111–120 of 520 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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*
Which is not everyone.
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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.
It wouldn’t stop anyone. The bots you want to block already operate out of places where those laws wouldn’t be enforced.
> 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…
>But the irony of taking an ideological stance about fairness while using AI generated comics for blog posts…
"But you participate in society!"
> 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?
I was referring to the following image:
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!zRK-!,w_1250,h_703,c...
[flagged]
Narrator: but he did put effort... Anyway, main take aways for you: - We REALLY need a way to tie identity to agent/requests - The idea of registering with cloudflare to be able to access a website is bad - Sites should be able to block whoever they want or make anything they desire a requirement (there are people that has login only with google after all) We have the right primitives to build something that works fo…
It doesn't help. Do you know why it doesn't help? It doesn't help because AI companies just pay people to borrow your identity. Somewhere between $2 and $250 per month to borrow your internet identity - the former for running a program in the background on your computer and the latter for getting an internet contract in your name. Or you can pay developers of free mobile games to put your code in their game, and the user doesn't know about it, and it's not even illegal.
All that will happen if you tighten identity further is that these measures will go further, e.g. farms of real devices with robots giving touch inputs and cameras running OCR. Meanwhile you'll make it more annoying for everyone to use the internet until they quit.
You know what other effect it has? Only big players will be able to afford the workaround measures. Google will have no problem deploying an army of robots with phones (or just faking it since they own the signing keys) meanwhile you just banned every non-Google non-Apple phone from your website, forcing centralisation and monopoly on everyone.
And for what? Saving 3 requests per second of server load?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bankruptcy as a surprise gift is not an alternative. Even those that use big cloud providers like AWS and GCP use CDNs like Cloudflare to protect themselves. And there is no free CDN like Cloudflare.
> And there is no free CDN like Cloudflare. Their pricing page says: No-nonsense Free Tier As part of the AWS free Usage Tier you can get started with Amazon CloudFront for free. Included in Always Free Tier 1 TB of data transfer out to the internet per month 10,000,000 HTTP or HTTPS Requests per month 2,000,000 CloudFront Function invocations per month 2,000,000 CloudFront KeyValueStore reads per month 10 Distributi…
> 1 TB of data
Someone can rent a 1Gbps server for cheap (under $50 on OVH) and pull 330TB in a month from your site. That's about $30k of egress on AWS if you don't do anything to stop it.
I have zero issue with Ai Agents, if there's a real user behind there somewhere. I DO have a major issue with my sites being crawled extremely aggressively by offenders including Meta, Perplexity and OpenAI - it's really annoying realising that we're tying up several cpu cores on AI crawling. Less than on real users and google et al.
To be fair, an accurate measurement would need to consider how many of those CPU cycles would be spent by the human user who is driving the bot. From that perspective, maybe the scrapers can “make up for it” by crawling efficiently, i.e. avoid loading tracker scripts, images, etc unless necessary to solve the query. This way they’ll still burn CPU cycles but at least it’ll be less cycles than a human user with a headful browser instance.
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…
You might have this the wrong way around. It's not the publishers who need to do the hard work, it's the multi-billion dollar investments into training these systems that need to do the hard work. We are moving to a position whereby if you or I want to download something without compensating the publisher, that's jail time, but if it's Zuck, Bezos or Musk, they get a free pass. That's the system that needs to change.…
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…
By developing Free Software combating these hostile softwares. Corporations develop hostile AI agents, Capable hackers develop anti-AI-agents. This defeatist atittude "we have no power".
