71–80 of 280 posts
What's wrong with AI agents accessing website content? We seem to have been happy with Google doing that for ages in exchange for displaying the website in search results.
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> I'd need to ask the lawyer how close this is to technically being a protection racket, or other no-no. Wait 'til you find out how many of the DDoS-for-hire services that Cloudflare offers to protect you from are themselves protected by Cloudflare.
I hear this pretty often. I am curious what do you think Cloudfare should do? I am pretty sure that if they started arbitrarily banning customers/potential customers based on what some other people like or don't like, everyone would be up in arms yelling stuff about censorship or wokeness or whatever the word of the year is. As an example, what if I'm not a DDoS-for-hire, but just a website that sells some software c…
Would you say this nuance is a major issue on the other big cloud providers? Your own grey-area example of Metasploit is hosted on AWS without any objections. Yet the other cloud providers make a decent effort to turn away open DDoS peddlers, whenever I survey the highest ranked DDoS services it's usually around 95% Cloudflare and 5% DDoS-Guard.
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The website owner chooses. They can say "nope" in robots.txt. Not everyone respects this, but Google does. Google can choose not to show that site as a result, if they want to. This adds a third option besides yes and no, which is "here's my price". Also, because cloudflare is involved, bots that just ignore a "nope" might find their lives a bit harder.
Robots.txt is for crawlers. It's explicitly not meant to say one-off requests from user agents can't access the site, because that would break the open web.
* Some company's crawler they're planning to use for AI training data.
* User agents that make web requests on behalf of a person.
Blocking the second one because the user's preferred browser is ChatGPT isn't really in keeping with the hacker spirit. The client shouldn't matter, I would hope that the web is made to be consumed by more than just Chrome.
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Interesting, as my theory for why cynicism is so common nowadays is that it's a coping mechanism for people who understand perfectly well what's happening in the modern world
You don't need to be a cynic if you have a grasp on reality If your truly understand something you are capable of evaluating it on a case by case basis without resorting to pathos.
So conjectures and hypothesis are not boring, but welcome in a discussion forum like HN.
Anything else is gatekeeping discussion.
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Ok, fine, let's restrict it to AI agents only, without training. It's still an adversarial relationship with the content creator. When you take an AI agent an ask it "find me the best italian restaurant in city xyz" it scans all the restaurant review sites and gives you back a recommendation. The content creator bears all the burden of creating and hosting the content and reaps non of the reward as the AI agent has n…
> reaps non of the reward Just to be clear what we're talking about: the reward in question is advertising dollars earned by manipulating people's attention for profit, right? I frankly don't think that people have the right to that as a business model and would be more than happy to see AI agents kill off that kind of "free" content.
Cloudflare found a new variation on their traditional service of protecting from abusers. This time, Cloudflare has formed a "marketplace" for the abuse from which they're protecting you, partnering with the abusers. And requiring you to use Cloudflare's service, or the abusers will just keep abusing you, without even a token payment. I'd need to ask the lawyer how close this is to technically being a protection rack…
Cloudflare found a new variation on their traditional service of protecting from abusers. This time, Cloudflare has formed a "marketplace" for the abuse from which they're protecting you, partnering with the abusers. And requiring you to use Cloudflare's service, or the abusers will just keep abusing you, without even a token payment. I'd need to ask the lawyer how close this is to technically being a protection rack…
I distinctly remember Cloudfare being accused here of hosting spammers and selling protection against them a decade ago. Then suddenly the name became associated with positive things only, and the whole thing have been memory-holed.
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> reaps non of the reward Just to be clear what we're talking about: the reward in question is advertising dollars earned by manipulating people's attention for profit, right? I frankly don't think that people have the right to that as a business model and would be more than happy to see AI agents kill off that kind of "free" content.
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We're talking in this subthread about an AI agent accessing content, not training a model on content. Training has copyright implications that are working their way through courts. AI agent access cannot be banned without fundamentally breaking the User Agent model of the web.
Ok, fine, let's restrict it to AI agents only, without training. It's still an adversarial relationship with the content creator. When you take an AI agent an ask it "find me the best italian restaurant in city xyz" it scans all the restaurant review sites and gives you back a recommendation. The content creator bears all the burden of creating and hosting the content and reaps non of the reward as the AI agent has n…
As a user agent my god what's happened to our industry. Locking the web to known client which are sufficiently not the user's agent betrays everything the web is for.
Do you really hate AI so much that you'll give up everything you believe in to see it hurt?