As a site operator who has been battling with the influx of extremely aggressive AI crawlers, I’m now wondering if my tactics have accidentally blocked internet archive. I am totally ok with them scraping my site, they would likely obey robots.txt, but these days even Facebook ignores it, and exceeds my stipulated crawl delay by distributing their traffic across many IPs. (I even have a special nginx rule just for Facebook.)
Blocking certain JA3 hashes has so far been the most effective counter measures. However I wish there was an nginx wrapper around hugin-net that could help me do TCP fingerprinting as well. As I do not know rust and feel terrified of asking an LLM to make it. There is also a race condition issue with that approach, as it is passive fingerprinting even the JA4 hashes won’t be available for the first connection, and the AI crawlers I’ve seen do one request per IP so you don’t get a chance to block the second request (never happens).
I am aware, fortunately I haven't seen much of this... yet.
Also JA4 is supposed to be a bit less vulnerable to this.
Also this is why I really want TCP and HTTP fingerprinting. But the best i've found so far is https://github.com/biandratti/huginn-net and is only available as rust library, I really need it as an nginx module. I've been tempted to try to vibe code an nginx module that wraps this library.
They are not alone in that. The "Archiveteam", a different organization, not to be confused with archive.org, also doesn't respect robots.txt according to their wiki: https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Robots.txt
I think it is safe to say that there is little consideration for site owners from the largest archiving organizations today. Whether there should be is a different debate.
It seems like the general problem is that the original common usage of robots.txt was to identify the parts of a site that would lead a recursive crawler into an infinite forest of dynamically generated links, which nobody wants, but it's increasingly being used to disallow the fixed content of the site which is the thing they're trying to archive and which shouldn't be a problem for the site when the bot is caching the result so it only ever downloads it once. And more sites doing the latter makes it hard for anyone to distinguish it from the former, which is bad for everyone.
> The "Archiveteam", a different organization, not to be confused with archive.org, also doesn't respect robots.txt according to their wiki
"Archiveteam" exists in a different context. Their usual purpose is to get a copy of something quickly because it's expected to go offline soon. This both a) makes it irrelevant for ordinary sites in ordinary times and b) gives the ones about to shut down an obvious thing to do, i.e. just give them a better/more efficient way to make a full archive of the site you're about to shut down.
What an absolutely insufferable explanation from ArchiveTeam. What else do you expect from an organization aggressively crawling websites and bringing them down to their knees because they couldn't care less?
I'm curious to hear about examples of where this has happened. Because ArchiveTeam also has an important role in rescuing cultural artefacts that have been taken into private hands and then negligently destroyed.
I wonder if it would be practical to have bot-blocking measures that can be bypassed with a signature from a set of whitelisted keys... In this case the server would be happy to allow Internet Archive crawlers.
That's an interesting idea. Mtls could probably be used for this pretty easily. It would require IA to support it if course, but could be a nice solution. I wonder, do they already support it? I might throw up a test...
I'm seeing a lot of comments about how we maintain the status quo, but I'm very interested in hearing from anyone who has conceded that there is no way to stop AI scrapers at this point and what that means for how we maintain public information on the internet in the future.
I don't necessarily believe that we won't find some half-successful solution that will allow server hosting to be done as it currently is, but I'm not very sure that I'll want to participate in whatever schemes come about from it, so I'm thinking more about how I can avoid those schemes rather than insisting that they won't exist/work.
The prevailing thought is that if it's not possible now, it won't be long before a human browser will be indistinguishable from an LLM agent. They can start a GUI session, open a browser, navigate to your page, snapshot from the OS level and backwork your content from the snapshot, or use the browser dev tools or whatever to scrape your page that way. And yes, that would be much slower and more inefficient than what they currently do, but they would only need to do that for those that keep on the bleeding edge of security from AI. For everyone else, you're in a security race against highly-paid interests. So the idea of having something on the public internet that you can stop people from archiving (for whatever purpose they want) seems like it's soon to be an old-fashioned one.
So, taking it as a given that you can't stop what these people are currently trying to stop (without a legislative solution and an enforcement mechanism): how can we make scraping less of a burden on individual hosts? Is this thing going to coalesce into centralizing "archiving" authorities that people trust to archive things, and serve as a much more structured and friendly way for LLMs to scrape? Or is it more likely someone will come up with a way to punish LLMs or their hosts for "bad" behavior? Or am I completely off base? Is anyone actually discussing this? And, if so, what's on the table?
> without a legislative solution and an enforcement mechanism
If there's one thing people, especially HN users, should've learned by now, it's that there's no enforcement mechanism worth a damn for Internet legislation when incentives don't align.
> how can we make scraping less of a burden on individual hosts?
Isn't this basically what content-addressable storage is for? Have the site provide the content hashes rather than the content and then put the content on IPFS/BitTorrent/whatever where the bots can get it from each other instead of bothering the site.
Extra points if you can get popular browsers to implement support for this, since it also makes it a lot harder to censor things and a decent implementation (i.e. one that prefers closer sources/caches) would give most of the internet the efficiency benefits of a CDN without the centralization.
I think this is what will happen. That the public internet will become the place you go to seed the data you want to the scrapers and you will use a private internet for everything else. Private sites, private feeds, mesh networks, etc. We're basically going back in time similar to when AOL and friends had their own private networks for their members.
It's easy to pretend you're human, it's hard to pretend that you have a valid cryptographic signature for Google which attests that your hardware is Google-approved.
Crawling is the price we pay for the web's openness.
I don't see this is a permanent problem. Right now there must be 1000s of well-funded AI companies trying to scrape the entire internet. Eventually the AI equity bubble will pop and there will be consolidation. If every player left has already scanned the web, will they need to keep constantly scanning it? Seems like no. Even if they do, there will be a lot less of them.
The current trend is that it's getting cheaper and easier to roll out your own AI on your own computer, so more and more people will do it as a hobby. Even if the big players die out, some dude with a decent gaming PC could decide to start scraping everything pertaining to their interests just for the hell of it. Every government with a budget and someone capable of doing the job will surely get in on it as well.
