Disclaimer: The article linked is from a single source with a single perspective. Make sure to cross-check information against multiple sources to get a comprehensive view on the situation.
A senior Palestinian official has called on the United States to compel Israel to accept a ceasefire and prisoner swap deal with Hamas, following the movement’s announcement of accepting the deal put forth by Egypt and Qatar.
Disclaimer: The article linked is from a single source with a single perspective. Make sure to cross-check information against multiple sources to get a comprehensive view on the situation.
Disclaimer: The article linked is from a single source with a single perspective. Make sure to cross-check information against multiple sources to get a comprehensive view on the situation.
If you've read about the sudden appearance of age verification across the internet in the UK and thought it would never happen in the U.S., take note: many politicians want the same or even more strict laws.
Interior Sec. Doug Burgum told an AI conference that data centers should be powered by coal, gas, and nuclear. Ruth Porat called his comments "fantastic.”
Google CEO praised Interior Secretary Doug Burgum for slamming the “climate extremist agenda” and sayings data centers should be powered by coal, gas, and nuclear.
Google CEO praised Interior Secretary Doug Burgum for slamming the “climate extremist agenda” and sayings data centers should be powered by coal, gas, and nuclear.
At the end of each shift, officers’ BWV footage was uploaded and stored to a central hub which could be accessed and managed, along with all of SYP’s digital evidence, via a secure system.
Following an upgrade in May 2023, the secure system began to struggle processing BWV data and a local drive workaround was put in place.
In August 2023 SYP identified that its BWV file storage was very low and further investigation found that 96,174 pieces of original footage had been deleted from its system.
The following month it was found the deletion had taken place on 26 July 2023 and included the loss of data relating to 126 criminal cases, only three of the cases were impacted by the loss. Of those three cases, SYP states one may have progressed to the first court hearing if BWV had been available. However, as there was no additional independent evidence to prove the offence, progression to prosecution stage was already uncertain.
Prior to the deletion, 95,033 pieces of BWV footage had been copied to a new system that SYP was implementing but, due to poor record keeping, SYP remain unable to confirm the exact number of files deleted without copies made.
PI filed a complaint with the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) against the Home Office’s policy and practice of collecting and processing data through two algorithmic tools used in immigration enforcement operations.
Key findings 1. UK Home Office’s uses two algorithms for immigration purposes seemingly without sufficient safeguards to protect the right to privacy and meet data protection standards. 2. Migrants appear to be subject to automated decision making without adequate human review processes. 3. Migrants are not adequately informed and therefore are unable to challenge invasive data processing activities of automated tools.
On the basis of a year of legal research by PI as well as documents obtained by other civil society organisations, and evidence provided by legal representatives fighting these automated systems on behalf of their clients, on the 18th August 2025, we…
This essay examines Iran’s most extensive internet disruption since 2022, imposed during the June 2025 conflict with Israel, when missile strikes quickly evolved into coordinated cyberattacks on banking, radar, and communications systems. Drawing from direct experience during the blackout, it traces how connectivity collapsed through staged throttling, protocol suppression, and full reliance on the National Information Network. What began as a technical containment strategy also became an improvised shield against foreign intrusion – one shaped as much by sanctions-driven hardware shortages and reliance on insecure gray-market equipment as by military calculus.
By situating Iran’s shutdown alongside wartime digital restrictions in places like Ukraine, the essay reframes shutdowns as contested acts of defense in a securitised internet. It explores how the shift from an open, decentralised network toward nationalised, politically bordered infrastructures is accelerating under the pressures of war, sanctions, and private platform power. Ultimately, it argues that the “state of exception” once theorised by Schmitt and Agamben is becoming the default operating mode online, eroding universal digital rights. In such moments, ideals like internet freedom survive only if continuously defended and reinvented, even when survival demands compromises unthinkable in peacetime.
You might want to watch Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece A Clockwork Orange or read the same named book by Anthony Burgess. It's not only worth it, it's basically part of the cultural canon.
In a very general sense it is, the ads should pay for the content. But fuck them because even paid services add ads. And paying for Internet access, you can't tell me what I can and can't block. Good luck proving people are blocking ads at the DNS level.
Loosely defined legal terms. A "computer program" can be copyrighted. You can write your own that does the same thing but you cannot copy the other code and slap your label on it. With a lot of imagination and bending the words of the shitty outdated law, you could say a website is also a "computer program." You cannot just go into the code and change it, e.g. by blocking ads. The lower court ruling didn't take this possible interpretation into account and now has to rule again with this in mind. Nothing's been decided yet. We're running a little hot in this thread on misleading headlines.
That’s foul. I wouldn’t touch YouTube without Ublock. You ever try watching that garbage without it?
The one app game I like(d) was Scrabble. It was sold and is now an endless stream of ads. Turn, ad, turn, ad, turn, ad, nonstop. It’s unplayable. I had to delete it.
Ad blockers make media consumable. Granted, less screen time would likely benefit everyone.
No, the regular Scrabble app. There are solo games, but mostly one on one games with strangers. And a speed competition more in keeping with real life play.
EA originally owned it. I bought it for $5 back on the first iPhone. Limited to banner ads. Then it died, because it was sold. Now it’s ScrabbleGO. The same with some eyeroll garbage for collecting new tile skins and a store for new skins and some pay to play. If that wasn’t bad enough, every time you take a turn, an ad plays after. Banners included as well. It’s unplayable in its current state.
The closest approximation would be words with friends. Also riddled with ads, triggered to play every 1-2 turns. Also unplayable. Also in addition to banner ads.
Scrabble is officially dead outside of real life play on a physical board. Which makes me sad. Real life play almost no one plays defensively so it’s just aggravating.
Yeah for anyone who doesn't know them, this is basically the fox news of Germany. WELT, BILD, and NIUS are the biggest publications I believe and if you see them please don't even dignify them with a read or watch.
They didn't rule it, they overturned a previous decision. Not that this isn't bad but it does not mean right now that using ad blockers is illegal. I also think reading other articles on this, that the ruling is also more focused on Adblock plus working with advertisers to allow some ads but block others.
Profitez des vidéos et de la musique que vous aimez, mettez en ligne des contenus originaux, et partagez-les avec vos amis, vos proches et le monde entier.
