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Why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel?
811–820 of 968 posts
Re: Why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel?
#812Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bot blocking through obscurity
That's really the only option available here, right? The goal is to keep sites low friction for end users while stopping bots. Requiring an account with some moderation would stop the majority of bots, but it would add a lot of friction for your human users.
The other option is proof of work. Make clients use JS to do expensive calculations that aren’t a big deal for single clients, but get expensive at scale. Not ideal, but another tool to potentially use.
Re: Why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel?
#813Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The difference between that and the LLM training data scraping Is the traffic that people are complaining about really training traffic? My SWAG would be that there are maybe on the order of dozens of foundation models trained in a year. If you assume the training runs are maximally inefficient, cache nothing, and crawl every Web site 10 times for each model trained, then that means maybe a couple of hundred full-c…
It's not random internet people saying it's training. It's Cloudflare, among others. Search for “A graph of daily requests over time, comparing different categories of AI Crawlers” on this blog: https://blog.cloudflare.com/ai-labyrinth/
In the feed today:
AI crawlers and fetchers are blowing up websites, with Meta and OpenAI the worst offenders
Re: Why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel?
#814Earlier quoted context omitted.
Its nice to see there is still some whimsy on the internet. Everything got so corporate and sterile.
Everyone copying the same Japanese cartoon style isn't any better than everyone copying corporate memphis.
I think it definitively would be. Perhaps a small one, but still
Re: Why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel?
#815Earlier quoted context omitted.
While the question of "is it actually possible to do this in a privacy preserving way?" is certainly interesting, was there ever a _single_ occasion where a government had the option of doing something in a privacy preserving way, when a non-privacy preserving way was also possible? Politicians would absolutely kill for the idea of unmasking dissenters on internet forums. Even if the option is a possibility, they are…
> was there ever a _single_ occasion I don't know where you live, but in my case, many. Beginning with the fact that I can buy groceries with cash.
Example does not fit, when cash was introduced electronic money transfer was not an option.
Re: Why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel?
#816> This… makes no sense to me. Almost by definition, an AI vendor will have a datacenter full of compute capacity. It feels like this solution has the problem backwards, effectively only limiting access to those without resources or trying to conserve them. Counterpoint - it seems to work. People use anubis because its the best of bad options. If theory and reality disagree, it means either you are missing something o…
Counter-counter point: it only stopped them for a few weeks and now it doesn’t work: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44914773
Geoblocking China and Singapore solves that problem, it seems, at least the non-residential IPs (though I also see a lot of aggressive bots coming from residential IP space from China).
I wish the old trick of sending CCP-unfriendly content to get the great firewall to kill the connection for you still worked, but in the days of TLS everywhere that doesn't seem to work anymore.
Re: Why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel?
#817Earlier quoted context omitted.
Counter-counter point: it only stopped them for a few weeks and now it doesn’t work: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44914773
Only Huawei so far, no? That could be easy to block on a network level for the time being Of course we knew from the beginning that this first stage of "bots don't even try to solve it, no matter the difficulty" isn't a forever solution
AliCloud also seems to send a more capable scraper army, but so far they're not using botnets ("residential proxies") to hide their bad practices.
Re: Why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel?
#818Earlier quoted context omitted.
The point is that scraping is already inherently cost-intensive so a small additional cost from having to solve a challenge is not going to make a dent in the equation. It doesn't matter what server is doing what for that.
100 billion web pages * 0.02 USD of PoW/page = 2 billion dollars, the point is not to stop every scraper/crawler, the point is to raise the costs enough to avoid being bombarded by all of them
Yes, but it's not going to be 0.02 USD of PoW per page! That is an absurd number. It'd mean a two-hour proof of work for a server CPU, a ten hour proof of work for a phone.
In reality you can do maybe a 1/10000th of that before the latency hit to real users becomes unacceptable.
And then, the cost is not per page. The cost is per cookie. Even if the cookie is rate-limited, you could easily use it for 1000 downloads.
Those two errors are multiplicative, so your numbers are probably off by about 7 orders of magnitudes. The cost of the PoW is not going to be $2B, but about $200.
Re: Why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel?
#819> The CAPTCHA forces vistors to solve a problem designed to be very difficult for computers but trivial for humans I'm an unsure if this deadpan humor or if the author has never tried to solve a CAPTCHA that is something like "select the squares with an orthodox rabbi present"
I wonder if it's an intentional quirk that you can only pass some CAPTCHAs if you're a human who knows what an American fire hydrant or school bus looks like?
Google demanding I flag yellow cars when asked to flag taxis is the silliest Americanism I've seen. At least the school bus has SCHOOL BUS written all over it and fire hydrants aren't exactly an American exclusive thing.
On some Russian and Asian site I ran into trouble signing up for a forum using translation software because the CAPTCHA requires me to enter characters I couldn't read or reproduce. It doesn't happen as often as the Google thing, but the problem certainly isn't restricted to American sites!
Re: Why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel?
#820I'm a scraper developer and Anubis would have worked 10 - 20 years ago, but now all broad scrapers run on a real headless browser with full cookie support and costs relatively nothing in compute. I'd be surprised if LLM bots would use anything else given the fact that they have all of this compute and engineers already available. That being said, one point is very correct here - by far the best effort to resist broad…
> It took the author just few minutes to solve this but for someone like Perplexity it would take hours of engineering and maintenance to implement a solution for each custom implementation which is likely just not worth it.
These are trivial for an AI agent to solve though, even with very dumb watered down models.