Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

positiveblue.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 520 posts

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

#81

Post by littlecranky67 »

andy99 wrote: post #74
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…

> But the reality is how can someone small protect their blog or content from AI training bots? A paywall. In reality, what some want is to get all the benefits of having their content on the open internet while still controlling who gets to access it. That is the root cause here.

This. We need to get rid of the ad-supported free internet economy. If you want your content to be free, you release it and have no issues with AI. If you want to make money of your content, add a paywall.

We need micropayments going forward, Lightning (Bitcoin backend) could be the solution.

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

#82

Post by notatoad »

gausswho wrote: post #71
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…

What we need is some legal teeth behind robots.txt. It won't stop everyone, but Big Corp would be a tasty target for lawsuits.

It wouldn’t stop anyone. The bots you want to block already operate out of places where those laws wouldn’t be enforced.

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

#84

Post by notatoad »

andy99 wrote: post #74
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…

> But the reality is how can someone small protect their blog or content from AI training bots? A paywall. In reality, what some want is to get all the benefits of having their content on the open internet while still controlling who gets to access it. That is the root cause here.

Which is really all that cloudflare is building here that people are mad about. It’s a way to give bots access to paywalled content.

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

#85

Post by FlyingSnake »

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…

It is a service available to Cloudflare customers and is opt-in. I fail to see how they’re being gatekeepers when site owners have option not to use it.

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

#86

Post by esseph »

bob1029 wrote: post #21
jjangkke wrote: post #3

I would love to get off Cloudflare but there are no real good alternatives

Writing backends that can actually handle public traffic and using authentication for expensive resources are fantastic alternatives. Also, cheaply rate limiting malicious web clients should be something that is trivial to accomplish with competent web tooling (i.e., on your own servers). If this seems out of scope or infeasible, you might be using the wrong tools for the job.

You still have the network traffic issues which is very substantial

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

#90

Post by ShakataGaNai »

impure wrote: post #16

Well, 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…

Agreed. It might not be THE BEST solution, but it is a solution that appears to work well.

Centralization bad yada yada. But if Cloudflare can get most major AI players to participate, then convince the major CDN's to also participate.... ipso facto columbo oreo....standard.

Post reply on HN