Let's take a deep breath and consider what's happened. The Federal Court of Justice has sent the case back to the lower court. They have not ruled on anything. They have not said ad blocking is piracy. They have essentially said: lower court, you had 25 boxes to tick but you only ticked 24 in your ruling. Go back and do one that ticks all of them.
It's entirely possible that the lower court will change its ruling based on the intricacies of German copyright law, which is shit. But it's not very likely if you ask me. Regardless, whoever loses will appeal it again. This rodeo is far from over. And when it's eventually over the technology will have moved on, with any luck the law along with it, and the only beneficiaries will have been the lawyers.
So the headline should read more like "German court does not rule out that ad blocking could be a copyright infringement."
The argument that Axel Springer is just doing it for their love of democracy is also comical. Media pluralism is important, I agree with them that far, but they are stuck in an outdated mindset. They launched a silly tabloid Fox News wannabe TV channel and failed. They are trying to force eyeballs on their content like you are at a news agent. Meanwhile, news is happening on TikTok and so-called AI is going to reduce their page views to dust. By the time we get a final ruling they will have pivoted strategy 10 times to keep the c-suite in caviar while the established media business that made them successful is rotting away under their assess.
Yes. The article only links to it in German but "Werbeblocker IV / Ad Blocker IV" on July 31 was the overturning case.
Axel previously tried twice in 2018 and 2023 and failed. Now that it is overturned, he is going to the Higher Regional Court of Hamburg to get a new ruling.
However I don't speak German or live in Germany, this is my understanding of this article and these court cases.
Here's a thing about LLMs, they will effectively make laws like this meaningless. Law comes in to enforce against a company building a program to block ads, extension goes off market. Someone asks their LLM "create an extension function referencing the same data set for my browser that performs the same function" boom new extension with no central point of distribution. Share the prompt on a forum, now everyone has a custom ad blocker. Or not so far down the road, LLM is directly built into the browser, no extension needed just prompt "do not display known advertisements on pages I request before loading, but perform background activity which gives feedback to the site that ads have loaded" boom done.
In a way, local LLMs are like distributed applications, they make enforcement against specific program functions pretty much impossible.
No. This is how the legal system works. When you appeal to a higher court, they can make a call themselves when massive mistakes were made at the lower level or they can say the lower court overlooked something and then make them redo their work. It's a convenient choice for the higher judges not to have to do more work themselves. But it's part of the process.
As the main comment explained: this is not saying "you got the wrong result", this is saying " the way you reached that result is not the proper way for our justice system".
So they are just saying that the lower court didn't do it's due diligence and needs to look again at the case, this time considering the parts they missed the first time.
It is not uncommon in Germany that cases like this end in the same result
To try and explain it in an easier to understand way:
Person X murders Person Y
Court A says "Guilty, because you suck"
Court Higher B says: "Suckiness is not a proper judicial term, do the whole thing again"
Court A says "guilty, because here is the witness testimony, your finger prints on the murder weapon and the video footage of you killing person Y".
Same result as before, but this time in a proper manner fitting a proper judicial system.
Here's a thing about LLMs, they will effectively make laws like this meaningless. Law comes in to enforce against a company building a program to block ads, extension goes off market. Someone asks their LLM "create an extension function referencing the same data set for my browser that performs the same function" boom new extension with no central point of distribution. Share the prompt on a forum, now everyone has a custom ad blocker. Or not so far down the road, LLM is directly built into the browser, no extension needed just prompt "do not display known advertisements on pages I request before loading, but perform background activity which gives feedback to the site that ads have loaded" boom done.
In a way, local LLMs are like distributed applications, they make enforcement against specific program functions pretty much impossible.
Of course torrentfreak would use the most outrageous & clickbaity title possible. It's not so bad though. Discussed in another post:
I speak German legalese (don’t ask) so I went to the actual source and read up on the decision.
The way I read it, the higher court simply stated that the Appeals court didn’t consider the impact of source code to byte code transformation in their ruling, meaning they had not provided references justifying the fact they had ignored the transformation. Their contention is that there might be protected software in the byte code, and if the ad blocker modified the byte code (either directly or by modifying the source), then that would constitute a modification of code and hence run afoul of copyright protections as derivative work.
Sounds more like, “Appeals court has to do their homework” than “ad blockers illegal.”
The ruling is a little painful to read, because as usual the courts are not particularly good at technical issues or controversies, so don’t quote me on the exact details. In particular, they use the word Vervielfältigung a lot, which means (mass) copy, which is definitely not happening here. The way it reads, Springer simply made the case that a particular section of the ruling didn’t have any reasoning or citations attached and demanded them, which I guess is fair. More billable hours for the lawyers! @
Nah, come on — Springer is claiming that a website is a computer program.
But that's not quite accurate.
HTML and CSS aren't computer programs - they're markup/style sheet languages. They define structure and appearance but don’t perform computation or logic. JavaScript, is a programming language and can make a website behave like a program. The same goes for server-side technologies like PHP.
However, what Adblockers typically do is prevent certain resources from loading. They don't modify the underlying program logic itself - they're just manipulating the DOM or blocking elements before they render. So in many cases, we're not interfering with a "program" in the traditional sense, but rather adjusting the output or content that gets displayed.
Imagine trying to explain that in court. Yes, your honour, it's a sort of object-based model representing the document. No, it's not really a model of an object exactly. Yes, it's made of bits and bytes, the same kind as you would use in a computer program, but it has that in common with... no, it does not actually object to anything...
Very much this. See UK's legislation for terrorism and activism and how it's being used to squash peaceful protests for a current example.
What you should want instead is widespread independent journalism along with a transparent government, national broadcasting and a well educated, critically thinking society. If you try to control information by omission and restriction, you only make it more appealing as it seems like a cover-up. Example: how many times have you heard of the Epstein files in recent months and years? It could've been a grocery shopping list and the effect would've been the same because of how it's been handled.
100%. Governments controlling information has always been associated with authoritarianism and oppression. This power and control is always eventually abused and misused. The solution to misinformation is information.
They have not been declared illegal (yet). The lower court just has to consider additional aspects according to the BGH and may possibly come to a different decision. In any case this only applies to adblock plus for now.