You're going to hate this, but one answer might be blockchain. A crytographically strong, attestable public record of appending information to a shared repository. Combined with cryptographic signatures for humans, it's basically a secure, open git repository for human knowledge.
> Combined with cryptographic signatures for humans
What happens when the human gives an agent access to said signature? Then you fall back on traditional anti-bot techniques and you're right back where you started.
Sounds interesting, but I guess I'm a little unsure of how to connect the dots? Are you suggesting that websites would be hosted on a blockchain and browsed by human-signed browsers? Or more like there would be a blockchain authority, which server hosts could query to determine if a signature, provided by their browser, is human? Would you mind painting the picture in a little more detail?
You can have cryptographically signed data caches without the need for a blockchain. What a blockchain can add is the ability to say that a particular piece of data must have existed before a given date, by including the hash of that data somewhere in the chain.
We're rarely going to need to attest anything is "real" or "human". It's basically only going to matter in civil and criminal court, and IDV.
We don't need to attest signals are analogue vs. digital. The world is going to adapt to the use of Gen AI in everything. The future of art, communications, and productivity will all be rooted in these tools.
> anyone who has conceded that there is no way to stop AI scrapers at this point and what that means for how we maintain public information on the internet in the future.
Bloat, and bandwidth costs are the real problems here. Every one seems to have forgotten basics of engineering and accounting.
I think media outlets think way too highly of their contribution to AI.
Had they never existed, it had likely not made a dent to the AI development - completely like believing that had they been twice as productive, it had likely neither made a dent to the quality of LLMs.
These news media outlets provide a drop in the ocean worth of information. Both qualitatively and quantitatively.
The news / media industry is really just trying to hold on to their lifeboat before inevitably becoming entirely irrelevant.
(I do find this sad, but it is like the reality - I can already now get considerably better journalism using LLMs than actual journalists - both click bait stuff and high quality stuff)
That seems like a reductive way to consider it. What percent of music was created by Led Zeppelin? What percent of art was painted by Monet? What percent of films by Alfred Hitchcock? It may be a small percentage objectively but they are hugely influential.
fwiw, no llm ive ever used generated in the writing style newspapers and -sites use - hence i honestly doubt they've been given a meaningful boost in relevancy.
How many Reddit, HN, etc. posts are based on NYT articles? How many derivative news articles, blog posts, YouTube videos, TikToks, etc. are responses to those articles?
> How many Reddit, HN, etc. posts are based on NYT articles? How many derivative news articles, blog posts, YouTube videos, TikToks, etc. are responses to those articles?
You may get an inconvenient answer when you ask the question the other way around.
How does the entire textual corpus of say, new York times compare to all novels? Each article is a page of text, maybe two at most? There certainly are an awful lot of articles. But it's hard to imagine it is much more than a couple hundred novels. There must be thousands of novels released each year
LLMs are (apparently) massively used to get information about topics in the real world. Novels aren't going to be much help there. Journalism, particularly in written form, provides a fount of facts presented from different angles, as well as opinions, and it was all there free for the taking…
Wikipedia provides the scantest summary of that, fora and social media give you banter, fake news, summaries of news, and a whole lot of shaky opinions, at best. Novels give you the foundations of language, but in terms of knowledge nothing much beyond what the novel is about.
To begin with, your premise is that the only primary sources are press conferences and that press conferences only provide information in response to questions.
But even taking it literally, isn't that one of the things LLMs could actually do? You're essentially asking how a text generator could generate text. The real question is whether the questions would be any good, but the answer isn't necessarily no.
You used to need them, because journalists had the distribution and the sources didn't. In a word of printed newspapers, you couldn't get your story distributed nationally (much less worldwide) without the help of a journalist, doubly so if you wanted to stay anonymous.
Nowadays, you just make a Substack and there's that.
See that recent expose on the Delve fraud as just one example. No journalists were harmed in the making of that article.
Primary sources can and often are, very biased. Journalists are (supposed to be) doing fact checks and gathering multiple sources from all sides. Modern journalism is in a terrible state, but still important.
Imagine if all info about Facebook came from Facebook...
This is why archive.is was created. Should we stop trying to hunt down and punish its creator and support it as the extremely useful project that it is?
Agreed, and if archive.is goes down, archive.org becomes the de facto monopoly in web archival.
That's a problem because archive.org honors removal requests from site owners. Buy an old domain and you can theoretically wipe its archived history clean.
Alternatively, it leaves a vacuum for an archive site that doesn't take things down like archive.org to exist and a new one takes its place as the defacto one.
The creator can maintain anonymity. The creator does not deserve to continue being celebrated when they embarked on a DDOS campaign using the traffic of archive.is against a journalist trying to uncover their identity. By these actions, they have shown to be capricious, vindictive, and willing to ensnare their users in their DDOS of others. Whoever they are, they’re terrible.
This is great. Journalists are impeding the preservation of the historical record by blocking archivist traffic while simultaneously manhunting those archivists who find ways around their authwalls.
Soon the news and the historical facts will be unnecessary. You can simply receive your wisdom from the AIs, which, as nondeterministic systems, are free to change the facts at will.
>This is great. Journalists are impeding the preservation of the historical record by blocking archivist traffic while simultaneously manhunting those archivists who find ways around their authwalls.
You are deliberately misrepresenting the situation. The journalists who block archivist traffic are not in any way connected to the blogger who was attempting to investigate the creator of archive.is. You have portrayed them as related in an attempt to garner sympathy for the creator of archive.is.
Indeed. I am highly supportive of archive.is, but let's remember that he hijacked his own users to become a bot net. That should make all us hackers furious. Is a complete violation of trust. Our residential IPs were used to attack someone, meaning he put us all at risk for his own personal goals. It's disgusting behavior and he should be called out for it. But we should also realize he's offering an important and free service to us all. I support him, but this is not something we should just ignore. Trust is very important.
Thanks for this. I didn’t know about the details, and there are probably mor... but this gyrovague person is clearly being a privileged trouble. Their “boringly straightforward curiosity” is an admittance of their shallow thinking. When you are pointed out that you’re hurting someone in some respect that you weren’t intentional about, you should stop, sit down, and reconsider everything in that respect.
