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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

#141

Post by mannanj »

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…

how about we discuss and design and implement a system that charges them for their actions? we could put some dark patterns in our sites that specifically have this cost through some sort of problem solving thing in the site that harvests their energetic scraping/LLM tools into directing their energy onto causes that give us profit on our site, in exchange for revealing some content in return that achieves their mission of scraping too. Looks like these exist to degrees.

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

#143

Post by verdverm »

avazhi wrote: post #139
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…

Nobody cares about robots.txt, nor should they. If this is your primary argument against being scraped (viz that your robots.txt said not to) then you’re naive and you’re doing it wrong. If the internet is open, then data on it is going to be scraped lol. You can’t have it both ways.

It seems the Open Internet is idealistic.

If others respected robots.txt, we would not need solutions like what Cloudflare is presenting here. Since abuse is rampant, people are looking for mitigations and this CF offering is an interesting one to consider.

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

#144

Post by pessimizer »

rustc wrote: post #109
SoftTalker wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

All "open source" code was already pretty much public domain. All they'd have to do was put a page of OSI-approved licenses up on the site, right? An index of Open Source projects and their authors? Is this more than a weeks work to comply?

Free Software is the only place where this is a real abridgement of rights and intention, and it's over. They've already been trained on all of it, and no judge will tell them to stop, and no congressman will tell them to stop.

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

#145

Post by jbrisson »

"In the 90s, Microsoft tried to “embrace and extend” the web, but failed. And that failure was a blessing."

Basically MS tried to kill the web with their Win95 release, the infamous Internet Explorer and their shitty IIS/Frontpage tandem.

I deeply hate them since that day.

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

#146

Post by literalAardvark »

qbane wrote: post #112
notatoad wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wouldn’t stop anyone. The bots you want to block already operate out of places where those laws wouldn’t be enforced.

Then that is a good reason to deny the requests from those IPs

I've run a few hundred small domains for various online stores with an older backend that didn't scale very well for crawlers and at some point we started blocking by continent.

It's getting really, really ugly out there.

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

#147

Post by verdverm »

viktorcode wrote: post #68
impure wrote: post #16

Well, if you have a better way to solve this that’s open I’m all ears. But what Cloudflare is doing is solving the real problem of AI bots. We’ve tried to solve this problem with IP blocking and user agents, but they do not work. And this is actually how other similar problems have been solved. Certificate authorities aren’t open and yet they work just fine. Attestation providers are also not open and they work just…

AI poisoning is a better protection. Cloudflare is capable of serving stashes of bad data to AI bots as protective barrier to their clients.

You don't think that the AI companies will take efforts to detect and filter bad data for training? Do you suppose they are already doing this, knowing that data quality has an impact on model capabilities?

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

#149

Post by verdverm »

TYPE_FASTER wrote: post #129

I think the reality is, we need identity on both the client and server sides. At some point soon, if not now, assume everything is generated by AI unless proven otherwise using a decentralized ID. Likewise, on the server side, assume it’s a bot unless proven otherwise using a decentralized ID. We can still have anonymity using decentralized IDs. An identity can be an anonymous identity, it’s not all (verified by some…

DID spec, also used in ATProto, is quite flexible. It would be nice to see it used in more places and processes

https://www.w3.org/TR/did-1.1/

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

#150

Post by whimsicalism »

pol_avec wrote: post #89
whimsicalism wrote: post #19

[flagged]

I personally reviewed his article, and he later rewrote and addressed many of the points, so maybe you can't really tell ai from human content.

i don’t doubt that it went through a review process but:

> Authentication for that world isn’t “ask Cloudflare for a hall pass.” It’s verifiable chains of delegation and request-level proof: open, portable, and independent of any one company. > The pattern is consistent: when the commons defines the interface, innovation compounds; when a vendor hands out permission slips, it stalls.

these are GPT tells. sure they have false positives, but i’m sure if you put this through any of the probabilistic detectors they would tell you this is almost certainly LLM-generated text.

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