You and I both know that these precedents get concocted to be selectively applied. There's no concern for the actual letter of the law here, it's just a means to an end.
If I understand it correctly, they're arguing that any unauthorized "modification of the computer program" (i.e. the web page) is a copyright violation.
This wouldn't only affect adblockers... this would affect any browser feature, extension, or user script that modifies the page in any way, shape, or form... translators, easy reading modes, CSS modifiers (e.g., dark mode for pages that don't have it, or anything that improves readability for people with vision problems), probably screen readers...
This would essentially turn web browsers into the HTML equivalent of PDF readers, without any of the customisability that's been standard for decades...
In other news: sunglasses are now prohibited in public transport, they were found to modify the perception of ads, modifying the intellectual property of ad maker in public places, the impact was a reduced market values of ad space in public transit which would have forced the city to increase the ticket price.
Stay tuned for news on those disgusting blinker pirate: those people blink twice more often than normal people which makes them see only half as many ads, police forces has invested millions in brand new blinking frequency detector, in order to more easily catch those dangerous criminals.
Fuck google but as someone whos job it os to maintain a legacy website using xhtml/xslt, no, this is not a way forward. The concept is cool but the language itself - way too abstract and verbose compared to HTML templates.
It goes back before AMP, according to the article. It also briefly lists several other attempts to fuck the general web standardization in favor of whatever the fuck they want, including two I wasn't aware: deprecating XSLT and SMIL
Ya I’ve heard this before! I’ve also heard there is still a lot of problem solving to learn for maintenance and some problems that often arise. But haven’t taken the time yet to familiarize myself with it.
as far as I know, Debian is the "gold standard" for stable linux to the point of being one of the most famous distros used on servers as well.
Exceptions are using unstable/testing versions of debian or accounting for an windows program to just work perfectly under wine (but that is a microsoft-linux integration which MS almost always wants to not happen)
The amazing thing about Linux is there are distros for any purpose. If you want stability there are distros focused on that. Yeah, the popular ones are often bleeding edge, or near bleeding edge, but you don't have to use one that's using the latest updates.
In what way? The most stable Linux is far better than what Microsoft could yank out of their AI asses. Debian and Red Hat has been the staple of many servers around the globe. Hell, this Lemmy instance might be on one of those.
It's only when you tinker around too hard and fast then you have problems in Linux. But there are ways to get things back on track easily compared to Windows.
Wait 3 weeks before applying updates and let other people be the guinea pigs. It's usually enough time for things like this to be caught and withdrawn by MS.
I delayed the 24h2 update as long as Windows physically let me which was like a month or two I think? After that delay ended my only option was to download cause it was popping up in an intrusive way every single hour... God I hate windows so much.
Again, why are people paying money for this bullshit?
This is just normal and on par for Microsoft. When was the last time they didn't fix a security issue because they didn't wanted the bad publicity, causing the US government to be hacked?
Oohh, we will never do it again, pinky promise!
Microsoft's evil but oh my fucking god, they're so incompetent that they can't even be evil without fucking shit up
Every thread has one Linux bro, stumbling around dazed and confused, still searching to understand why people use a different OS. Always asking "Why do people even use that?" Ignorant of the litany of reasons the real world behaves the way it does.
Windows sucks, in a lot of ways, we get it. But holy hell find a different schrick.
I understand why people use different operating systems. Ill judge you for mac os but i kinda get it. I think slackware or something works for some use cases.
Windows is just ijsane though. You're insane for using it.
Maybe has something to do with making assumptions about how the nand controller is going to allocate things across superpages but that is a stupid random guess and also I have no idea why it’s an OS issue but boy do they keep finding ways
os updates write large amount of data to disk at once. especially a highly bloated os like modern windows. whatever the trigger, it's still faulty nand controller. you can very well cooy a 20G file and see disk is corrupted.
My assumption was it had something to do with the drivers for the controller, and the update flooding it faster than it could take data and not caching everything it couldn't cram into controller DRAM, causing parts to just get dropped wholesale.
modern ssds have on board firmware that executes actual nvme (or sata) commands. so it's possible a bad dma driver can coincide with a firmware bug to result in unexpected behaviour.
Welp, Windows 11 is going to make me quit my sysadmin job of 15+ years, after all. I already refuse to use it at home but have no options at work. Bet dollars to donuts this was some sort of vibe coder AI fuck up we'll never be able to confirm.
Start looking into desktop environments, everyones quick to suggest distros, but de imo is more what matters day to day, most distros just work and will help you grab the same stuff in different background ways and/or with different terminal commands.
They should all have de options or have community alternatives of them that come with a certain de like kde or gnome.
Close to windows, minimal customization (still more than default windows
Cinnamon
Iphone + cydia, opinionated base experience with extensions that can completely change the look and add stuff like panels/dock
gnome + extension store
Windows but ultra customizable, tons of settings and directly customizable from the ui itself by right clicking
kde plasma
Keyboard user, hand always on it, like shortcuts and code editor based customization with documentation
And remember that "DE hopping" is much easier than distro hopping, as you can install multiple and try them out without reinstalling your system.
Personally I'm a shill for Plasma, as I think that their motto "simple by default, powerful when needed" is very true. Out of the box, you get a grandma-ready UX that's pretty intuitive to any Windows or Mac user, but once you start to dig in there's so many "power user" features. Now every time I'm on a different system I instantly miss all the little QoL that I never even think about, and almost everything is neatly packaged in the system settings or context menus, without having to install extensions or set up a dozen different components
Imo plasma settings/options can be a bit overwhelming, cinnamon can be underwhelming lol, as a former cydia user, I really like toggleable extensions with indidual settings that can be as complex/basic as they need to be.
My main issue with plasma is I cant stop tinkering with my theme/ui because the settings are so easily accesible. I get distracted easily. Gnome with a few curated extensions helps me focus, realized on accident using it because davinci resolve had issues on kde plasma using the global menu (didn't resolve after removing the menu)
I thought I was the only one who found KDE to be far TOO customizable. I used GNOME on openSUSE and actually enjoyed it. Used KDE on PoP! and hated it. Of course, the distro may have played a part in that. PoP never seemed to run right on my dual gfx Yoga 720. Using Cinnamon with Mint on it and I like it, but agree with a lack of all desired customization options. I can do about 90% of the tweaks I like to make.
