I suppose it’s time AI proselytization rediscovered the tragedy of the commons.
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
#62This is like saying companies don't need security gates and checkpoints. Unfortunately the world is filled with bad people, and you need security to keep them off your property.
If the broader economic system wasn't based on what is essentially theft, security wouldn't be as necessary as it is.
Re: The web does not need gatekeepers: Cloudflare’s new “signed agents” pitch
#63Related:
Web Bot Auth
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45055452
and associated blog post:
The age of agents: cryptographically recognizing agent traffic
Re: The web does not need gatekeepers: Cloudflare’s new “signed agents” pitch
#64at its foundation, the bots issue is in fact 3 main issues:
bots vs humans:
humans are trying to buy tickets that were sold out to a bot
data scrapping:
you index my data (real estate listing) to not to route traffic to my site as people search for my product, as a search engine will do, rather to become my competitor.
spam (and scam): digital pollution, or even worse, trying to input credit card, gift cards, passwords, etc.
(obviously there are more, most which will fall into those categories, but those are the main ones)
now, in the human assisted AI, the first issue is no longer an issue, since it is obvious that each of us, the internet users, will soon have an agent built into our browser. so we will all have the speedy automated select, click and checkout at our disposal.
Prior to LLM era, there were search engines and academic research on the right side of the internet bots, and scrappers and north to that, on the wrong side of the map. but now we have legitimate human users extending their interaction with an LLM agent, and on top of it, we have new AI companies, larger and smaller which thrive for data in order to train their models.
Cloudflare simply trying to make sense of this, whilst maintaining their bot protection relevant.
I do not appreciate the post content whatsoever, since it lacks or consistency and maturity (a true understanding of how the internet works, rather than a naive one).
when you talk about "the internet", what exactly are you referring to? a blog? a bank account management app? a retail website? social media?
those are all part of the internet and each is a complete different type of operation.
EDIT:
I've written a few words about this back in January [1] and in fact suggested something similar:
Leading CDNs, CAPTCHA providers, and AI vendors—think
Cloudflare, Google reCAPTCHA, OpenAI, or Anthropic
could collaborate to develop something akin to a
“tokenized machine ID.”
Re: The web does not need gatekeepers: Cloudflare’s new “signed agents” pitch
#65I wish Cloudflare would roll out AI poisoning attack as protection for their clients (providing bad data cache to AI bots), instead of this. Would work like a charm.
Re: The web does not need gatekeepers: Cloudflare’s new “signed agents” pitch
#66Everyone 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…
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Re: The web does not need gatekeepers: Cloudflare’s new “signed agents” pitch
#67Earlier 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. 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.
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Re: The web does not need gatekeepers: Cloudflare’s new “signed agents” pitch
#68Well, 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.
Re: The web does not need gatekeepers: Cloudflare’s new “signed agents” pitch
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
For that matter, sometimes it's a social/political problem and not a technological problem.
Re: The web does not need gatekeepers: Cloudflare’s new “signed agents” pitch
#70Earlier 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. 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.
Just today Anthropic announced that they will begin using their users data for training by default - they still want fresh data so badly that they risked alienating their own paying customers to get some more. They're at the stage of pulling the copper out of the walls to feed their crippling data addiction.