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

positiveblue.substack.com

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

#91

Post by esseph »

positiveblue wrote: post #42
whimsicalism wrote: post #19

[flagged]

Narrator: but he did put effort... Anyway, main take aways for you: - We REALLY need a way to tie identity to agent/requests - The idea of registering with cloudflare to be able to access a website is bad - Sites should be able to block whoever they want or make anything they desire a requirement (there are people that has login only with google after all) We have the right primitives to build something that works fo…

Tying identity of any thing to this is a road we should not go down. I hear you, but this will get extended to people, which is already under threat in a lot of places.

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

#92

Post by xg15 »

Gud wrote: post #27
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…

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".

That's a mantra, not a solution.

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

#93

Post by rustc »

littlecranky67 wrote: post #81
andy99 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> 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.

What about licenses like CC-BY-NC (Creative Commons - Non Commercial)?

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

#95

Post by moribvndvs »

I’m not necessarily coming to the defense of CF’s proposed solution, but it’s ridiculous and rather telling that the article mounts such a strong defense for agents around the notion they are simply completing user-directed tasks the user would otherwise do themselves, while avoiding the blatantly obvious issues of copyright, attribution, resource overusage, etc. presented by agents.

It’s somewhat ironic to let fly the “free and open internet” battle cry on behalf of an industry that is openly destroying it.

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

#96

Post by nromiun »

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.

Even if you write the best backend in the world where do you host them? AFAIK Cloudflare is the only free CDN.

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

#97

Post by stronglikedan »

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 should have the same protections as an EULA, where the crawler is the end user, and crawlers should be required to read it and apply it.

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

#98

Post by PaulRobinson »

meindnoch wrote: post #79

The private tracker community have long figured this out. Put content behind invite-only user registration, and treeban users if they ever break the rules.

This doesn't scale to the general web, does it? I think invite-only might work to build communities, but you end up in the situation we're in today where people are buying/selling invites, and that's with treebans in place.

I do fear the actions of the current bot landscape is going to lead to almost everything going behind auth walls though, and perhaps even paid auth walls.

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

#99

Post by positiveblue »

pluto_modadic wrote: post #39

I think it shouldn't require registering /with/ cloudflare. cloudflare should just look up the .well-known referenced and double check for impersonation, and keep score on how well behaved each one is.

This is one of the main points :+1:

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

#100

Post by Gud »

Analemma_ wrote: post #50
Gud wrote: post #27

Earlier 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".

How does an agent help my website not get crushed by traffic load, and how is this proposal any different from the gatekeeping problem to the open web, except even less transparent and accountable because now access is gated by logic inside an impenetrable web of NN weights? This seems like slogan-based planning with no actual thought put into it.

Whatever is working against the AI doesn’t have to be an AI agent.
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