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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

#51

Post by rikafurude21 »

jsheard wrote: post #41
rikafurude21 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cloudflare is trying to gatekeep which user-initated agents are allowed to read website content, which is of course very different from scraping website for training data. Meta, Perplexity and OpenAI all have some kind of web-search functionality where they sent requests based on user prompts. These are not requests that get saved to train the next LLM. Cloudflare intentionally blurs the line between both types of bo…

> Cloudflare is trying to gatekeep which user-initated agents are allowed to read website content, which is of course very different from scraping website for training data. That distinction requires you to take companies which benefit from amassing as much training data as possible at their word when they pinky swear that a particular request is totally not for training, promise.

If you look at the current LLM landscape, the frontier is not being pushed by labs throwing more data at their models - most improvements come from using more compute and improving training methods. In that sense I dont have to take their word, more data just hasnt been the problem for a long time.

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

#52

Post by esseph »

fooqux wrote: post #11
cyberlurker wrote: post #2

I would love that vision to become reality but what Cloudflare is doing is unfortunately necessary atm.

Ok, I'll bite. Why is turning the Internet into a walled garden necessary now?

Commercial, criminal, and state interests have far more resources than you do, and their interests are in direct conflict with yours.

That would be fine, you could walk away and go home, but if you're going to drive on their digital highways, you're going to need "insurance" just protect you from everyone else.

Ongoing multi-nation WWIII-scale hacking and infiltration campaigns of infrastructure, AI bot crawling, search company and startup crawling, security researchers crawling, and maybe somebody doesn't like your blog and decides to rent a botnet for a week or so.

Bet your ISP shuts you off before then to protect themselves. (Happens all the time via BGP blackholing, DDoS scrubbing services, BGP FlowSpec, etc).

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

#55

Post by imiric »

> When I’m driving, I hand my phone to a friend and say, “Reply ‘on my way’ to my Mom.” They act on my behalf, through my identity, even though the software has no built-in concept of delegation. That is the world we are entering.

That is a very small part of the world we're entering.

The other vast majority of use cases will come from even more abusive bots than we have today, filling the internet with spam, disinformation, and garbage. The dead internet is no longer a theory, and the future we're building will make the internet for bots, by bots. Humans will retreat into niche corners of it, and those who wish to participate in the broader internet will either have to live with this, or abide by new government regulations that invade their privacy and undermine their security.

So, yes, confirming human identity is the only path forward if we want to make the internet usable by humans, but I do agree that the ideal solution will not come from a single company, or a single government, for that matter. It will be a bumpy ride until we figure this out.

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

#56

Post by esseph »

doublerabbit wrote: post #46
giantrobot wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Multi-Tbps DDoS attacks, pervasive scanning of sites for exploits, comically expensive egress bandwidth on services like AWS, and ISPs disallowing hosting services on residential accounts.

Start forcing tighter security on the devices causing the Multi-Tbps DDoS attacks would be a better option, no? Cheap unsecured IoT devices are a problem. It's not just computers anymore. Web enabled CCTV, doorbell cameras are all culprits.

And home routers, printers, and end user devices themselves. Residential ISP networks can be infiltrated and remote CVE'd through browser calls at this point from a remote website. It's not even hard.

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

#57

Post by eldenring »

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 recently found out my website has been blocked by AI agents, when I had never asked for it. It seems to be opt-out by default, but in an obscure way. Very frustrating. I think some of these companies (one in particular) are risking burning a lot of goodwill, although I think they have been on that path for a while now.

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

#58

Post by esseph »

Gud wrote: post #27
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…

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".

Sometimes it's a hardware problem, not a software problem.

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

#59

Post by habinero »

doublerabbit wrote: post #46
giantrobot wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Multi-Tbps DDoS attacks, pervasive scanning of sites for exploits, comically expensive egress bandwidth on services like AWS, and ISPs disallowing hosting services on residential accounts.

Start forcing tighter security on the devices causing the Multi-Tbps DDoS attacks would be a better option, no? Cheap unsecured IoT devices are a problem. It's not just computers anymore. Web enabled CCTV, doorbell cameras are all culprits.

How would you secure someone else's devices?

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

#60

Post by dlcarrier »

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.

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