Comment on Millions of websites to get 'game-changing' AI bot blocker
Concave1142@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Until the AI companies find a way around it. Love the idea so hopefully it causes at least 3 days of struggle for the AI crawlers.
Having said that… Can someone else put this in place so we do not have Cloudflare hosting everything where we would just be one intern away from a global outage. Please? Pretty please?
Yeah this will have absolutely no impact to gathering training data.
I assumed it was to block ai agents crawling it during requests, which they’d be unlikely to bypass in the web ui.
But no company spending millions on training will hesitate to have an agent appear as a regular desktop user to scrape data.
Does cloudflare still look at the agent? I thought they have more reliable data points.
I meant an ai agent not the browser agent. All data points can be spoofed and if not they’ll pay a human to scrape before they pay for content.
Okay, fair enough, I thought you meant just the user agent. Trouble with having a bot make it look like an actual user is looking at the data, is that it’s slow and inefficient. Trouble with paying humans to scrape the data is that it’s slow and inefficient. These companies want to ingest data ridiculously fast because there’s so much of it. If all else fails, they’ll resort to paying the content creators. But only if it’s data they really do think gives their model a competitive edge in some metric and they can’t pirate it. E.g I can see them paying for scientific research they can’t get from libgen, but not some rando’s blog post or local news website.
Proof of work seems to be working pretty well for many websites.
orclev@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
The problem is that the biggest service Cloudflare provides is DDoS protection, and doing that requires that you have more bandwidth available than your attacker. Having enough bandwidth to withstand modern botnet powered DDoS attacks is ridiculously expensive (and it’s also a finite resource, there’s only so much backbone infrastructure). Basically it’s economically infeasible to have multiple companies providing the service Cloudflare does. You might be able to get away with two companies doing so, but it’s unlikely you could manage more than that without some of them starting to go bankrupt.
acosmichippo@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
when a critical service is not economical for more than one business to do (natural monopoly), that’s when govt should be stepping in.
antonim@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
Which govt? I’m not comfortable with the idea of the current US govt having control over this sort of service.
acosmichippo@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
are you comfortable with a single corporation having control over this sort of service?
Kowowow@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
I wonder if it would be a good investment for a country to have their own then down the line expand to sell the same service to others
altkey@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
It’s OurFlare, comrade.