You may end up deciding to continue inflicting harm, intentionally so this time---that is a perfectly valid course to take. But you cannot anymore remain unintentional about it.
> When you are pointed out that you’re hurting someone in some respect that you weren’t intentional about, you should stop, sit down, and reconsider everything in that respect.
> You may end up deciding to continue inflicting harm, intentionally so this time---that is a perfectly valid course to take. But you cannot anymore remain unintentional about it.
To be clear, are you talking about the harm of commanding a botnet (which includes you and me) to attack an investigative journalist for investigatively journaling?
I didn't think I was going to side with the DDoS-er, but considering what happened with Aaron Schwartz, that blogger was trying to get them killed or put in a box forever.
Well, if they deserve anonymity, they also deserve to be able to protect it, and they have really few tools against a doxxing, the DDOS was one of them, corrupting the archived article was another, albeit dangerous for their own reputation as an archiver.
The crux of the problem was the doxxing, not the defense against it.
I think this is a weak framing. Lots of things are moral or immoral under specific circumstances. We should protect people from being murdered. I think murder is usually wrong. But we also likely agree that there are circumstances in which killing someone can be justified. If we can find context for taking a life, I'm quite sure we can find context for a DoS.
So their desire to not be used to commit a cyberattack doesn’t factor in? As long as they aren’t legally liable, it doesn’t matter?
Also a checkbox that says something like “I would like to help commit a crime using my internet traffic” would keep people from having their traffic used without consent.
Not defending any party, it's basic ethological expectation: a creature that try to beat an other should expect aggressive response in return.
Of course, never aggressing anyone and transform any aggression agaisnt self into an opportunity to acculturate the aggressor into someone with the same empathic behavior is a paragon of virtuous entity. But paragons of virtue is not the median norm, by definition.
> Not defending any party, it's basic ethological expectation: a creature that try to beat an other should expect aggressive response in return.
Another basic ethological expectation is that the strong dominate the weak, but maybe we shouldn’t base our moral framework around how things are, and rather on how they should be.
You don't think non-consensually revealing somebody's identity is a problem?
Resorting to DDoS is not pretty, but "why is my violent behavior met with violence" is a little oblivious and reversal of victim and perpetrator roles.
There's an old legal maxim "in pari delicto potior est conditio defendentis", that is "in a case of mutual fault the position of the defending party is the better one."
They’re terrible for turning all of us into parts of a botnet DDOS someone doing their job. I don’t understand how DDOS is the correct tool for anyone to protect their anonymity.
As someone who did a lot of work on early spam fighting only to see it replaced by things like DKIM, I wonder if we are going to start having the "taxi medallion" style approach but for people connecting to your site.
e.g. IA will publish out signed https requests with their key so you, as the site owner, can confirm that it is indeed from them and not from AI.
Feels like that would be very anti open internet but not sure how else you would prove who is a good actor vs not (from your perspective that is).
I'm now an AI bro, and a long-time fan of the EFF (though they occasionally make a mistake). I think this EFF piece could be more forthright (rather than political persuasion), since the matter involves balancing multiple public interest goals that are currently in opposition.
> Organizations like the Internet Archive are not building commercial AI systems.
This NiemanLab article lists evidence that Internet Archive explicitly encouraged crawling of data, and was used for training major commercial AI models:
| News publishers limit Internet Archive access due to AI scraping concerns (niemanlab.org) | 569 points by ninjagoo 34 days ago | 366 comments | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47017138
> [...] over a fight that libraries like the Archive didn't start, and didn't ask for.
They started or stumbled into this fight through their actions. And (ideology?) they also started and asked for a related fight, about disregard of copyright and exploitation of creators:
| Internet Archive forced to remove 500k books after publishers' court win (arstechnica.com) | 530 points by cratermoon on June 21, 2024 | 564 comments | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40754229
> by selection of topics, by distribution of concerns, by emphasis and framing of issues, by filtering of information, by bounding of debate within certain limits. They determine, they select, they shape, they control, they restrict — in order to serve the interests of dominant, elite groups in the society."
> "history is what appears in The New York Times archives; the place where people will go to find out what happened is The New York Times. Therefore it's extremely important if history is going to be shaped in an appropriate way, that certain things appear, certain things not appear, certain questions be asked, other questions be ignored, and that issues be framed in a particular fashion."
The propaganda in the New York times is especially precious because of how highly respected it is, there never was a war or other elite interest they didn't push along.
They have a very long track record of pretending to be independent but actually toeing the government's line at key pivotal moments in history when an independent newspaper is needed the most. Everybody here knows how they helped start the second Iraq war I hope, but that wasn't a one-off fluke. Go back through the major wars in American history and you can find the New York Times championing the cause of war before each of these. World Was 2, they uncritically accepted Walter Durranty letting Stalin ghostwrite for him, specifically w.r.t. Stalin's man-made famine in Ukraine, because America was allied with Stalin. WWI, frequent editorializing of Germans being wild Asiatic savages while the Anglos were good and noble people that Americans owed something to for some reason nobody could explain. Vietnam, they uncritically accepted government reports on the second Gulf of Tonkin incident which never happened and broadly accepted the governments own reports about how the war was going, at least in the early years when it still might have been possible to avoid further engagement. Korean war, they supported the government narrative of communist containment. First Iraq War, they uncritically reported very dubious atrocity propaganda, like the fraudulent "Nayirah testimony" given by the teenage daughter of a diplomat pretending to be a politically uninvolved hospital worker.
The pattern here is deference to official narratives at precisely the times when criticism is needed the most.
> World Was 2, they uncritically accepted Walter Durranty letting Stalin ghostwrite for him, specifically w.r.t. Stalin's man-made famine in Ukraine, because America was allied with Stalin.
Duranty's New York Times articles were written in 1931, a decade before America entered World War II. They not only predate an American alliance with the Soviet Union, but they also predate the United States having any diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union whatsoever.
> Go back through the major wars in American history and you can find the New York Times championing the cause of war before each of these.
