921–930 of 1001 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder what percentage of legitimate traffic is blocked by this. I would imagine that the majority of users don't have an account, by a large margin, correct?
I've had zero issues all day. Didn't even notice there was a problem, but I'm logged in.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah but he's full of crap; why would we believe anything he says about anything?
The above comment doesn't deserve to be downvoted. If Musk wants people to believe his statements, he should have refrained from being a serial liar. Now his reputation is in the trash, and he has only himself to blame.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This could easily be solved by making the unauthenticated access hard for machines to consume, like introducing delays or some kind of captcha or even just proof of work (reverse some hash). While the authenticated get all the snappiness they want. I'm strictly anti account, so he just lost me as audience. The next walled garden after Facebook and Instagram that won't ever see me again.
HTTP Status Code 429 exists for this very purpose. While I sympathise with the idea that services need to protect their content from scraping to power AIs, I can't help but feel its a convenient excuse for these companies to re-implement archaic philosophies about online services. i.e. Killing off 3rd party apps and walling their garden higher, both feel very boomer in their retreat from the openness of the internet…
No matter what you do, this will cost server infra. That's Musk's argument for disabling access altogether.
Therefore it would make sense to have a solution which burdens the client disproportionately in relation to the server. A burden so low for the casual user that it's negligible but in aggregate, at scale, would break things. Which is what he wants.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The choice is not between no change and drastic change, but selecting a rate of change that is appropriate. Things which do not change, die, as the only thing that is constant is change. Change or be changed.
I visit a few sites that never changed (or at least changed things only few were even aware of) and they live long enough to lose count of hordes of change-praisers appear and die. I believe this eternal loop of change is a trap that impatient people force themselves in. Instead of accustoming and learning the current state, they rush into another one with a change that has unclear implications. As a result, they nev…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This could easily be solved by making the unauthenticated access hard for machines to consume, like introducing delays or some kind of captcha or even just proof of work (reverse some hash). While the authenticated get all the snappiness they want. I'm strictly anti account, so he just lost me as audience. The next walled garden after Facebook and Instagram that won't ever see me again.
Unless the captcha is annoying enough to a significant degrees, I doubt that it would work. With all the money in the bucket, scrapers can just hire a captcha farm to get pass the captcha with help from a real human. Also a side note: distributed Web crawler is not unheard of these days, as well as residential IP proxies. Meaning the effectiveness of Proof of Work model maybe also limited.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Facebook news is shutting off in Canada where there are currently wildfires. I'm leaving no comment on why.
wrong. > The move comes in reaction to the federal government's Online News Act, Bill C-18, which would require the tech giant to pay Canadian media companies for linking to or otherwise repurposing their content online https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/2221275715931
From Elon's twitter ( https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1674942336583757825?s=20 ) "This will be unlocked shortly. Per my earlier post, drastic & immediate action was necessary due to EXTREME levels of data scraping. Almost every company doing AI, from startups to some of the biggest corporations on Earth, was scraping vast amounts of data. It is rather galling to have to bring large numbers of servers online on an…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Elon has a good point there. Much of the current AI hotness is predicated on stealing peoples content and exploiting the infrastructure that other people have built. I don’t think it’s acceptable. The licenses, compensation models, law, technical solutions, attribution, security and privacy all need time to catch up. Regulation has a role to play as its a bit of a free for all right now. The irony of Elon mentioning…
> Elon has a good point there. Much of the current AI hotness is predicated on stealing peoples content and exploiting the infrastructure that other people have built. I don’t think it’s acceptable. But then so is Twitter. They don’t produce any content whatsoever. The data they are having a fit about is not theirs, it’s been volunteered by the users. It’s the same line Reddit is pushing, and it’s bullshit. AI compan…
Taking/scrapping/stealing that data out of said platform for the benefit of your over-hyped “disruptive” startup - and implying that others should give you all for free - is the issue.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sorry I don’t buy it. Hundreds of millions of people use Twitter, and we are to understand that there are an enough people scraping to the extent that they had to suddenly take drastic action by shuttering unauthenticated access? Any dev would have told him that those supposedly scraping could simply setup Selenium or some other headless browser to login before scraping. This smells of another failed Musk experiment…
Not only that but unauthenticated access is the easiest thing to cache. There is no need to "bring large numbers of servers online". He's lying.
It can add nontrivial load.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have a bridge to sell anyone who believes this is true. AI companies have been a boon to businesses that want to lock down user data and now have an excuse. It may be true to the extent that Musk is legitimately angry that Twitter isn't getting a piece of that AI VC money (I'm sure he is). But: A) Twitter would probably move in this direction even if AI companies didn't exist, this is an excuse. Nothing about Musk'…
FWIW: I've been scraping the shit out of social media for my AI training. I also do Amazon, AliExpress, etc. Libs like puppeteer is so good these days that it's impossible to tell real users from fake traffic. Most of the blocks are just IP blocks.