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The AI company Perplexity is complaining their bots can't bypass Cloudflare's firewall (www.searchenginejournal.com)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 18 points 1 year ago* (10 children)

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.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago (6 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    How "open" a website is, is up to the owner, and that's all. Unless we're talking about de-privatizing the internet as a whole, here.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    Well, until we abolish capitalism, that's the state of things. Unless you feel like Nazis MUST be freely given access to everything too?

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    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.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago

    That same logic is how Aaron Swartz was cornered into suicide for scraping JSTOR, something widely agreed to be a bad idea by a wide range of lawspeople including SCOTUS in its 2021 decision Van Buren v. US that struck this interpretation off the books.

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