Are there other major American newspapers who have a history of dissenting against war? Wasn't the New York Times' behavior in most of the conflicts you mention in line with American popular opinion?
The American political apparatus was already normalizing relations with the Soviet Union due to the Japanese invasion of Manchuria (1931, which is when WW2 truly started), due to the great depression in America making alliance with the Soviets look economically advantageous for America, and due to political instability in Germany and Italy. There was a strong sense of shit hitting the fan soon and that America would be with the Soviet Union through it. FDR officially recognized the Soviet Union in 1933, during the peak of Stalin's famine in Ukraine, which the New York Times was actively denying.
As for other newspapers, the Times isn't worse but bears the brunt of the criticism because they are after all America's foremost, most influential newspaper.
> But in recent months The New York Times began blocking the Archive from crawling its website, using technical measures that go beyond the web’s traditional robots.txt rules. That risks cutting off a record that historians and journalists have relied on for decades. Other newspapers, including The Guardian, seem to be following suit.
I'm a bit surprised I never read about this till now, though while disappointing it is unfortunately not surprising.
> The Times says the move is driven by concerns about AI companies scraping news content. Publishers seek control over how their work is used, and several—including the Times—are now suing AI companies over whether training models on copyrighted material violates the law. There’s a strong case that such training is fair use.
I suspect part of it might be these corps not wanting people to skip a paywall (whether or not someone would pay even if they had no access is a different story). But this argument makes no sense for the Guardian.
I went to Guardian's website to cross check their motto (getting confused with WaPo's motto) and got served this (hilarious? sad?) banner. As if blocking cross website tracking is somehow bad.
> Rejection hurts …
You’ve chosen to reject third-party cookies while browsing our site. Not being able to use third party cookies means we make less from selling adverts to fund our journalism.
We believe that access to trustworthy, factual information is in the public good, which is why we keep our website open to all, without a paywall.
If you don’t want to receive personalised ads but would still like to help the Guardian produce great journalism 24/7, please support us today. It only takes a minute. Thank you.
The Guardian’s ads asking for contributions have got progressively more desperate. I find their commitment to keeping their site paywall free admirable, but the current almost-begging (and selling off their Sunday paper) has got so intense that it feels like it’s only a matter of time until they introduce some kind of paid content.
Begging users to turn the tracking gun on themselves so they can be bombarded with ads is totally pathetic, and I’ve seen this on multiple news sites. These guys can’t go out of business fast enough.
When you disappear from the historical record, that's called you becoming irrelevant. The world moves on, and pays attention to someone else. Not sure why the Times doesn't seem to see this angle.
Does IA use a known set of IPs? Should be trivial to let them through. But yeah, news companies aren't technically capable of this kind of finesse, they probably have by-the-hour contractors doing any coding/config changes, and closing the ticket is the goal there.
I am really tired of this kind of moralizing. The reality is that every time geeks come up with some utopian ideal, such as that we should publish all our software under free licenses or make all human knowledge freely accessible to anyone, the same geeks later show up and build extractive industries on top of this. Be a part of the open source revolution... so that you do unpaid labor for Facebook. Make a quirky homepage... so that we can bootstrap global-scale face recognition tech. Help us build the modern-day library of Alexandria... so that OpenAI and Anthropic can sell it back to you in a convenient squeezable tube.
Maybe it's time to admit that the techie community has a pretty bad moral compass and that we're not good stewards of the world's knowledge. We turn lofty ideals into amoral money-making schemes whenever we can. I'm not sure that the EFF's role in this is all that positive. They come from a good place, but they ultimately aid a morally bankrupt industry. I don't want archive.org to retain a copy of everyone's online footprint because I know it be used the same way it always is: to make money off other people's labor and to and erode privacy.
The EFF is being obtuse. Using archives sites is a known bypass for reading news articles for free. Every time a paywalled site someone posts an archive link so others can read for free.
>Archiving and Search Are Legal
But giving full articles away for free to everyone is not. Archive.org has the power to make archives private.
Devil's advocate: Anyone seeking to limit AI scraping doesn't have much of a choice in also blocking archivists.
And it's genuinely not that weird for news organisations to want to stop AI scraping. This is just a repeat of their fight with social media embedding.
Sure. The back catalogue should be as close to public domain as possible, libraries keeping those records is incredibly important for research.
But with current news, that becomes complicated as taking the articles and not paying the subscription (or viewing their ads) directly takes away the revenue streams that newsrooms rely on to produce the news. Hence the "Newspaper trying to ban linking" mess, which was never about the links themselves but about social media sites embedding the headline and a snippet, which in turn made all the users stop clicking through and "paying" for the article.
Social media relies on those newsrooms (same with really, most other kinds of websites) to provide a lot of their content. And AI relies on them for all of the training data (remember: "Synthetic data" does not appear ex nihilo) & to provide the news that the AI users request. We can't just let the newsrooms die. The newsroom hasn't been replaced itself, it's revenue has been destroyed.
---
And so, the question of archives pops up. Because yes, you can with some difficulty block out the AI bots, even the social media bots. A paywall suffices.
But this kills archiving. Yet if you whitelist the archives in some way, the AI scrapers will just pull their data out of the archive instead and the newsrooms still die. (Which also makes the archiving moot)
A compromise solution might be for archives to accept/publish things on a delay, keep the AI companies from taking the current news without paying up, but still granting everyone access to stuff from decades ago.
There's just major disagreement about what a reasonable delay is. Most major news orgs and other such IP-holders are pretty upset about AI firm's "steal first, ask permission later" approach. Several AI firms setting the standard that training data is to be paid for doesn't help here either. In paying for training data they've created a significant market for archives, and significant incentive to not make them publicly freely accessible.
Why would The Times ever hand over their catalogue to the Internet Archive if Amazon will pay them a significant sum of money for it? The greater good of all humanity? Good luck getting that from a dying industry.
---
Tangent: Another annoying wrinkle in the financial incentives here is that not all archiving organisations are engaging in fair play, which yet further pushes people to obstruct their work.
