Earlier quoted context omitted.
This. We need to get rid of the ad-supported free internet economy. If you want your content to be free, you release it and have no issues with AI. If you want to make money of your content, add a paywall. We need micropayments going forward, Lightning (Bitcoin backend) could be the solution.
> If you want your content to be free, you release it and have no issues with AI. If you want to make money of your content, add a paywall. What about licenses like CC-BY-NC (Creative Commons - Non Commercial)?
The web does not need gatekeepers: Cloudflare’s new “signed agents” pitch
191–200 of 520 posts
Re: The web does not need gatekeepers: Cloudflare’s new “signed agents” pitch
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
How so? If you don't want AI bots reading information on the web, you don't actually want a free and open web. The reality of an open web is that such information is free and available for anyone.
How is it available for everyone if the AI bots bring down your server?
Re: The web does not need gatekeepers: Cloudflare’s new “signed agents” pitch
#193Everyone 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?” Why would you need to? If your inability to assemble basic HTML forces you to adopt enormous, bloated frameworks that require two full cores of a cpu to render your post… … or if you think your online missives are a step in the road to content creator riches … … then I suppose I see the problem. Otherwise there’s no proble…
There’s going to be bad actors taking advantage of people who cannot fight back without regulations and gatekeepers, suggesting otherwise is about as reasonable as ancaps idea of government
Re: The web does not need gatekeepers: Cloudflare’s new “signed agents” pitch
#194I pretty much use Perplexity exclusively at this point, instead of Google. I'd rather just get my questions answered than navigate all of the ads and slowness that Google provides. I'm fine with paying a small monthly fee, but I don't want Cloudflare being the gatekeeper. Perhaps a way to serve ads through the agents would be good enough. I'd prefer that to be some open protocol than controlled by a company.
Perplexity has been one of the AI companies that created the problem that gave rise to this CF proposal. Why doesn't Perplexity invest more into being a responsible scraper? https://blog.cloudflare.com/perplexity-is-using-stealth-unde...
Re: The web does not need gatekeepers: Cloudflare’s new “signed agents” pitch
#195I can see a future where I don't use the internet at all.
Re: The web does not need gatekeepers: Cloudflare’s new “signed agents” pitch
#196The private tracker community have long figured this out. Put content behind invite-only user registration, and treeban users if they ever break the rules.
This doesn't scale to the general web, does it? I think invite-only might work to build communities, but you end up in the situation we're in today where people are buying/selling invites, and that's with treebans in place. I do fear the actions of the current bot landscape is going to lead to almost everything going behind auth walls though, and perhaps even paid auth walls.
One of the practical problems I rather saw was bootstrapping: how to convince any website owner to use it, when very few people are on the system? Where should they find someone to get invites from?
As for tracking (auth walls), the website needs not know who you are. They just see random tokens with signatures and can verify the signature. If there's abuse, they send evidence to the tree system, where it could be handled similarly to HN: lots of flags from different systems will make an automated system kick in, but otherwise a person looks at the issue and decides whether to issue a warning or timeout. (Of course, the abuse reporting mechanism can also be abused so, again similar to HN, if you abuse the abuse mechanism then you don't count towards future reports.)
Ideally, we'd not need this and let real judges do the job of convicting people of abuse and computer fraud, but until such time, I'd rather use the internet anonymously with whatever setup I like than face blocks regularly while doing nothing wrong
Re: The web does not need gatekeepers: Cloudflare’s new “signed agents” pitch
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that was the point. Everyone loves the dream, but the reality is different.
How so? If you don't want AI bots reading information on the web, you don't actually want a free and open web. The reality of an open web is that such information is free and available for anyone.
This is such a bad faith argument.
We want a town center for the whole community to enjoy! What, you don't like those people shooting up drugs over there? But they're enjoying it too, this is what you wanted right? They're not harming you by doing their drugs. Everyone is enjoying it!
Re: The web does not need gatekeepers: Cloudflare’s new “signed agents” pitch
#198Everyone 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…
"Okay, that means AI companies can train on your content."
"Well, actually, we need some protections..."
"So you want a closed web with access controls?"
"No no no, I support openness! Can't we just have, like, ethical openness? Where everyone respects boundaries but there's no enforcement mechanism? Why are you making this so black and white?"
Re: The web does not need gatekeepers: Cloudflare’s new “signed agents” pitch
#199I 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?
There's a whole spectrum of gatekeeping on communications with users, from static sites that broadcast their information to anyone, and stores that let you order without even making an account, to organizations that require you install local software to even access data and perform transactions. The latter means 90%+ of your users will hate you for it, and half will walk away, but it's still very common, collectively causing business that do so billions of dollers a year. (https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2021/02/15/91-of-u... to-install-apps-to-do-business-costing-brands-billions/)
When companies get big enough to have entire departments devoted tasks, those departments will follow the fads that bring them the most prestige, at the cost of the rest of the company. Eventually the company will lose out to newer more efficient businesses that forgo fads in favor of serving customers, and the cycle continues.
I'm just point out how a new fad is hurting businesses, but by no means wish to limit their ability to do so. They just won't be getting my business, nor business from a quickly growing cohort that desires anonymitiy, or even requires it to get around growing local censorship.
Re: The web does not need gatekeepers: Cloudflare’s new “signed agents” pitch
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
What we need is stop fighting robots and start welcoming and helping them. I se zero reasons to oppose robots visiting any website I would build. The only purpose I ever tried disallowed robots for was preventing search engines from indexing incomplete versions or going the paths which really make no sense for them to go. Now I think we should write separate instructions for different kinds of robots: a search engine…
> preventing search engines from indexing incomplete versions or going the paths which really make no sense for them to go.
What will you do when the bots ignore your instructions, and send a million requests a day to these URLs from half a million different IP addresses?