HN hug of death
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Why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel?
211–220 of 968 posts
Re: Why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel?
#212Every time I see one of these I think it's a malicious redirect to some pervert-dwelling imageboard. On that note, is kernel.org really using this for free and not the paid version without the anime? Linux Foundation really that desperate for cash after they gas up all the BMW's?
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> Anubis is a clone of Kiwiflare, not an original work, so you're actually sort of half-right:
Interesting. That itself appears to be a clone of haproxy-protection. I know there has also been an nginx module that does the same for some time. Either way, proof-of-work is by this point not novel.
Everyone seems to have overlooked the more substantive point of my comment which is that it appears kernel.org cheaped out and is using the free version of Anubis, instead of paying up to support the developer for his work. You know they have the money to do it.
In 2024 the Linux Foundation reported $299.7M in expenses, with $22.7M of that going toward project infrastructure and $15.2M on "event services" (I guess making sure the cotton candy machines and sno-cone makers were working at conferences).
My point is, cough up a few bucks for a license you chiselers.
Re: Why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel?
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The difference between that and the LLM training data scraping Is the traffic that people are complaining about really training traffic? My SWAG would be that there are maybe on the order of dozens of foundation models trained in a year. If you assume the training runs are maximally inefficient, cache nothing, and crawl every Web site 10 times for each model trained, then that means maybe a couple of hundred full-c…
The traffic I'm seeing on a wiki I host looks like plain old scraping. When it hits it's a steady load of lots of traffic going all over, from lots of IPs. And they really like diffs between old page revisions for some reason.
That sounds like a really dumb scraper indeed. I don't think you'd want to feed very many diffs into a training run or most inference runs.
But if there's a (discoverable) page comparing every revision of a page to every other revision, and a page has N revisions, there are going to be (N^2-N)/2 delta pages, so could it just be the majority of the distinct pages your Wiki has are deltas?
I would think that by now the "AI companies" would have something smarter steering their scrapers. Like, I dunno, some kind of AI. But maybe they don't for some reason? Or maybe the big ones do, but smaller "hungrier" ones, with less staff but still probably with a lot of cash, are willing to burn bandwidth so they don't have to implement that?
The questions just multiply.
Re: Why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel?
#214My biggest bitch is that it requires JS and cookies... Although the long term problem is the business model of servers paying for all network bandwidth. Actual human users have consumed a minority of total net bandwidth for decades: https://www.atom.com/blog/internet-statistics/ Part 4 shows bots out using humans in 1996 8-/ What are "bots"? This needs to include goggleadservices, PIA sharing for profit, real-time ad…
> The difference between that and the LLM training data scraping Is the traffic that people are complaining about really training traffic? My SWAG would be that there are maybe on the order of dozens of foundation models trained in a year. If you assume the training runs are maximally inefficient, cache nothing, and crawl every Web site 10 times for each model trained, then that means maybe a couple of hundred full-c…
The traffic I've seen is the big AI players just voraciously scraping for ~everything. What they do with it, if anything, who knows.
There's some user-directed traffic, but it's a small fraction, in my experience.
Re: Why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel?
#215Re: Why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel?
#216I don't care that they use anime catgirls. What I do care about is being met with something cutesy in the face of a technical failure anywhere on the net . I hate Amazon's failure pets, I hate google's failure mini-games -- it strikes me as an organizational effort to get really good at failing rather than spending that same effort to avoid failures all together. It's like everyone collectively thought the standard o…
The original versions were a way to make fun even a boring event such as a 404. If the page stops conveying the type of error to the user then it's just bad UX but also vomiting all the internal jargon to a non-tech user is bad UX. So, I don't see an error code + something fun to be that bad. People love dreaming of the 90s wild web and hate the clean cut soulless corp web of today, so I don't see how having fun erro…
This assumes it's fun.
Usually when I hit an error page, and especially if I hit repeated errors, I'm not in the mood for fun, and I'm definitely not in the mood for "fun" provided by the people who probably screwed up to begin with. It comes off as "oops, we can't do anything useful, but maybe if we try to act cute you'll forget that".
Also, it was more fun the first time or two. There's a not a lot of orginal fun on the error pages you get nowadays.
> People love dreaming of the 90s wild web and hate the clean cut soulless corp web of today
It's been a while, but I don't remember much gratuitous cutesiness on the 90s Web. Not unless you were actively looking for it.
Re: Why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel?
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your link explicitly says: > It's a reverse proxy that requires browsers and bots to solve a proof-of-work challenge before they can access your site, just like Hashcash. It's meant to rate-limit accesses by requiring client-side compute light enough for legitimate human users and responsible crawlers in order to access but taxing enough to cost indiscriminate crawlers that request host resources excessively. It inde…
Here's a more relevant quote from the link: > Anubis is a man-in-the-middle HTTP proxy that requires clients to either solve or have solved a proof-of-work challenge before they can access the site. This is a very simple way to block the most common AI scrapers because they are not able to execute JavaScript to solve the challenge. The scrapers that can execute JavaScript usually don't support the modern JavaScript f…
Why require proof of work with difficulty at all then? Just have no UI other than (javascript) required and run a trivial computation in WASM as a way of testing for modern browser features. That way users don't complain that it is taking 30s on their low-end phone and it doesn't make it any easier for scrapers to scrape (because the PoW was trivial anyways).
Re: Why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel?
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sadly, touching the user-agent header more or less instantly makes you uniquely identifiable. Browser fingerprinting works best against people with unique headers. There's probably millions of people using an untouched safari on iPhone. Once you touch your user-agent header, you're likely the only person in the world with that fingerprint.
If your headers are new every time then it is very difficult to figure out who is who.
yes, but it puts you in the incredibly small bucket of "users that has weird headers that don't mesh well", and makes using the rest of the (many) other fingerprinting techniques all the more accurate.
Re: Why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel?
#219Re: Why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel?
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
The original versions were a way to make fun even a boring event such as a 404. If the page stops conveying the type of error to the user then it's just bad UX but also vomiting all the internal jargon to a non-tech user is bad UX. So, I don't see an error code + something fun to be that bad. People love dreaming of the 90s wild web and hate the clean cut soulless corp web of today, so I don't see how having fun erro…
This assumes it's fun. Usually when I hit an error page, and especially if I hit repeated errors, I'm not in the mood for fun, and I'm definitely not in the mood for "fun" provided by the people who probably screwed up to begin with. It comes off as "oops, we can't do anything useful, but maybe if we try to act cute you'll forget that". Also, it was more fun the first time or two. There's a not a lot of orginal fun o…
> This assumes it's fun.
Not to those who don't exist in such cultures. It's creepy, childish, strange to them. It's not something they see in everyday life, nor would I really want to. There is a reason why cartoons are aimed for younger audiences.
Besides if your webserver is throwing errors, you've configured it incorrectly. Those pages should be branded as the site design with a neat and polite description to what the error is.