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The web does not need gatekeepers: Cloudflare’s new “signed agents” pitch

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Re: The web does not need gatekeepers: Cloudflare’s new “signed agents” pitch

#101

Post by [deleted] »

jMyles wrote: post #73
TIPSIO wrote: post #20

Everyone loves the dream of a free for all and open web. But the reality is how can someone small protect their blog or content from AI training bots? E.g.: They just blindly trust someone is sending Agent vs Training bots and super duper respecting robots.txt? Get real... Or, fine what if they do respect robots.txt, but they buy the data that may or may not have been shielded through liability layers via "licensed d…

> Everyone loves the dream of a free for all and open web. > protect their blog or content from AI training bots It strikes me that one needs to chose one of these as their visionary future. Specifically: a free and open web is one where read access is unfettered to humans and AI training bots alike. So much of the friction and malfunction of the web stems from efforts to exert control over the flow (and reuse) of in…

[deleted]

Re: The web does not need gatekeepers: Cloudflare’s new “signed agents” pitch

#102

Post by SoftTalker »

verdverm wrote: post #72
dlcarrier wrote: post #60

I use uncommon web browsers that don't leak a lot of information. To Cloudflare, I am indistingushable from a bot. Privacy cannot exist in an environment where the host gets to decide who access the web page. I'm okay with rate limiting or otherwise blocking activity that creates too much of a load, but trying to prevent automated access is impossible withou preventing access from real people.

The website owner has rights too. Are you arguing they cannot choose to implement such gatekeeping to keep their site operating in a financially viable manner?

If you put your information freely on the web, you should have minimal expectations on who uses it and how. If you want to make money from it, put up a paywall.

If you want the best of both worlds, i.e. just post freely but make money from ads, or inserting hidden pixels to update some profile about me, well good luck. I'll choose whether I want to look at ads, or load tracking pixels, and my answer is no.

Re: The web does not need gatekeepers: Cloudflare’s new “signed agents” pitch

#103

Post by positiveblue »

seanvelasco wrote: post #43

as a Cloudflare customer, I am happy with their proposition. I personally do not want companies like Perplexity that fake their user-agent and ignore my robots.txt to trespass. and isn't this why people sign up with Cloudflare in the first place? for bot protection? to me, this is just the same, but with agents. i love the idea of an open internet, but this requires all party to be honest. a company like Perplexity t…

The point is "should everyone just have an account with Cloudflare then"

Re: The web does not need gatekeepers: Cloudflare’s new “signed agents” pitch

#104

Post by sneak »

TIPSIO wrote: post #20

Everyone loves the dream of a free for all and open web. But the reality is how can someone small protect their blog or content from AI training bots? E.g.: They just blindly trust someone is sending Agent vs Training bots and super duper respecting robots.txt? Get real... Or, fine what if they do respect robots.txt, but they buy the data that may or may not have been shielded through liability layers via "licensed d…

> But the reality is how can someone small protect their blog or content from AI training bots?

First off, there's no harm from well-behaved bots. Badly behaved bots that cause problems for the server are easily detected (by the problems they cause), classified, and blocked or heavily throttled.

Of course, if you mean "protect" in the sense of "keep AI companies from getting a copy" (which you may have, given that you mentioned training) - you simply can't, unless you consider "don't put it on the web" a solution.

It's impossible to make something "public, but not like that". Either you publish or you don't.

If anything, it's a legal issue (copyright/fair use), not a technical one. Technical solutions won't work.

I'm not sure why people are so confused by this. The Mastodon/AP userbase put their public content on a publicly federated protocol then lost their shit and sent me death threats when I spidered and indexed it for network-wide search.

There are upsides and downsides to publishing things you create. One of the downsides is that it will be public and accessible to everyone.

Re: The web does not need gatekeepers: Cloudflare’s new “signed agents” pitch

#105

Post by nromiun »

skybrian wrote: post #18

This is sort of like how email is based on Internet standards but a large percentage of email users use Gmail. The Internet standards Cloudflare is promoting are open, but Cloudflare has a lot of power due to having so many customers. (What are some good alternatives to Cloudflare?) Another way the situation is similar: email delivery is often unreliable and hard to implement due to spam filters. A similar thing seem…

It is a big problem. There is no good alternative to Cloudflare as a free CDN. They put servers all over the world and they are giving them away for free. And making their money on premium serverless services.

Not to mention the big cloud providers are unhinged with their egress pricing.

Re: The web does not need gatekeepers: Cloudflare’s new “signed agents” pitch

#106

Post by quectophoton »

gausswho wrote: post #71
TIPSIO wrote: post #20

Everyone loves the dream of a free for all and open web. But the reality is how can someone small protect their blog or content from AI training bots? E.g.: They just blindly trust someone is sending Agent vs Training bots and super duper respecting robots.txt? Get real... Or, fine what if they do respect robots.txt, but they buy the data that may or may not have been shielded through liability layers via "licensed d…

What we need is some legal teeth behind robots.txt. It won't stop everyone, but Big Corp would be a tasty target for lawsuits.

I don't know about this. This means I'd get sued for using a feed reader on Codeberg[1], or for mirroring repositories from there (e.g. with Forgejo), since both are automated actions that are not caused directly by a user interaction (i.e. bots, rather than user agents).

[1]: https://codeberg.org/robots.txt#:~:text=Disallow:%20/.git/,....

Re: The web does not need gatekeepers: Cloudflare’s new “signed agents” pitch

#107

Post by positiveblue »

avtar wrote: post #36

> An allowlist run by ONE company? An allowlist run by one company that site owners chose to engage with. But the irony of taking an ideological stance about fairness while using AI generated comics for blog posts…

> An allowlist run by one company that site owners chose to engage with.

Exactly, no problem with that, just hinting that's not a protocol.

> But the irony of taking an ideological stance about fairness while using AI generated comics for blog posts

Wait, what?

Re: The web does not need gatekeepers: Cloudflare’s new “signed agents” pitch

#108

Post by positiveblue »

notatoad wrote: post #84
andy99 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But the reality is how can someone small protect their blog or content from AI training bots? A paywall. In reality, what some want is to get all the benefits of having their content on the open internet while still controlling who gets to access it. That is the root cause here.

Which is really all that cloudflare is building here that people are mad about. It’s a way to give bots access to paywalled content.

Where everyone needs a cloudflare account to be able to pay*

Re: The web does not need gatekeepers: Cloudflare’s new “signed agents” pitch

#109

Post by rustc »

SoftTalker wrote: post #102
verdverm wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The website owner has rights too. Are you arguing they cannot choose to implement such gatekeeping to keep their site operating in a financially viable manner?

If you put your information freely on the web, you should have minimal expectations on who uses it and how. If you want to make money from it, put up a paywall. If you want the best of both worlds, i.e. just post freely but make money from ads, or inserting hidden pixels to update some profile about me, well good luck. I'll choose whether I want to look at ads, or load tracking pixels, and my answer is no.

> If you put your information freely on the web, you should have minimal expectations on who uses it and how.

Does this only apply to "information" or should we treat all open source code as public domain?

Re: The web does not need gatekeepers: Cloudflare’s new “signed agents” pitch

#110

Post by [deleted] »

dlcarrier wrote: post #60

I use uncommon web browsers that don't leak a lot of information. To Cloudflare, I am indistingushable from a bot. Privacy cannot exist in an environment where the host gets to decide who access the web page. I'm okay with rate limiting or otherwise blocking activity that creates too much of a load, but trying to prevent automated access is impossible withou preventing access from real people.

[deleted]
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