I've never heard of cydia, though. Of course I'm like a 110yo on Windows when it comes to Linux usage. I couldn't even get openSUSE to reinstall from a flash drive after testing some other distros. Kept getting out of memory when it would attempt to install. I do think it was my favorite flavor of all the ones I tried!
I so much want to, but the programs I run are partly windows only. I don't know how to switch yet. Next to that, I tried Linux once but was unable to reach netwerk drives from my NAS. I tried everything, none of the solutions I found actually worked. I seem to have a curse running into issues no one else had. Struggling my whole life with that. Today I spent the entire day fixing Kodi, which suddenly stopped working. None of the solutions on internet worked. I managed to fix it my own way, eventually. Just to play a video without losing my "videos watched".
MS is working hard to force me though. I'm almost as far as to say goodbye to apps I've used my whole life. Like Directory Opus for example.
I used total commander when I was young, but I like the folder tree view and the massive amount of options to personalize it to my needs. Also the flawless network drive and ftp compatibility, tabs, it's own file transfer system and mass file renaming function. Haven't found something similar yet (but maybe didn't search well enough). Oh and color options, so my screens are all dark view exactly the way I want it.
I haven't had disk issues, am running a 980 Pro SSD currently, but I've definitely noticed other weirdness that sure feels more like that? Half-Life crashing repeatedly in map loads sometimes succeeding fine and other times not. Firefox broke wholesale until I reinstalled it and even then had to do a refresh to fully solve it. I haven't seen anything else weird thankfully but this definitely has me concerned and glad I'm backing up with a very long rolling period just in case. Gonna uninstall this update for sure.
Well, do it manually then! Without internet, you can't send any tracking to the corporate, and without a working drive the data will be unreadable after you are done ;)
I think I do but I'm not sure. I seem to remember some years back when a kernel version was released and due to a bug on either a driver or a filesystem, as soon as you started writing it would override the partition table or something like that
I think I do but I'm not sure. I seem to remember some years back when a kernel version was released and due to a bug on either a driver or a filesystem, as soon as you started writing it would override the partition table or something like that
German publisher Axel Springer, owner of brands including Bild and Die Welt, has been given another opportunity to have ad blocking outlawed on copyright grounds. After a series of defeats in its years-long legal action against the makers of Adblock Plus, the publisher appealed to the Federal Court of Justice. Germany's top court has now overturned a 2023 ruling by the Higher Regional Court of Hamburg, referring the case back for reconsideration of the core issues.
Open any consumer electronics catalog from around the 1980s to the early 2000s and you are overwhelmed by a smörgåsbord of devices, covering any audio-visual and similar entertainment and hobby nee…
Disclaimer: The article linked is from a single source with a single perspective. Make sure to cross-check information against multiple sources to get a comprehensive view on the situation.
Various vulnerabilities in Intel’s internal sites allowed unauthorized users to access the personal data of approximately 270,000 employees, more than the company currently employs. Easy-to-circumvent logins and hard-coded login credentials were the weakest links.
Intel data breach: employee data could be accessed via API
Various vulnerabilities in Intel’s internal sites allowed unauthorized users to access the personal data of approximately 270,000 employees, more than the company currently employs. Easy-to-circumvent logins and hard-coded login credentials were the weakest links.
Various vulnerabilities in Intel’s internal sites allowed unauthorized users to access the personal data of approximately 270,000 employees, more than the company currently employs. Easy-to-circumvent logins and hard-coded login credentials were the weakest links.
Disclaimer: The article linked is from a single source with a single perspective. Make sure to cross-check information against multiple sources to get a comprehensive view on the situation.
Disclaimer: The article linked is from a single source with a single perspective. Make sure to cross-check information against multiple sources to get a comprehensive view on the situation.
I get the centralization concerns, but I would think that's on the consumer since there are other options. As for the fascist content, as another commenter said, they could risk their safe harbor if they started stated regulating content that they weren't legally required to regulate.
They’re not. They’re using this as an excuse to become paid gatekeepers of the internet as we know it. All that’s happening is that Cloudflare is using this to menuever into position where they can say “nice traffic you’ve got there - would be a shame if something happened to it”.
This feels like cloudflare trying to collect rent from both sides instead of doing what’s best for the website owners.
There is a problem with AI crawlers, but these technologies are essentially doing a search, fetching a several pages, scanning/summarizing them, then presenting the findings to the user.
I don’t really think that’s wrong, it’s just a faster version of rummaging through the SEO shit you do when you Google something.
(I’ve never used perplexity, I do use Kagi’s ki assistant for similar search. It runs 3 searches and scans the top results and then provides citations)
On the flip side, most websites are so ad-ridden these days a reader mode or other summary tool is almost required for normal browsing. Not saying that AI is the right move, but I can understand not wanting to visit the actual page any more.
Search engines been going relatively fine for decades now. But the crawlers from AI companies basically DDOS hosts in comparison, sending so many requests in such a short interval. Crawling dynamic links as well that are expensive to render compared to a static page, ignoring the robots.txt entirely, or even using it discover unlinked pages.
Servers have finite resources, especially self hosted sites, while AI companies have disproportinately more at their disposal, easily grinding other systems to a halt by overwhelming them with requests.
Cloudflare runs as a CDN/cache/gateway service in front of a ton of websites. Their service is to help protect against DDOS and malicious traffic.
A few weeks ago cloudflare announced they were going to block AI crawling (good, in my opinion). However they also added a paid service that these AI crawlers can use, so it actually becomes a revenue source for them.
This is a response to that from Perplexity who run an AI search company. I don’t actually know how their service works, but they were specifically called out in the announcement and Cloudflare accused them of “stealth scraping” and ignoring robots.txt and other things.
A few weeks ago cloudflare announced they were going to block AI crawling (good, in my opinion). However they also added a paid service that these AI crawlers can use, so it actually becomes a revenue source for them.
I think it's also worth pointing out that all of the big AI companies are currently burning through cash at an absolutely astonishing rate, and none of them are anywhere close to being profitable. So pay-walling the data they use is probably gonna be pretty painful for their already-tortured bottom line (good).