To cite a HN-relevant example: Source code archivist "Software Heritage" has long engaged in holding a copy of all the sourcecode they can get their hands on, regardless of it's license. If it's ever been on github, odds are they're distributing it. Even when licenses explicitly forbid that. (This is, of course, perfectly legal in the case of actual research and other fair use. But:)
They were notable involved in HuggingFace's "The Stack" project by sharing a their archives ... and received money from HuggingFace. While the latter is nominally a donation, this is in effect a sale.
---
I find it quite displeasing that the EFF fails to identify the incentives at play here. Simply trying to nag everyone into "doing the thing for the greater good!" is loathsome and doesn't work. Unless we change this incentive structure, the outcome won't change.
It would be better if there was some arrangement the papers could reach with Archive where they just delay the release or wait a week then its part of the archive. That way, news stuff gets paid for when its hot and fresh but then it gets archived and the record is preserved
As a site operator who has been battling with the influx of extremely aggressive AI crawlers, I’m now wondering if my tactics have accidentally blocked internet archive. I am totally ok with them scraping my site, they would likely obey robots.txt, but these days even Facebook ignores it, and exceeds my stipulated crawl delay by distributing their traffic across many IPs. (I even have a special nginx rule just for Facebook.)
Blocking certain JA3 hashes has so far been the most effective counter measures. However I wish there was an nginx wrapper around hugin-net that could help me do TCP fingerprinting as well. As I do not know rust and feel terrified of asking an LLM to make it. There is also a race condition issue with that approach, as it is passive fingerprinting even the JA4 hashes won’t be available for the first connection, and the AI crawlers I’ve seen do one request per IP so you don’t get a chance to block the second request (never happens).
Evasion techniques like JA3 randomization or impersonation can bypass detection.
I am aware, fortunately I haven't seen much of this... yet. Also JA4 is supposed to be a bit less vulnerable to this. Also this is why I really want TCP and HTTP fingerprinting. But the best i've found so far is https://github.com/biandratti/huginn-net and is only available as rust library, I really need it as an nginx module. I've been tempted to try to vibe code an nginx module that wraps this library.
> they would likely obey robots.txt
If only... Despite providing a useful service, they are not as nice towards site owners as one would hope.
Internet Archive says:
> We see the future of web archiving relying less on robots.txt file declarations geared toward search engines
https://blog.archive.org/2017/04/17/robots-txt-meant-for-sea...
They are not alone in that. The "Archiveteam", a different organization, not to be confused with archive.org, also doesn't respect robots.txt according to their wiki: https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Robots.txt
I think it is safe to say that there is little consideration for site owners from the largest archiving organizations today. Whether there should be is a different debate.
It seems like the general problem is that the original common usage of robots.txt was to identify the parts of a site that would lead a recursive crawler into an infinite forest of dynamically generated links, which nobody wants, but it's increasingly being used to disallow the fixed content of the site which is the thing they're trying to archive and which shouldn't be a problem for the site when the bot is caching the result so it only ever downloads it once. And more sites doing the latter makes it hard for anyone to distinguish it from the former, which is bad for everyone.
> The "Archiveteam", a different organization, not to be confused with archive.org, also doesn't respect robots.txt according to their wiki
"Archiveteam" exists in a different context. Their usual purpose is to get a copy of something quickly because it's expected to go offline soon. This both a) makes it irrelevant for ordinary sites in ordinary times and b) gives the ones about to shut down an obvious thing to do, i.e. just give them a better/more efficient way to make a full archive of the site you're about to shut down.
What an absolutely insufferable explanation from ArchiveTeam. What else do you expect from an organization aggressively crawling websites and bringing them down to their knees because they couldn't care less?
I'm curious to hear about examples of where this has happened. Because ArchiveTeam also has an important role in rescuing cultural artefacts that have been taken into private hands and then negligently destroyed.
Having a laudable goal doesn't absolve them from bad behavior.
I wonder if it would be practical to have bot-blocking measures that can be bypassed with a signature from a set of whitelisted keys... In this case the server would be happy to allow Internet Archive crawlers.
That's an interesting idea. Mtls could probably be used for this pretty easily. It would require IA to support it if course, but could be a nice solution. I wonder, do they already support it? I might throw up a test...
We're essentially burning the library to punish the arsonist. The arsonist already left.
What do you mean, "the arsonist already left"? Isn't it more accurate to say that 90% of the library's visitors are arsonists?
I'm seeing a lot of comments about how we maintain the status quo, but I'm very interested in hearing from anyone who has conceded that there is no way to stop AI scrapers at this point and what that means for how we maintain public information on the internet in the future.
I don't necessarily believe that we won't find some half-successful solution that will allow server hosting to be done as it currently is, but I'm not very sure that I'll want to participate in whatever schemes come about from it, so I'm thinking more about how I can avoid those schemes rather than insisting that they won't exist/work.
The prevailing thought is that if it's not possible now, it won't be long before a human browser will be indistinguishable from an LLM agent. They can start a GUI session, open a browser, navigate to your page, snapshot from the OS level and backwork your content from the snapshot, or use the browser dev tools or whatever to scrape your page that way. And yes, that would be much slower and more inefficient than what they currently do, but they would only need to do that for those that keep on the bleeding edge of security from AI. For everyone else, you're in a security race against highly-paid interests. So the idea of having something on the public internet that you can stop people from archiving (for whatever purpose they want) seems like it's soon to be an old-fashioned one.
So, taking it as a given that you can't stop what these people are currently trying to stop (without a legislative solution and an enforcement mechanism): how can we make scraping less of a burden on individual hosts? Is this thing going to coalesce into centralizing "archiving" authorities that people trust to archive things, and serve as a much more structured and friendly way for LLMs to scrape? Or is it more likely someone will come up with a way to punish LLMs or their hosts for "bad" behavior? Or am I completely off base? Is anyone actually discussing this? And, if so, what's on the table?
> without a legislative solution and an enforcement mechanism
If there's one thing people, especially HN users, should've learned by now, it's that there's no enforcement mechanism worth a damn for Internet legislation when incentives don't align.
> how can we make scraping less of a burden on individual hosts?
