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Detecting AI agent use and abuse

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Re: Detecting AI agent use and abuse

#71

Post by qotgalaxy »

randunel wrote: post #51
soulofmischief wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plaid is not a "good bot" company. Despite posturing from leadership, it is fundamentally unethical to build a pervasive banking middle-man service which requires users to surrender their private account credentials in order to operate. What if every business operated this way? It's disgusting that companies like Plaid have considerably set back public discourse on acceptable privacy tradeoffs.

I'd assume they had to work with what was offered. As long as banks required usernames and passwords with no oauth possible, what's plaid to do? Their users wanted their service, but the banks used username password credentials. In any case, "good bot" doesn't refer to best practices such as rejecting suppliers with antiquated auth and guiding users to others, it refers to not being intentionally malicious and acting…

[dead]

Re: Detecting AI agent use and abuse

#72

Post by 1shooner »

diggan wrote: post #3

> it could present unacceptable risks for application developers or be used as a method for malicious attacks (e.g. credential stuffing or fake account creation). The article seems to want to distinguish between "bad" and "good" bots, yet beyond the introduction, seems to treat them exactly the same. Why are website authors so adamant I need to use whatever client they want to consume their content? If you put up a b…

>now we have a new user-agent available, "AI Agents", that somehow is unacceptable and should be blocked?

Giving deference or even exclusive access to certain service clients is as old as the commercial web. The article specifically cites security or other risk as the reason. Of course commercial media on the web today put conditions on the consumption of what they publish: ad-blocker nag screens, paywalls, etc. Usually that's just a commercial interest, but what about other conditions, like a disclaimer for medical or legal advice? AI Agents will cite your content without necessarily the context or due diligence you may be legally or ethically obligated to provide with that content.

Generally, I agree that it holds us back from what the 'Agent Experience' web will inevitably need to become, but there are valid reasons for the incumbent patterns that should be resolved in a mutually beneficial way.

Re: Detecting AI agent use and abuse

#73

Post by rkagerer »

diggan wrote: post #3

> it could present unacceptable risks for application developers or be used as a method for malicious attacks (e.g. credential stuffing or fake account creation). The article seems to want to distinguish between "bad" and "good" bots, yet beyond the introduction, seems to treat them exactly the same. Why are website authors so adamant I need to use whatever client they want to consume their content? If you put up a b…

Many (most?) commercial websites have terms of service that ban you from using bots, scripting, etc. It's a similar travesty.

Re: Detecting AI agent use and abuse

#74

Post by hiatus »

jerpint wrote: post #50

The other day I tried an open source deep research implementation, and a ton of links returned 403s because I was using an agent. But it is for legitimate purposes. I think we need better ways of identifying legitimate agents working on my behalf vs spam bots

Was it running locally and using your IP to access the content?

Re: Detecting AI agent use and abuse

#75

Post by hiatus »

bsnnkv wrote: post #15

I have personally opted out of the arms race for at least one service that I operate.[1] If AI agents figure out how to buy a subscription and transfer money from their operators to me, they are more than welcome to scrape away. [1]: https://lgug2z.com/articles/in-the-age-of-ai-crawlers-i-have...

Does your service respect robots.txt of the sites it crawls?

Re: Detecting AI agent use and abuse

#76

Post by bsnnkv »

hiatus wrote: post #75
bsnnkv wrote: post #15

I have personally opted out of the arms race for at least one service that I operate.[1] If AI agents figure out how to buy a subscription and transfer money from their operators to me, they are more than welcome to scrape away. [1]: https://lgug2z.com/articles/in-the-age-of-ai-crawlers-i-have...

Does your service respect robots.txt of the sites it crawls?

Look harder Simba, there is no crawling involved

Re: Detecting AI agent use and abuse

#77

Post by abenga »

mcstempel wrote: post #12
JohnMakin wrote: post #7

I've been flagged as a bot on pretty much every major platform. Most ridiculously lately, linkedin - I have to prove my identity using 2 different forms of ID, which they still won't accept, OR find a notary and somehow prove I own the account I no longer have access to. Maybe try refining this tech a little better before you start blasting legitimate users with it - I am extremely skeptical of the catch rate given w…

LinkedIn always hits me with those frustrating custom CAPTCHAs where you have to rotate the shape 65 degrees -- they've taken a pretty blunt, high-friction approach to bot detection I think most apps should primarily start with just monitoring for agentic traffic so they can start to better understand the emergent behaviors they're performing (it might tell folks where they actually need real APIs for example), and t…

Ironic that orgs using everyone's content (fairly or not) stuffing AI down our throats are the ones aggressively against their users using AI on their services.

Re: Detecting AI agent use and abuse

#78

Post by chii »

golergka wrote: post #37
diggan wrote: post #3

> it could present unacceptable risks for application developers or be used as a method for malicious attacks (e.g. credential stuffing or fake account creation). The article seems to want to distinguish between "bad" and "good" bots, yet beyond the introduction, seems to treat them exactly the same. Why are website authors so adamant I need to use whatever client they want to consume their content? If you put up a b…

I'm building a service which needs to extract rss feeds from pages (hntorss.com if you're interested). Nothing else. From any rational point of view, website owner would actively want this parser to work as easily as possible — the whole point is for users to see the content you publish! Alas, I still get rate-limited, 400-ed and others because of user agent and other bot-detection mechanisms.

> the whole point is for users to see the content you publish!

no, the whole point (for most sites) is to make money off the users visiting said site (currently via advertising).

Another third party service which slurps the data, and redirect the users to a different site to consume the data means the original site lost the revenue, but paid the bandwidth cost.

So it's understandable that many sites want to block such agents.

Re: Detecting AI agent use and abuse

#79

Post by chii »

ATechGuy wrote: post #55
cle wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Web Environment Integrity. Eventually your hardware will rat you out via attestation.

And you think nobody (professional hackers?) can put together a "virtual TPM" that falsifies real hardware info? I think there are much simpler solutions, but the big tech wants to retain the control.

the whole point of TPM is that you cannot do it. And it's why windows 11 requires a modern TPM.

It's a travesty of modern computing. As an owner of hardware, i must be completely 100% able to control all aspect of it, and TPM is one aspect for which you are gated out.

Re: Detecting AI agent use and abuse

#80

Post by nonrandomstring »

mcstempel wrote: post #9
diggan wrote: post #3

> it could present unacceptable risks for application developers or be used as a method for malicious attacks (e.g. credential stuffing or fake account creation). The article seems to want to distinguish between "bad" and "good" bots, yet beyond the introduction, seems to treat them exactly the same. Why are website authors so adamant I need to use whatever client they want to consume their content? If you put up a b…

Hey there, I'm the author of the post. I'm actually pretty sympathetic to your viewpoint, and I wanted to clarify my stance. I actually spent years working at a "good bot" company (Plaid), which focused on making users' financial data portable. The main reason Plaid existed was that banks made it hard for users to permission their data to other apps -- typically not solely out of security concerns, but to also active…

What came up in this interview [0] was that

1) Because of "AI" we're moving more to API-like model in which the end user gets more say how they want to consume content.

2) That is in tension with (ahem) intention. We can't direct the user "experience" and have a "positive model" (not based on denylists). We can present data bit we can't enforce our intentions (informally defined ideas about how it may be used).

3) That means we must move to a behavioural security/access model in place of identity based ones (including categorical identity like ASN, user-agent, device type... )

[0] https://cybershow.uk/episodes.php?id=39

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