21–30 of 45 posts
The internet is for whoever wants to send bits to each other and is willing to pay for transit to do it. The WWW might be for end users, though that seems less obvious by the day.
Right. The RFC is attempting to clarify the IETF's official position. The IETF is not the internet police, and can't make other actors obey. We can make our own internet though - with blackhack and jookers.
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Why would anyone ever want to solve 99 Cloudflare captchas a day if you can get a bot to do it instead?
Literally used an LLM to answer the latest one 20 minutes ago, which was "what can climb a tree". Cloudflare is a blight on the internet, but HN loves it.
The question is, what is the alternative to cloudflare? We've tried (to various degrees) user id, micropayments, device attestation... I'm not hopeful we can actually solve this. Maybe if there was a neutral, "NGO-like" cloudflare of some sort?
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Cloudflare just started blocking Googlebot, so maybe we'll see an exodus away from Cloudflare by people who want their sites indexed? Hopefully?
I thought Google Search is dead, everyone is using ChatGPT now to find information.
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I thought Google Search is dead, everyone is using ChatGPT now to find information.
but how does chatGPT find information?
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Literally used an LLM to answer the latest one 20 minutes ago, which was "what can climb a tree". Cloudflare is a blight on the internet, but HN loves it.
> but HN loves it There is popular sentiment on HN that CF is making internet worse by being a core infrastructure element most websites use.
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Literally used an LLM to answer the latest one 20 minutes ago, which was "what can climb a tree". Cloudflare is a blight on the internet, but HN loves it.
Cloudflare spreads everywhere and kills the drive to do nice things. It is akin to a disease. The question is, what is the alternative to cloudflare? We've tried (to various degrees) user id, micropayments, device attestation... I'm not hopeful we can actually solve this. Maybe if there was a neutral, "NGO-like" cloudflare of some sort?
How about an internet where we don't need CloudFlare?
One without zillions of AI crawlers and script kiddies with Terabit DDoS capability… (the latter being the harder problem)
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but how does chatGPT find information?
With bots that break through cloudflare captchas. As a human, I immediately close the browser tab when I see one. If you make your site inaccessible for humans, only the bots remain.
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Literally used an LLM to answer the latest one 20 minutes ago, which was "what can climb a tree". Cloudflare is a blight on the internet, but HN loves it.
Cloudflare spreads everywhere and kills the drive to do nice things. It is akin to a disease. The question is, what is the alternative to cloudflare? We've tried (to various degrees) user id, micropayments, device attestation... I'm not hopeful we can actually solve this. Maybe if there was a neutral, "NGO-like" cloudflare of some sort?
But
The llm thing started to change me in a sense that I no longer really feel obligated to use everybody else's solutions. It may be harder and harder to get onto the 'old web', but my new small project put a website from cellphone and is available for as long as I need it to be available.
The short answer to what we can do is 'adjust accordingly'.
E.g. If the internet is super-fast and has the capability to deliver video ads, it will be used for that. If everyone just had a connection with the speed of a 56K modem, that video-based ad model wouldn't work.
If we really want the internet to be a certain way, we have to change the underlying technology used, not the ideology behind it. Because if an technology has a capability, it will be used to do whatever is most successful in the capitalistic system, not what's best for 'end users'.
Regulation sometimes be effective, but...the model of regulation in a world of freely-evolving technology is a broken system most of the time.
Who's an end user. Unless you own your hardware, you aren't the end user. When your phone, tv, camera, or even laptop on a non-free OS is on your network, you can get some semblance of control by controlling what network services it uses. Things like DoH are part of the removal of my control as a home user and give it to Sony, or Apple, or TPLink The most obvious thing is it becomes harder to block adverts. Throw in…
In countries where the internet is subject to censorship, as well as in regions with underdeveloped infrastructure, DNS queries are highly likely to be deliberately tampered with, poisoned, or hijacked. DoH is a very practical way to mitigate this problem, and I do not believe that the ability to block advertisements is more important than that.
Moreover, advanced users can still run their own DNS services for ad blocking, and, at least for the foreseeable future, DoH will not prevent them from continuing to use traditional DNS. You cannot criticize an important improvement in security merely because it makes ad blocking less convenient. Other people may face threat models that are a hundred times more serious than yours.