Perplexity (an "AI search engine" company with 500 million in funding) can't bypass cloudflare's anti-bot checks. For each search Perplexity scrapes the top results and summarizes them for the user. Cloudflare intentionally blocks perplexity's scrapers because they ignore robots.txt and mimic real users to get around cloudflare's blocking features. Perplexity argues that their scraping is acceptable because it's user initiated.
Personally I think cloudflare is in the right here. The scraped sites get 0 revenue from Perplexity searches (unless the user decides to go through the sources section and click the links) and Perplexity's scraping is unnecessarily traffic intensive since they don't cache the scraped data.
…and Perplexity's scraping is unnecessarily traffic intensive since they don't cache the scraped data.
That seems almost maliciously stupid. We need to train a new model. Hey, where’d the data go? Oh well, let’s just go scrape it all again. Wait, did we already scrape this site? No idea, let’s scrape it again just to be sure.
I think it boils down to "consent" and "remuneration".
I run a website, that I do not consent to being accessed for LLMs. However, should LLMs use my content, I should be compensated for such use.
So, these LLM startups ignore both consent, and the idea of remuneration.
Most of these concepts have already been figured out for the purpose of law, if we consider websites much akin to real estate: Then, the typical trespass laws, compensatory usage, and hell, even eminent domain if needed ie, a city government can "take over" the boosted post feature to make sure alerts get pushed as widely and quickly as possible.
That all sounds very vague to me, and I don't expect it to be captured properly by law any time soon. Being accessed for LLM? What does it mean for you and how is it different from being accessed by a user? Imagine you host a weather forecast. If that information is public, what kind of compensation do you expect from anyone or anything who accesses that data?
Is it okay for a person to access your site? Is it okay for a script written by that person to fetch data every day automatically? Would it be okay for a user to dump a page of your site with a headless browser? Would it be okay to let an LLM take a look at it to extract info required by a user? Have you heard about changedetection.io project? If some of these sound unfair to you, you might want to put a DRM on your data or something.
Would you expect a compensation from me after reading your comment?
That all sounds very vague to me, and I don’t expect it to be captured properly by law any time soon.
It already has been captured, properly in law, in most places. We can use the US as an example: Both intellectual property and real property have laws already that cover these very items.
What does it mean for you and how is it different from being accessed by a user?
Well, does a user burn up gigawatts of power, to access my site every time? That's a huge different.
Imagine you host a weather forecast. If that information is public, what kind of compensation do you expect from anyone or anything who accesses that data?
Depends on the terms of service I set for that service.
Is it okay for a person to access your site?
Sure!
Is it okay for a script written by that person to fetch data every day automatically?
Sure! As long as it doesn't cause problems for me, the creator and hoster of said content.
Would it be okay for a user to dump a page of your site with a headless browser?
See above. Both power usage and causing problems for me.
Would it be okay to let an LLM take a look at it to extract info required by a user?
No. I said, I do not want my content and services to be used by and for LLMs.
Have you heard about changedetection.io project?
I have now. And should a user want to use that service, that service, which charges 8.99/month for it needs to pay me a portion of that, or risk having their service blocked.
There no need to use it, as I already provide RSS feeds for my content. Use the RSS feed, if you want updates.
If some of these sound unfair to you, you might want to put a DRM on your data or something.
Or, I can just block them, via a service like Cloud Flare. Which I do.
Would you expect a compensation from me after reading your comment?
None. Unless you're wanting to access if via an LLM. Then I want compensation for the profit driven access to my content.
Both intellectual property and real property have laws already that cover these very items.
And it causes a lot of trouble to many people and pains me specifically. Information should not be gated or owned in a way that would make it illegal for anyone to access it under proper conditions. License expiration causing digital work to die out, DRM causing software to break, idiotic license owners not providing appropriate service, etc.
Well, does a user burn up gigawatts of power, to access my site every time?
Doing a GET request doesn't do that.
As long as it doesn't cause problems for me, the creator and hoster of said content.
What kind of problems that would be?
Both power usage and causing problems for me.
?? How? And what?
do not want my content and services to be used by and for LLMs.
You have to agree that at one point "be used by LLM" would not be different from "be used by a user".
which charges 8.99/month
It's self-hosted and free.
Use the RSS feed, if you want updates.
How does that prohibit usage and processing of your info? That sounds like "I won't be providing any comments on Lemmy website, if you want my opinion you can mail me at a@b.com"
I can just block them, via a service like Cloud Flare. Which I do.
That will never block all of them. Your info will be used without your consent and you will not feel troubled from it. So you might not feel troubled if more things do the same.
None. Unless you're wanting to access if via an LLM. Then I want compensation for the profit driven access to my content.
What if I use my local hosted LLM? Anyway, the point is, selling text can't work well, and you're going to spend much more resources on collecting and summarizing data about how your text was used and how others benefited from it, in order to get compensation, than it worths.
Also, it might be the case that some information is actually worthless when compared to a service provided by things like LLM, even though they use that worthless information in the process.
I'm all for killing off LLMs, btw. Concerns of site makers who think they are being damaged by things like Perplexity are nothing compared to what LLMs do to the world. Maybe laws should instead make it illegal to waste energy. Before energy becomes the main currency.
Information should not be gated or owned in a way that would make it illegal for anyone to access it under proper conditions.
Then you don't believe content creators should have any control over their own works?
The "proper conditions" are deemed by the content creator, not the consumers.
Doing a GET request doesn’t do that.
Not at all. It consumes at most, a watt.
What kind of problems that would be?
Increasing my hosting bill, to accommodate the senseless traffic being sent my way?
Outages for my site, making my content unavailable for legitimate users?
You have to agree that at one point “be used by LLM” would not be different from “be used by a user”.
Not at all. LLMs are not users.
It’s self-hosted and free.
If you want, or they charge for the hosted version. If they want to use a paid for version, then they can divert some of that revenue to me, the creator, because without creators, they would have no product.
How does that prohibit usage and processing of your info? That sounds like “I won’t be providing any comments on Lemmy website, if you want my opinion you can mail me at a@b.com”
That's a apples and oranges comparison, and you know it.