Isn't this basically what content-addressable storage is for? Have the site provide the content hashes rather than the content and then put the content on IPFS/BitTorrent/whatever where the bots can get it from each other instead of bothering the site.
Extra points if you can get popular browsers to implement support for this, since it also makes it a lot harder to censor things and a decent implementation (i.e. one that prefers closer sources/caches) would give most of the internet the efficiency benefits of a CDN without the centralization.
If you don't publish content to the public web anymore, you don't have to worry traffic or scraping or bots
Maybe it'll just be cheaper for CDNs or whatever to sell the data they serve directly instead of doing extra steps with scraping
I think this is what will happen. That the public internet will become the place you go to seed the data you want to the scrapers and you will use a private internet for everything else. Private sites, private feeds, mesh networks, etc. We're basically going back in time similar to when AOL and friends had their own private networks for their members.
The only answer is WebDRM.
It's easy to pretend you're human, it's hard to pretend that you have a valid cryptographic signature for Google which attests that your hardware is Google-approved.
Crawling is the price we pay for the web's openness.
It's not hard to bypass attestation, it's actually very easy and done right now at scale, there's giant click farms with phones on racks.
They don't modify any device and will pass whatever attestation you try to make.
I don't see this is a permanent problem. Right now there must be 1000s of well-funded AI companies trying to scrape the entire internet. Eventually the AI equity bubble will pop and there will be consolidation. If every player left has already scanned the web, will they need to keep constantly scanning it? Seems like no. Even if they do, there will be a lot less of them.
The current trend is that it's getting cheaper and easier to roll out your own AI on your own computer, so more and more people will do it as a hobby. Even if the big players die out, some dude with a decent gaming PC could decide to start scraping everything pertaining to their interests just for the hell of it. Every government with a budget and someone capable of doing the job will surely get in on it as well.
You're going to hate this, but one answer might be blockchain. A crytographically strong, attestable public record of appending information to a shared repository. Combined with cryptographic signatures for humans, it's basically a secure, open git repository for human knowledge.
> Combined with cryptographic signatures for humans
What happens when the human gives an agent access to said signature? Then you fall back on traditional anti-bot techniques and you're right back where you started.
DNA/biometrics are the only secure future!
I joke, but there are those out there who don’t.
You'd spend less compute just serving the crawlers than maintaining the Blockchain.
Like, 3 orders of magnitude less compute, conservatively counting.
Sounds interesting, but I guess I'm a little unsure of how to connect the dots? Are you suggesting that websites would be hosted on a blockchain and browsed by human-signed browsers? Or more like there would be a blockchain authority, which server hosts could query to determine if a signature, provided by their browser, is human? Would you mind painting the picture in a little more detail?
You can have cryptographically signed data caches without the need for a blockchain. What a blockchain can add is the ability to say that a particular piece of data must have existed before a given date, by including the hash of that data somewhere in the chain.
We're rarely going to need to attest anything is "real" or "human". It's basically only going to matter in civil and criminal court, and IDV.
We don't need to attest signals are analogue vs. digital. The world is going to adapt to the use of Gen AI in everything. The future of art, communications, and productivity will all be rooted in these tools.
> anyone who has conceded that there is no way to stop AI scrapers at this point and what that means for how we maintain public information on the internet in the future.
Bloat, and bandwidth costs are the real problems here. Every one seems to have forgotten basics of engineering and accounting.
I think media outlets think way too highly of their contribution to AI.
Had they never existed, it had likely not made a dent to the AI development - completely like believing that had they been twice as productive, it had likely neither made a dent to the quality of LLMs.
How do you think those models get trained? You can only get so far with Wikipedia, Reddit, and non-fiction works like books and academic papers.
Have a look at this article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2023/a...
NY Times is 0.06% of common crawl.
These news media outlets provide a drop in the ocean worth of information. Both qualitatively and quantitatively.
The news / media industry is really just trying to hold on to their lifeboat before inevitably becoming entirely irrelevant.
(I do find this sad, but it is like the reality - I can already now get considerably better journalism using LLMs than actual journalists - both click bait stuff and high quality stuff)
That seems like a reductive way to consider it. What percent of music was created by Led Zeppelin? What percent of art was painted by Monet? What percent of films by Alfred Hitchcock? It may be a small percentage objectively but they are hugely influential.
I don't think back propagation care whose text it is back propagating.
The data sets aren't naively fed into the training runs.
Instead, training attempts to sample more heavily from higher quality sources, with, I'm sure, a mix of manual and heuristic labeling.
fwiw, no llm ive ever used generated in the writing style newspapers and -sites use - hence i honestly doubt they've been given a meaningful boost in relevancy.
their idioms would leak occasionally otherwise
90% of common crawl is complete junk. While the tiny bit of news articles powers almost all the ai answers in Google search.
How many Reddit, HN, etc. posts are based on NYT articles? How many derivative news articles, blog posts, YouTube videos, TikToks, etc. are responses to those articles?
At least NYT is probably on the correct side of Sturgeon’s Law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law
> How many Reddit, HN, etc. posts are based on NYT articles? How many derivative news articles, blog posts, YouTube videos, TikToks, etc. are responses to those articles?
You may get an inconvenient answer when you ask the question the other way around.
0.06% is way higher than I would expect
How does the entire textual corpus of say, new York times compare to all novels? Each article is a page of text, maybe two at most? There certainly are an awful lot of articles. But it's hard to imagine it is much more than a couple hundred novels. There must be thousands of novels released each year
Like apples to oranges.
LLMs are (apparently) massively used to get information about topics in the real world. Novels aren't going to be much help there. Journalism, particularly in written form, provides a fount of facts presented from different angles, as well as opinions, and it was all there free for the taking…
Wikipedia provides the scantest summary of that, fora and social media give you banter, fake news, summaries of news, and a whole lot of shaky opinions, at best. Novels give you the foundations of language, but in terms of knowledge nothing much beyond what the novel is about.
LLMs can get up to date information from primary sources - no journalists required.
I don't understand how LLMs can ask questions at a press conference.
To begin with, your premise is that the only primary sources are press conferences and that press conferences only provide information in response to questions.
