Despite the click-baitish title, this brings up a lot of good points.

What continues to happen with headlines should worry us all

The situation is catastrophic but not serious

In this case, we are a little behind schedule, but working to rapidly catch up.

In the Cyberpunk TTRPG universe, the original internet (known as the Net) collapsed during a catastrophic event called the DataKrash, which occurred on June 3, 2022.

Poor title, but pretty interesting article. The future of the internet is going to be wild.

Yea, like the matrix, the Internet is now an intrinsically dangerous place where anyone is potentially some highly capable AI with potentially very malicious intent.

Context:

If you work in or around the film industry, there is a decent chance you have used the work of The Numbers this month, whether you realise it or not.

Its hand-researched data is the highest quality, tracking box office grosses, budgets, home video and streaming across more than 78,000 films and 236,000 people. It gets north of eight million visitors a year, and is treated as THE definitive authority by journalists, academics, filmmakers, prediction markets, and even Guinness World Records.

AI tools are some of the most powerful and destructive things humans have ever created. And they are being effectively tested by the public in real time in the real world. When the Manhattan Project was trying to work out the power of their atomic tech, they did not do so by sending everyone the specs each morning and seeing which houses blew up.

Honestly, this. In their desperate attempt to break even, AI companies are throwing everything they can at the wall to see what sticks, without any due regard as to its effects on society at large...

Which unfortunately have proven time and time again to be horribly corrosive towards human culture.

TL;DR

AI scraped it to death on behalf of prediction markets. They couldn't handle the load.

A year ago, Cloudflare launched pay-per-crawl, letting sites charge AI crawlers per page. Last week, it went further, announcing a pay-per-use model in which publishers get paid when their content actually appears in an AI answer, and declaring that, from 15 September, its customers’ ad-supported pages will block unpaid “mixed-use” crawlers by default.

I'd be OK paying a subscription fee to access websites.

Two BIG problems though:

a) my anonymity b) conglomeration of websites into increasingly enshittified monopolies.

How come none of these sites being hit by AI to the point they can't function implement rate limiting?

Rate limiting grouped by IP or UA tends to work pretty well, and normal users have very slow request rates so generally never get impacted.

I'm having a hard time blaming this entirely on Ai. We're talking about a 30 year old site that has probably never had a proper redesign (front and back end). Of course it's eventually going to be compromised.

Some of these used the site using legitimate URLs, others were looking for back doors, most likely so they could get to the data before it appeared on the site, or to manipulate the data presented to users.

I'm sure they know what they're doing, making me very wrong, but bots probing for back doors is very common, and not at all anything to be concerned about. The attackers most likely don't even care about the data, all they want is another site to spread malware or to join their botnet.

AI scrapers can be brutal though, and is very relevant.

This doesn't say anything.

Why did the server crash? Who knows!

Did it crash because of ai scrapers? Maybe! It was definitely stressed by them.

Was the server hacked? No idea!

If it was hacked, was it an attempt to rig prediction markets? Sounds plausible!

This nebulous theorizing really is worrying me! I'm worried for the critical thinking capacity of every commenter. Sure, ai bot traffic is a problem, the entire internet is dealing with it, but its tenuous link to TheNumbers.com mystery is merely clickbait journalism without any sourcing.

Polymarket, ugh.

Fuck AI.

Man this sucks. Feels like we've lost the internet to the capitalists. I find myself at least once a day reacting to something with a "man the internet used to be actually good"