That will never block all of them. Your info will be used without your consent and you will not feel troubled from it. So you might not feel troubled if more things do the same.
Perplexity seems to be troubled by it.
What if I use my local hosted LLM? Anyway, the point is, selling text can’t work well, and you’re going to spend much more resources on collecting and summarizing data about how your text was used and how others benefited from it, in order to get compensation, than it worths.
If selling text can't work well, then why do LLM products insist on using my text, to sell it?
Also, it might be the case that some information is actually worthless when compared to a service provided by things like LLM, even though they use that worthless information in the process.
LLMs are a net negative, as far as costs go. They consume far more in resources than they provide in benefit. If my information was worthless without an LLM, it's worthless with an LLM, therefore, LLMs don't need to access it. Periodt.
The bottom line? Content creators get the first say in how their content is used, and consumed. You are not entitled to their labor, for free, and without condition.
Don't feel like spending time on this anymore. To me you are not different from idiots who destroys information once they can't sell it anymore, who sue webarchive, who calls pirated copy a lost sale, who shut down game servers etc. LLM might be worse than those but Perplexity is certainly a lesser player in the field.
LLM might be worse than those but Perplexity is certainly a lesser player in the field.
Its a good thing I don't just block Perplexity, but all of the LLMs.
And I wont comment on the rest of this, but lets consider another form of property: Real estate.
You own a plot of land. Should others be able to use it, however they feel, whenever they feel like? Or should you have a say in how it gets used?
If you feel like you should have exclusive say in how real estate you own is used and when and by whom, why is intellectual property any different? There must be value in using it, so what's wrong with revenues generated by that use being shared (At least) with the creator?
Last I checked, I'm not seeing rev shares from any of these LLMs that have certainly used my code and other content to train?
they cant get their ai to check a box that says "I am not a robot"? I'd think thatd be a first year comp sci student level task. And robots.txt files were basically always voluntary compliance anyway.
Cloudflare actually fully fingerprints your browser and even sells that data. Thats your IP, TLS, operating system, full browser environment, installed extensions, GPU capabilities etc. It's all tracked before the box even shows up, in fact the box is there to give the runtime more time to fingerprint you.
This post refers to Google ReCaptcha v2 (not the latest version)
Recently Google introduced a simplified "captcha" verification system (video) that enables users to pass the "captcha" just by clic...
you're not wrong, but it also allows more than 99.8% of the bot traffic through too on text challenges. Its like the TSA of website security. Its mostly there to keep the user busy while cloudflare places itself in a man in the middle of your encrypted connection to a third party. The only difference between cloudflare and a malicious attacker is cloudflares stated intention not to be evil. With that and 3 dollars I can buy myself a single hard shell taco from tacobell.
When a firm outright admits to bypassing or trying to bypass measures taken to keep them out, you think that would be a slam dunk case of unauthorized access under the CFAA with felony enhancements.
Fuck that. I don't need prosecutors and the courts to rule that accessing publicly available information in a way that the website owner doesn't want is literally a crime. That logic would extend to ad blockers and editing HTML/js in an "inspect element" tag.
That logic would not extend to ad blockers, as the point of concern is gaining unauthorized access to a computer system or asset. Blocking ads would not be considered gaining unauthorized access to anything. In fact it would be the opposite of that.
Ehhhh, you are gaining access to content due to assumption you are going to interact with ads and thus, bring revenue to the person and/or company producing said content. If you block ads, you remove authorisation brought to you by ads.
Carefull, this way even not looking at an ads positioned at the bottom of the page (or anyway not visible without scrolling) would mean to remove authorisation brought to you by ads.
And my point is that defining "unauthorized" to include visitors using unauthorized tools/methods to access a publicly visible resource would be a policy disaster.
If I put a banner on my site that says "by visiting my site you agree not to modify the scripts or ads displayed on the site," does that make my visit with an ad blocker "unauthorized" under the CFAA? I think the answer should obviously be "no," and that the way to define "authorization" is whether the website puts up some kind of login/authentication mechanism to block or allow specific users, not to put a simple request to the visiting public to please respect the rules of the site.
To me, a robots.txt is more like a friendly request to unauthenticated visitors than it is a technical implementation of some kind of authentication mechanism.
Scraping isn't hacking. I agree with the Third Circuit and the EFF: If the website owner makes a resource available to visitors without authentication, then accessing those resources isn't a crime, even if the website owner didn't intend for site visitors to use that specific method.
Andrew “Weev” Auernheimer was convicted of violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act ("CFAA") in New Jersey federal court and sentenced to 41 months in federal prison in March of 2013 for revealing to media outlets that AT...
When sites put challenges like Anubis or other measures to authenticate that the viewer isn't a robot, and scrapers then employ measures to thwart that authentication (via spoofing or other means) I think that's a reasonable violation of the CFAA in spirit — especially since these mass scraping activities are getting attention for the damage they are causing to site operators (another factor in the CFAA, and one that would promote this to felony activity.)
The fact is these laws are already on the books, we may as well utilize them to shut down this objectively harmful activity AI scrapers are doing.
Nah, that would also mean using Newpipe, YoutubeDL, Revanced, and Tachiyomi would be a crime, and it would only take the re-introduction of WEI to extend that criminalization to the rest of the web ecosystem. It would be extremely shortsighted and foolish of me to cheer on the criminalization of user spoofing and browser automation because of this.
Do you think DoS/DDoS activities should be criminal?
If you're a site operator and the mass AI scraping is genuinely causing operational problems (not hard to imagine, I've seen what it does to my hosted repositories pages) should there be recourse? Especially if you're actively trying to prevent that activity (revoking consent in cookies, authorization captchas).
In general I think the idea of "your right to swing your fists ends at my face" applies reasonably well here — these AI scraping companies are giving lots of admins bloody noses and need to be held accountable.
I really am amenable to arguments wrt the right to an open web, but look at how many sites are hiding behind CF and other portals, or outright becoming hostile to any scraping at all; we're already seeing the rapid death of the ideal because of these malicious scrapers, and we should be using all available recourse to stop this bleeding.