But even taking it literally, isn't that one of the things LLMs could actually do? You're essentially asking how a text generator could generate text. The real question is whether the questions would be any good, but the answer isn't necessarily no.
Startup idea right there.
I don't think an LLM can have secret human sources that provide them with confidential information anonymously. Not all news shows up on Twitter.
You don't need the secret human sources any more.
You used to need them, because journalists had the distribution and the sources didn't. In a word of printed newspapers, you couldn't get your story distributed nationally (much less worldwide) without the help of a journalist, doubly so if you wanted to stay anonymous.
Nowadays, you just make a Substack and there's that.
See that recent expose on the Delve fraud as just one example. No journalists were harmed in the making of that article.
The primary source for most news is journalism.
In context, primary source means the subject of the article (the thing the journalist is writing about).
Journalism is by definition a secondary source. (Notwithstanding edge cases like articles reporting directly on the news industry itself.)
Journalism is absolutely not by definiton a secondary source.
If a journalist is on location covering a flood, for example, they are the primary source.
A journalist conducting an interview would also be a primary source.
Primary sources can and often are, very biased. Journalists are (supposed to be) doing fact checks and gathering multiple sources from all sides. Modern journalism is in a terrible state, but still important.
Imagine if all info about Facebook came from Facebook...
Isn't the non-LLM generated text becoming more valuable for training as the web at large is flooded with slop?
Preventing new human generated text from being used by AI firms (without consent) seems like a valid strategy.
No.
Modern LLMs are trained on a large percentage of synthetic data.
This sentiment is largely legacy (even though just a couple of years old).
This is why archive.is was created. Should we stop trying to hunt down and punish its creator and support it as the extremely useful project that it is?
Agreed, and if archive.is goes down, archive.org becomes the de facto monopoly in web archival.
That's a problem because archive.org honors removal requests from site owners. Buy an old domain and you can theoretically wipe its archived history clean.
Alternatively, it leaves a vacuum for an archive site that doesn't take things down like archive.org to exist and a new one takes its place as the defacto one.
The creator can maintain anonymity. The creator does not deserve to continue being celebrated when they embarked on a DDOS campaign using the traffic of archive.is against a journalist trying to uncover their identity. By these actions, they have shown to be capricious, vindictive, and willing to ensnare their users in their DDOS of others. Whoever they are, they’re terrible.
This is great. Journalists are impeding the preservation of the historical record by blocking archivist traffic while simultaneously manhunting those archivists who find ways around their authwalls.
Soon the news and the historical facts will be unnecessary. You can simply receive your wisdom from the AIs, which, as nondeterministic systems, are free to change the facts at will.
>This is great. Journalists are impeding the preservation of the historical record by blocking archivist traffic while simultaneously manhunting those archivists who find ways around their authwalls.
You are deliberately misrepresenting the situation. The journalists who block archivist traffic are not in any way connected to the blogger who was attempting to investigate the creator of archive.is. You have portrayed them as related in an attempt to garner sympathy for the creator of archive.is.
Here is an account of the facts: https://gyrovague.com/2026/02/01/archive-today-is-directing-...
Indeed. I am highly supportive of archive.is, but let's remember that he hijacked his own users to become a bot net. That should make all us hackers furious. Is a complete violation of trust. Our residential IPs were used to attack someone, meaning he put us all at risk for his own personal goals. It's disgusting behavior and he should be called out for it. But we should also realize he's offering an important and free service to us all. I support him, but this is not something we should just ignore. Trust is very important.
Review the definition of botnet. That is not what was done.
Thanks for this. I didn’t know about the details, and there are probably mor... but this gyrovague person is clearly being a privileged trouble. Their “boringly straightforward curiosity” is an admittance of their shallow thinking. When you are pointed out that you’re hurting someone in some respect that you weren’t intentional about, you should stop, sit down, and reconsider everything in that respect.
You may end up deciding to continue inflicting harm, intentionally so this time---that is a perfectly valid course to take. But you cannot anymore remain unintentional about it.
> When you are pointed out that you’re hurting someone in some respect that you weren’t intentional about, you should stop, sit down, and reconsider everything in that respect.
> You may end up deciding to continue inflicting harm, intentionally so this time---that is a perfectly valid course to take. But you cannot anymore remain unintentional about it.
To be clear, are you talking about the harm of commanding a botnet (which includes you and me) to attack an investigative journalist for investigatively journaling?
I didn't think I was going to side with the DDoS-er, but considering what happened with Aaron Schwartz, that blogger was trying to get them killed or put in a box forever.
Their life is in danger and one particular journalist is making it so
I had no idea that was the actual situation (journalist trying to hunt them down). Sorta changes the moral calculus, I'll allow it
Well, if they deserve anonymity, they also deserve to be able to protect it, and they have really few tools against a doxxing, the DDOS was one of them, corrupting the archived article was another, albeit dangerous for their own reputation as an archiver.
The crux of the problem was the doxxing, not the defense against it.
You don’t think leveraging your site to DDOS someone is a problem?
Do people not also deserve to be protected from being DDOSed? Do people also not deserve to not have their internet traffic be used to DDOS someone?
> You don’t think leveraging your site to DDOS someone is a problem?
It is, but it's one of the only tools they have to prevent the doxxing site to being reachable.
> Do people not also deserve to be protected from being DDOSed?
You mean the person doing the doing should be protected ?
>Do people also not deserve to not have their internet traffic be used to DDOS someone?
Yes, it should have been opt-in. But unless you doesn't run JS, you kinda give right to the website you visit to run arbitrary code anyway.
I think this is a weak framing. Lots of things are moral or immoral under specific circumstances. We should protect people from being murdered. I think murder is usually wrong. But we also likely agree that there are circumstances in which killing someone can be justified. If we can find context for taking a life, I'm quite sure we can find context for a DoS.
And what’s the context for using the internet traffic of your unsuspecting users to accomplish this?
Using the internet trafic of the persons using your service to protect your anonymity and thus, protecting the service itself.
So you shouldn’t have to inform your users that their traffic will be used in a cyberattack?
