I would promote this idea to all of my competitors. Nah mate, you don't have to ask her out right now. You can wait until next week ;)
Anyway, silver linings, looks like we're finally going to get widely adopted infra for microtransactions.
https://web.archive.org/web/20030202042510/http://www.openp2...
Are the AI companies worried about anything but their valuations?
I don’t care about their valuations, but I do care about the risks that they are creating for the economy, society, and the technological advancement, at large.
Micro transactions [in this case] are a great idea, these crawlers need to be taxed and made to pay for the unaccounted external costs. Furthermore, we need to fund any risk mitigations, security coordination, and other safety work. If these things are not imposed on the market, the most ruthless player will create the biggest mess they can get away with.
I don’t see a better way to do this, right now, than to allow Strips, or CF, to create some way to charge the crawlers. Imagine I have some really expensive content, I can put it behind the paywall, or subscription model, but that’s very specific to the human consumer. What if I do want to search engine or content aggregator to consume some of the content? It would be quite hard for me to sign an exclusive agreement with OpenAI, like what Reddit or NYT are doing. It might be quite beneficial to create some infrastructure to let bots automatically to pay for access. It might even be crypto based, I don’t think it really matters. It just has to be easy for me to integrate it, and the bots need to find it easy to use.
If we all start doing this, I think this could be of benefit to all content creators, such as musicians, movie makers, game developers, and even independent journalists.
We used to pay for software and things, but what has happened? Walled gardens and production monopolies are taking over. This has largely reduced the quality of all the content we consume.
Anyway, what’s wrong with making 2 cents? :)
Why not? At this point, any attempt to try to meet the bots halfway is doomed.
Not as in “1 out of 1000 legit requests get blocked” but “you’re going to block 100% of some person’s requests.”
More over, I actually pay for three different AI subscriptions, and use them a lot. I also think it’s fair that I pay for their services. I just want them to also pay for what they use.
But I’m seeing requests coming in from random IP addresses from all over the world using randomised user-agents. But somehow these are trying URLs in sequential order. A while ago this would be classed as a DDoS cyber attack.
I feel like it's the same issue that public resources are facing.
Step 1: public resource is freely available
Step 2: asshole shows up, drains the resource completely just because they can
Step 3: either resource is taken away, or it has massive security behind it
We don't even need a new law. What they're doing is already a felony, and there's a process already in place to go to a court and request unmasking of 10000 IP addresses.
they have one of the worst bot detection in the industry. but because everyone uses them, their huge false positive numbers won't show up anywhere.
And I only stand to gain from pay-to-crawl, so I don't really mind that play.
It makes sense doesn't it? If you own all the pipes, you can effectively block bad actors. But in reality what they do is to just block everyone who blocks advertising tracking and profiling tech (such as canvas fingerprint etc)... and because all vendors use cf, they all block those same clients, and they think there's some winner takes all magic happening with finely tuned blocklists. Don't fall for the marketing!
Try it yourself. Block those fingerprinting tech and try to access their own user forum. you get blocked. Now allow fingerprinting (even if emulated in a headless chrome!) and access by the most toxic vpn you can think off, access granted.
All cloudflare does is act like a gatekeep for monetizable-by-creepy-advertising-networks traffic, not bots. If the bots pay the small headless chrome tax, you get bombarded with their requests just fine.
So you can definitely block by IP, by fingerprint, both or neither
And Cloudflare is no exception, the "hello world" of bots is Cloudflare bypass.