DoS attacks are already a crime, so of course the need for some kind of solution is clear. But any proposal that gatekeeps the internet and restricts the freedoms with which the user can interact with it is no solution at all. To me, the openness of the web shouldn't be something that people just consider, or are amenable to. It should be the foundation in which all reasonable proposals should consider as a principle truth.
How “open” a website is, is up to the owner, and that’s all.
As someone who registered this account on this platform in response to Reddit's API restrictions, it would be hypocritical of me to accept such a belief.
Well, until we abolish capitalism, that’s the state of things.
I can see that things are the way things are. Accepting it is a different matter.
Unless you feel like Nazis MUST be freely given access to everything too?
To me, the "access" that I am referring to (the interface with which you gain access to a service) and that "access" (your behavior once you have gained access to a service) are different topics. The same distinction can be made with the concern over DoS attacks mentioned earlier in the thread. The user's behavior of overwhelming a site's traffic is the root concern, not the interface that the user is connecting with.
Site owners currently do and should have the freedom to decide who is and is not allowed to access the data, and to decide for what purpose it gets used for. Idgaf if you think scraping is malicious or not, it is and should be illegal to violate clear and obvious barriers against them at the cost of the owners and unsanctioned profit of the scrapers off of the work of the site owners.
Yeah, fuck everything about that. If I'm a site visitor I should be able to do what I want with the data you send me. If I bypass your ads, or use your words to write a newspaper article that you don't like, tough shit. Publishing information is choosing not to control what happens to the information after it leaves your control.
Don't like it? Make me sign an NDA. And even then, violating an NDA isn't a crime, much less a felony punishable by years of prison time.
Interpreting the CFAA to cover scraping is absurd and draconian.
If you want anybody and everyone to be able to use everything you post for any purpose, right on, good for you, but don't try to force your morality on others who rely on their writing, programming, and artworks to make a living to survive.
I'm gonna continue to use ad blockers and yt-dlp, and if you think I'm a criminal for doing so, I'm gonna say you don't understand either technology or criminal law.
Thats a crime yeah and if Alphabet co wants to sue you for $1.34 damages then they have that right, just as we should have the right to sue them if their AI crawlers make our site unusable and plagiarize our work to the effect of thousands of dollars, or even press charges for the criminal act of intentional disruption of services.
Thats a crime yeah and if Alphabet co wants to sue you for $1.34 damages then they have that right
So yeah, I stand by my statement that anyone thinks this is a crime, or should be a crime, has a poor understanding of either the technology or the law. In this case, even mentioning Alphabet suing for damages means that you don't know the difference between criminal law and civil law.
press charges for the criminal act of intentional disruption of services
That's not a crime, and again reveals gaps in your knowledge on this topic.
Who said anything about DDoS? I'm using ad blockers and saving/caching/archiving websites with a single computer, and not causing damage. I'm just using the website in a way the owner doesn't like. That's not a crime, nor should it be.
just as we should have the right to sue them if their AI crawlers make our site unusable and plagiarize our work to the effect of thousands of dollars, or even press charges for the criminal act of intentional disruption of services.
I've developed my own agent for assisting me with researching a topic I'm passionate about, and I ran into the exact same barrier: Cloudflare intercepts my request and is clearly checking if I'm a human using a web browser. (For my network requests, I've defined my own user agent.)
So I use that as a signal that the website doesn't want automated tools scraping their data. That's fine with me: my agent just tells me that there might be interesting content on the site and gives me a deep link. I can extract the data and carry on my research on my own.
I completely understand where Perplexity is coming from, but at scale, implementations like ~~this~~ Perplexity's are awful for the web.
I hate to break it to you but not only does Cloudflare do this sort of thing, but so does Akamai, AWS, and virtually every other CDN provider out there. And far from being awful, it’s actually protecting the web.
We use Akamai where I work, and they inform us in real time when a request comes from a bot, and they further classify it as one of a dozen or so bots (search engine crawlers, analytics bots, advertising bots, social networks, AI bots, etc). It also informs us if it’s somebody impersonating a well known bot like Google, etc. So we can easily allow search engines to crawl our site while blocking AI bots, bots impersonating Google, and so on.
What I meant with "things like this are awful for the web," I meant that automation through AI is awful for the web. It takes away from the original content creators without any attribution and hits their bottom line.
My story was supposed to be one about responsible AI, but somehow I screwed that up in my summary.
You'd think that a competent technology company, with their own AI would be able to figure out a way to spoof Cloudflare's checks. I'd still think that.
Or find a more efficient way to manage data, since their current approach is basically DDOSing the internet for training data and also for responding to user interactions.
Perplexity argues that Cloudflare is mischaracterizing AI Assistants as web crawlers, saying that they should not be subject to the same restrictions since they are user-initiated assistants.
Personally I think that claim is a decent one: user-initiated request should not be subject to robot limitations, and are not the source of DDOS attack to web sites.
I think the solution is quite clear, though: either make use of the user identity to walz through the blocks, or even make use of the user browser to do it. Once a captcha appears, let the user solve it.
Though technically making all this happen flawlessly is quite a big task.
Personally I think that claim is a decent one: user-initiated request should not be subject to robot limitations, and are not the source of DDOS attack to web sites.
They are one of the sources!
The AI scraping when a user enters a prompt is DDOSing sites in addition to the scraping for training data that is DDOSing sites. These shitty companies are repeatedly slamming the same sites over and over again in the least efficient way because they are not using the scraped data from training when they process a user prompt that does a web search.
Scraping once extensively and scraping a bit less but far more frequently have similar impacts.
When user enters a prompt, the backend may retrieve a handful a pages to serve that prompt. It won't retrieve all the pages of a site. Hardly different from a user using a search engine and clicking 5 topmost links into tabs. If that is not a DoS attack, then an agent doing the same isn't a DDoS attack.
Constructing the training material in the first place is a different matter, but if you're asking about fresh events or new APIs, the training data just doesn't cut it. The training, and subsequenctly the material retrieval, has been done a long time ago.
puts on evil hat CloudFlare should DRM their protection then DMCA Perplexity and other US based "AI" companies to oblivion. Side effect, might break the Internet.
It's insane that anyone would side with Cloudflare here. To this day I cant visit many websites like nexusmods just because I run Firefox on Linux. The Cloudflare turnstile just refreshes infinitely and has been for months now.
