@kkarhan
Yeah, Cloudflare is scummy. Fedi admins use Cloudflare because it can speed up performance and protect against ddos. The problem here is that Cloudflare itself needs to be considered in the threat model, especially after this news

@FediPact @subMedia

🛎 🛎 🛎 thank you!

a big chunk of their services are free, aren't they?

the fact the founder shares the same last name as the guy behind Academi/Blackwater, even if they were not related, i’d assume they’re making money out of surveillance.

and “AI” *is* spyware, not just plagiarism-as-a-service.

@ophiocephalic @kkarhan @FediPact @subMedia

@blogdiva
sus as hell all the way around

@kkarhan @FediPact @subMedia

Yeah, definitely grounds for concern. And yet another good reminder DO NOT USE FEDI FOR ANYTHING CONFIDENTIAL, that's what Signal is for!

All that being said, it's not clear to me whether Meta is scraping images from DMs or followers-only post. If they're looking at neuromatch.social (or follow 'show original post' link for any profiles or public/unlisted posts that federate from neuromatch to instances that don't have their public feeds locked down) they'd get files from media.neuromatch.social. But is there a realistic way for them to scrape all images from media.neuromatch.social?

Anyhow @jonny @moderation according to this report Meta's scraping a list of domains that include media.neuromatch.social. Meta denies it of course but we all know that doesn't mean anything. It's not clear just what it means for domains to be on the list, and I'm not sure what to do in response -- blocking all known Meta domains and IPs at the network level is a good idea if that's not already happening, although it's easy enough for them to work around it.

EDIT, August 10: here's jonny's update: the neuromatch media site wasn't publically enumerable.

@ophiocephalic @FediPact @subMedia

@fancysandwiches
This. At the end of the day, Cloudflare is just another unaccountable black box of a corporation

@Mikal @FediPact @subMedia

Well, that's bad. But it's not news.
That's what AI does.

@b2c is constantly fighting AI traffic to our server. But they are constantly fighting to scrape everything despite any counter measures.

I'll look more into it later, but from what I see now cj.g is on the list but cj.s not.
That could be because cj.g has the bluesky bridge enabled. Dunno.

PS: Nevermind. Now that I'm awake I searched the pdf and both climatejustice instances are on the list. But not all instances on our server.

@DoryTheFish you can’t prevent it as long as your profile is public. That’s the whole point, profile public = anybody can scrap it.

Mastodon is available on the web. Anybody can scrap any website and mastodon by default does not require a login to see users public post.

It’s definitely not ethical but it’s technically not complicated.

You can make your profile private and always reply privately if you don’t want your posts to be visible.

@thenexusofprivacy @VictimOfSimony @essjayjay Also literally no one in this thread said it was legal. XD

Even the original article notes that it's illegal to be slurping up copyrighted works, but that they failed to convince the judge of meaningful damages meriting restitution.

I said scraping is "not necessarily consensual" and that's because various sites have entered partnerships to sell off their users' creations with some half-assed nod to getting their consent.

@thenexusofprivacy
@bluestarultor
@essjayjay

This article seems to think the problem is that a third party is asserting the copyright. The fact that these class actions are becoming more popular with first parties seems to suggest you're mistaken. Also, the trespass issue I mentioned remains since there is no implied right of access to chattels for an illegal purpose. There's a tort here.

There are quite a few class actions in process and it'll be interesting to see how things play out. And even though the plaintiffs in the Meta case didn't succeed, the court certainly left the door open to other attempts -- and arguably even encouraged them. technologyreview.com/2025/07/0… is a good overview of the Meta and Anthropic cases, and as they point out the wins for the tech companies are less cut-and-dried than they seem at first.

Still, even though the answer may be different at some point, right now I think it's still true that so far individuals haven't succeeded in copyright claims against scrapers.

@VictimOfSimony @bluestarultor @essjayjay @FediPact

What comes next for AI copyright lawsuits?

Remarkably little has been settled by recent rulings in favor of Anthropic and Meta.

^{Will Douglas Heaven (MIT Technology Review)}