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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

#331

Post by fooey »

ctoth wrote: post #217

The web doesn't need attestation. It doesn't need signed agents. It doesn't need Cloudflare deciding who's a "real" user agent. It needs people to remember that "public" means PUBLIC and implement basic damn rate limiting if they can't handle the traffic. The web doesn't need to know if you're a human, a bot, or a dog. It just needs to serve bytes to whoever asks, within reasonable resource constraints. That's it. Th…

Modern AI crawlers are indistinguishable from malicious botnets. There's no longer any rate limiting strategy that's effective, that's entirely the point of what cloudflare is attempting to solve

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

#332

Post by remich »

lucb1e wrote: post #231
remich wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If by "our constitution" you mean the U.S. Constitution then no, it says nothing of the sort. The first article of the U.S. Constitution concerns the organization of the legislative branch. You may be referencing the Equal Protection and Due Process clauses, in the Fifth and Fourteenth amendments, but neither of those applies in this situation either since there are no laws or governmental actions at issue here, and…

You can assume it's the USA and that I'm just dead wrong, but the third word of my profile specifies where I'm from and you'd find that this Dutch constitution matches the comment's contents Equal protection is indeed not the same as equal treatment. No, it really does say that everyone shall be treated equally so long as the circumstances are equal (gelijke behandeling in gelijke gevallen)

I didn't assume, that's why I started my comment with "if by what you mean." Good to know that you were referencing a different place, but it's unrealistic to expect people to delve into your account bio to understand what you intended by "our constitution," especially when the parent comment also contained no geographic or cultural references. Perhaps you know the parent commenter and know that they share your geography? If so, that would also have been helpful context.

As an aside, I'm curious by how that language in the Dutch constitution actually works in practice. Is it just a game of distinguishing between situations or people to excuse disparate conduct? It seems like it would be unworkable if interpreted literally.

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

#333

Post by fooey »

Animats wrote: post #281

Are bots using a large number of IP addresses simultaneously, so they look like a DDOS attack? Or are they just making ordinary requests from a small number of addresses. If it's the latter, all you need is some kind of fair queuing so those requests compete with each other for access, not with other users.

They're using state of the art obfuscation that makes them indistinguishable from malicious botnets. It's an arms race with billion dollar companies vying to consume the most content before it all collapses

the open web is dead and whatever's left will be locked be authentication and paywalls

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

#334

Post by ares623 »

ctoth wrote: post #217

The web doesn't need attestation. It doesn't need signed agents. It doesn't need Cloudflare deciding who's a "real" user agent. It needs people to remember that "public" means PUBLIC and implement basic damn rate limiting if they can't handle the traffic. The web doesn't need to know if you're a human, a bot, or a dog. It just needs to serve bytes to whoever asks, within reasonable resource constraints. That's it. Th…

> within reasonable resource constraints

And let’s all hold hands and sing koombaya

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

#335

Post by Fabricio20 »

jmtame wrote: post #12

I 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.

This has been my experience more recently as well, I've finally migrated from google to Brave Search since google was just slow for me.

I also appreciate the AI search results a bit when im looking for something very specific (like what the yaml definition for a docker swarm deployment constraint looks like) because the AI just gives me the snippet while the search results are 300 medium blog posts about how to use docker and none of them explain the variables/what each does. Even the official docker documentation website is a mess to navigate and find anything relevant!

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

#336

Post by TIPSIO »

infecto wrote: post #179
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…

I personally love the idea of a free and open internet and also have no issues with bots scraping or training off of my data. I would much rather have it open for all, including companies, than the coming dystopian landscape of paywall gates. I don’t care about respecting robots.txt or any other types of rules. If it’s on the internet it’s for all to consume. The moment you start carving out certain parties is the mo…

For what it’s worth, I think CF will lose this battle and fundamentally feeding the bots will just become normal and wanted

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

#337

Post by spankibalt »

wvenable wrote: post #250
BrenBarn wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that is not true. It is only true if you just equate "AI training bots" with "people" on some kind of nominal basis without considering how they operate in practice. It is like saying "If your grocery store is open to the public, why is it not open to this herd of rhinoceroses?" Well, the reason is because rhinoceroses are simply not going to stroll up and down the aisles and head to the checkout line quietly wit…

You have a problem with badly behaved scrapers, not AI. I can't disagree with being against badly behaved scrapers. But this is neither a new problem or an interesting one from the idea of making information freely available to everyone, even rhinoceroses, assuming they are well behaved. Blocking bad actors is not the same thing as blocking AI.

> You have a problem with badly behaved scrapers, not AI.

And you have a problem understanding that "freedom and openness" extend only to where the rights (e. g. the freedom) of another legal entity begins. When I don't want "AI" (not just the badly-behaved subset) rifling my website then I should be well within my rights to disallow just that, in the same way as it's your right to allow them access to your playground. It's not rocket science.

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

#338

Post by beeflet »

pton_xd wrote: post #197
wilson090 wrote: post #176

Earlier 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.

> If you don't want AI bots reading information on the web, you don't actually want a free and open web. 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!

Clearly you don't want the whole community to enjoy it then. Openness is incompatible with keeping the riff raff out

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

#339

Post by immibis »

pton_xd wrote: post #197
wilson090 wrote: post #176

Earlier 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.

> If you don't want AI bots reading information on the web, you don't actually want a free and open web. 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!

Unironically, if we want everyone to enjoy the town center, we should let people do drugs.

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

#340

Post by immibis »

Symbiote wrote: post #295
wvenable wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Problem one is not specific to AI and not even about AI. Problem two is not anything new. Taking freely available content and distilling it into a product is something valuable and potentially worth paying for. People used to buy encyclopedias too. There are countless examples.

At present, problem one is almost entirely AI companies.

There's actually not much evidence of this, since the attack traffic is anonymous.
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