Cloudflare is the biggest cancer on the web, fucking burn it.
I'm on Linux with Firefox and have never had that issue before (particularly nexusmods which I use regularly). Something else is probably wrong with your setup.
Linux and Firefox here. No problem at all with Cloudflare, despite having more or less as much privacy preserving add-on as possible. I even spoof my user agent to the latest Firefox ESR on Linux.
Thats not how it works. Cf uses thousands of variables to estimate a trust score and block people so just because it works for you doesn't mean it works.
Same goes the other way. It's not because it doesn't work for you that it should go away.
That technology has its uses, and Cloudflare is probably aware that there are still some false positive, and probably is working on it as we write.
The decision is for the website owner to take, taking into consideration the advantages of filtering out a majority of bots and the disadvantages of loosing some legitimate traffic because of false positives. If you get Cloudflare challenge, chances are that he chosed that the former vastly outclass the later.
Now there are some self-hosted alternatives, like Anubis, but business clients prefer SaaS like Cloudflare to having to maintain their own software. Once again it is their choices and liberty to do so.
lmao imagine shilling for corporate Cloudflare like this. Also false positive vs false negative are fundamentally not equal.
Cloudflare is probably aware that there are still some false positive, and probably is working on it as we write.
The main issue with Cloudflare is that it's mostly bullshit. It does not report any stats to the admins on how many users were rejected or any false positive rates and happily put's everyone under "evil bot" umbrella. So people from low trust score environments like Linux or IPs from poorer countries are under significant disadvantage and left without a voice.
I'm literally a security dev working with Cloudflare anti-bot myself (not by choice). It's a useful tool for corporate but a really fucking bad one for the health of the web, much worse than any LLM agent or crawler, period.
I suspect a lot of it comes down to your ISP. Like the original commentor I also frequently can't pass CloudFlare turnstile when on Wifi, although refreshing the page a few times usually gets me through. Worst case on my phone's hotspot I can much more consistently pass. It's super annoying and combined with their recent DNS outage has totally ruined any respect I had for CloudFlare.
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Perplexity argues that a platform’s inability to differentiate between helpful AI assistants and harmful bots causes misclassification of legitimate web traffic.
So, I assume Perplexity uses appropriate identifiable user-agent headers, to allow hosters to decide whether to serve them one way or another?
No, as per the article, their argumentation is that they are not web crawlers generating an index, they are user-action-triggered agents working live for the user.
You could probably route all requests to your site from them, back at themselves, so they DDoS themselves, and on top off it, cost them more because their endpoint needs to process things via their LLM.
The amount of people just reacting to the headline in the comments on these kinds of articles is always surprising.
Your browser acts as an agent too, you don’t manually visit every script link, image source and CSS file. Everyone has experienced how annoying it is to have your browser be targeted by Cloudflare.
There’s a pretty major difference between a human user loading a page and having it summarized and a bot that is scraping 1500 pages/second.
Cheering for Cloudflare to be the arbiter of what technologies are allowed is incredibly short sighted. They exist to provide their clients with services, including bot mitigation. But a user initiated operation isn’t the same as a bot.
Which is the point of the article and the article’s title.
It isn’t clear why OP had to alter the headline to bait the anti-ai crowd.
But a user initiated operation isn’t the same as a bot.
Oh fuck off with that AI company propaganda.
The AI companies already overwhelmed sites to get training data and are repeating their shitty scraping practices when users interact with their AI. It's the same fucking thing.
Web crawlers for search engines don't scrape pages every time a user searches like AI does. Both web crawlers and scrapers are bots, and how a human initiates their operation, scheduled or not, doesn't matter as much as the fact that they do things very differently and only one of the two respects robots.txt.
There’s no difference in server load between a user looking at a page and a user using an AI tool to summarize the page.
The AI companies already overwhelmed sites to get training data and are repeating their shitty scraping practices when users interact with their AI. It’s the same fucking thing.
You either didn’t read the article or are deliberately making bad faith arguments. The entire point of the article is that the traffic that they’re referring to is initiated by a user, just like when you type an address into your browser’s address bar.
This traffic, initiated by a user, creates the same server load as that same user loading the page in a browser.
Yes, mass scraping of web pages creates a bunch of server load. This was the case before AI was even a thing.
This situation is like Cloudflare presenting was a captcha in order to load each individual image, css or JavaScript asset into a web browser because bot traffic pretends to be a browser.
I don’t think it’s too hard to understand that a bot pretending to be a browser and a human operated browser are two completely different things and classifying them as the same (and captchaing them) would be a classification error.
This is exactly the same kind of error. Even if you personally believe that users using AI tools should be blocked, not everyone has the same opinion. If Cloudflare can’t distinguish between bot requests and human requests then their customers can’t opt out and allow their users to use AI tools even if they want to.
It's been this from the very beginning. But they don't fit the definition of a protection racket as they're not the ones attacking you if you don't pay up. So they're more like a security company that has no competitors due to the needed investment to operate.
Alles richtig gemacht! Was soll ich sonst schreiben, über den Geburtstagsfilm, den der SWR dem größten Mülheimer Genie der Gegenwart im Auftrag der ARD hat widmen lassen? Angesichts der Unmöglichkeit der gestellten Aufgabe, haben sie dort glücklicherweise kollektiv entschieden, den Künstler das Werk doch lieber selbst anfertigen zu lassen, bevor die Sendeanstalt sich der Peinlichkeit einer weiteren öffentlich-rechtlichen Hagiographie die dann doch nicht mehr als ein Recycling alter Talkshows und Sketche geworden wäre. (ARD, Neu!)
Alles richtig gemacht! Was soll ich sonst schreiben, über den Geburtstagsfilm, den der SWR dem größten Mülheimer Genie der Gegenwart im Auftrag der ARD hat widmen lassen? Angesichts der Unmöglichkeit der gestellten Aufgabe, haben sie dort glücklicher…
It's not particularly new (except to me) or that shiny... but I got a new gfx card today. I bought it mainly for the nv remove background functionality and because it will be much faster at other tasks too! I am only about 5 years behind the times at least, rather than the 10 I normally am....
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