

The magic of proof of work is that it's something that's really hard to do but easy to validate. Anubis' proof of work works like this:

A sha256 hash is a bunch of bytes like this:

  394d1cc82924c2368d4e34fa450c6b30d5d02f8ae4bb6310e2296593008ff89f
We usually write it out in hex form, but that's literally what the bytes in ram look like. In a proof of work validation system, you take some base value (the "challenge") and a rapidly incrementing number (the "nonce"), so the thing you end up hashing is this:

  await sha256(`${challenge}${nonce}`);
The "difficulty" is how many leading zeroes the generated hash needs to have. When a client requests to pass the challenge, they include the nonce they used. The server then only has to do one sha256 operation: the one that confirms that the challenge (generated from request metadata) and the nonce (provided by the client) match the difficulty number of leading zeroes.

The other trick is that presenting the challenge page is super cheap. I wrote that page with templ (https://templ.guide) so it compiles to native Go. This makes it as optimized as Go is modulo things like variable replacement. If this becomes a problem I plan to prerender things as much as possible. Rendering the challenge page from binary code or ram is always always always going to be so much cheaper than your webapp ever will be.

I'm planning on adding things like changing out the hash in use, but right now sha256 is the best option because most CPUs in active deployment have instructions to accelerate sha256 hashing. This combined with webcrypto jumping to heavily optimized C++ and the JIT in JS being shockingly good means that this super naïve approach is probably the most efficient way to do things right now.

I'm shocked that this all works so well and I'm so glad to see it take off like it has.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#396

At some point we'll have to create our own walled gardens and throttle traffic to non-logged-in users heavily or outright forbid them. Its sad that it has to come to this. But especially when those "scrapers" are in a foreign country, you can't even do anything legally.

Alternatively, be OK with the fact that anything you put in public can be used for anything and by anyone, regardless of licensing and laws. A pirate's dream basically.

Personally, when I first got connected to the internet around ~1999, that was the approach I've followed since, I don't share things I am not OK with others to use for whatever they want.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#397
post #231

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.

There is nothing that says you can't charge money for FOSS software. FOSS is more about having the ability to inspect and freely change your software to your use-cases.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#398
post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> all Gnome developers should pay a small sum to be able to access it? There's access via (e.g.) the git protocol (git://....) and access via http. These attacks all happen via the latter, since the former is already access-controlled.

Offering read-only mirrors via git+http:// might be a solution then, at least to shed the load if anything. It does remind me a bit about companies complaining about being scraped and trying to prevent it, instead of offering a API so no one would have to scrape them.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#399
post #159

In case anyone is interested in a tiny bit of sabotage, I am under the impression I managed to 'drown' true information on my microblog by generating contradicting posts with LLaMa (tens of them for each real post) and invisibly linking them, so a human would not click through. You know, flood the zone with s***, Bannon-style ...

This is an approach I've seen used and I'm not sure what success it has had. But logically it seems sound: explicitly reference paths that no human would actually see - traffic hitting those paths are bots. They can't help themselves.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#400

So I'll just float an idea again that always gets rejected here. This is yet another problem that could be solved completely by... Eliminating anonymity by default on the internet. To be clear, you could still have anonymous spaces like Reddit where arbitrary user IDs are used and real identities are discarded. People could opt-in to those spaces. But for most people most of the time, things get better when you can v…

A few minutes of spitballing what implementations might look like create a number of problems that appear to make the idea a nonstarter. You should have a real proposal that explores the possibility space, say what the key requirements are, and assuage (or confirm) people's objections. That way more people might be willing to engage with the idea seriously.
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