In most jurisdictions informing them would potentially make them legally liable. The fact they had no knowledge shields them from liability.
So their desire to not be used to commit a cyberattack doesn’t factor in? As long as they aren’t legally liable, it doesn’t matter?
Also a checkbox that says something like “I would like to help commit a crime using my internet traffic” would keep people from having their traffic used without consent.
Unfortunately “consent” is a difficult to understand concept for a lot of the web and Silicon Valley.
I don't have strong feelings about that one way or the other, honestly.
Not defending any party, it's basic ethological expectation: a creature that try to beat an other should expect aggressive response in return.
Of course, never aggressing anyone and transform any aggression agaisnt self into an opportunity to acculturate the aggressor into someone with the same empathic behavior is a paragon of virtuous entity. But paragons of virtue is not the median norm, by definition.
> Not defending any party, it's basic ethological expectation: a creature that try to beat an other should expect aggressive response in return.
Another basic ethological expectation is that the strong dominate the weak, but maybe we shouldn’t base our moral framework around how things are, and rather on how they should be.
You don't think non-consensually revealing somebody's identity is a problem?
Resorting to DDoS is not pretty, but "why is my violent behavior met with violence" is a little oblivious and reversal of victim and perpetrator roles.
> You don't think non-consensually revealing somebody's identity is a problem?
I do think it’s a problem. You are the only one excusing bad behavior here.
There's an old legal maxim "in pari delicto potior est conditio defendentis", that is "in a case of mutual fault the position of the defending party is the better one."
That works better when there is a defendant.
People do not ever have any sort of moral or natural right to not get hit after starting shit.
Even if this were true, this does not justify any particular type of action, except maybe an in kind response.
For example, would they have been justified to murder the blogger?
If there's ever something a journalist would never ever do, it's destroy someone's life for a headline. Never ever. Totally impossible.
They're terrible for not wanting to be dox'd?
They’re terrible for turning all of us into parts of a botnet DDOS someone doing their job. I don’t understand how DDOS is the correct tool for anyone to protect their anonymity.
As someone who did a lot of work on early spam fighting only to see it replaced by things like DKIM, I wonder if we are going to start having the "taxi medallion" style approach but for people connecting to your site.
e.g. IA will publish out signed https requests with their key so you, as the site owner, can confirm that it is indeed from them and not from AI.
Feels like that would be very anti open internet but not sure how else you would prove who is a good actor vs not (from your perspective that is).
I'm now an AI bro, and a long-time fan of the EFF (though they occasionally make a mistake). I think this EFF piece could be more forthright (rather than political persuasion), since the matter involves balancing multiple public interest goals that are currently in opposition.
> Organizations like the Internet Archive are not building commercial AI systems.
This NiemanLab article lists evidence that Internet Archive explicitly encouraged crawling of data, and was used for training major commercial AI models:
| News publishers limit Internet Archive access due to AI scraping concerns (niemanlab.org) | 569 points by ninjagoo 34 days ago | 366 comments | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47017138
> [...] over a fight that libraries like the Archive didn't start, and didn't ask for.
They started or stumbled into this fight through their actions. And (ideology?) they also started and asked for a related fight, about disregard of copyright and exploitation of creators:
| Internet Archive forced to remove 500k books after publishers' court win (arstechnica.com) | 530 points by cratermoon on June 21, 2024 | 564 comments | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40754229
The New York Times is awful I want it to be archived so people can see that in the future.
All media opinion articles are nothing but propaganda pieces. Every media out only allows those aligned with their ideology to write those pieces
I don't read it. Why is it awful?
From Manufacturing Consent:
> by selection of topics, by distribution of concerns, by emphasis and framing of issues, by filtering of information, by bounding of debate within certain limits. They determine, they select, they shape, they control, they restrict — in order to serve the interests of dominant, elite groups in the society."
> "history is what appears in The New York Times archives; the place where people will go to find out what happened is The New York Times. Therefore it's extremely important if history is going to be shaped in an appropriate way, that certain things appear, certain things not appear, certain questions be asked, other questions be ignored, and that issues be framed in a particular fashion."
The propaganda in the New York times is especially precious because of how highly respected it is, there never was a war or other elite interest they didn't push along.
They have a very long track record of pretending to be independent but actually toeing the government's line at key pivotal moments in history when an independent newspaper is needed the most. Everybody here knows how they helped start the second Iraq war I hope, but that wasn't a one-off fluke. Go back through the major wars in American history and you can find the New York Times championing the cause of war before each of these. World Was 2, they uncritically accepted Walter Durranty letting Stalin ghostwrite for him, specifically w.r.t. Stalin's man-made famine in Ukraine, because America was allied with Stalin. WWI, frequent editorializing of Germans being wild Asiatic savages while the Anglos were good and noble people that Americans owed something to for some reason nobody could explain. Vietnam, they uncritically accepted government reports on the second Gulf of Tonkin incident which never happened and broadly accepted the governments own reports about how the war was going, at least in the early years when it still might have been possible to avoid further engagement. Korean war, they supported the government narrative of communist containment. First Iraq War, they uncritically reported very dubious atrocity propaganda, like the fraudulent "Nayirah testimony" given by the teenage daughter of a diplomat pretending to be a politically uninvolved hospital worker.
The pattern here is deference to official narratives at precisely the times when criticism is needed the most.
> World Was 2, they uncritically accepted Walter Durranty letting Stalin ghostwrite for him, specifically w.r.t. Stalin's man-made famine in Ukraine, because America was allied with Stalin.
Duranty's New York Times articles were written in 1931, a decade before America entered World War II. They not only predate an American alliance with the Soviet Union, but they also predate the United States having any diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union whatsoever.
> Go back through the major wars in American history and you can find the New York Times championing the cause of war before each of these.
Are there other major American newspapers who have a history of dissenting against war? Wasn't the New York Times' behavior in most of the conflicts you mention in line with American popular opinion?
The American political apparatus was already normalizing relations with the Soviet Union due to the Japanese invasion of Manchuria (1931, which is when WW2 truly started), due to the great depression in America making alliance with the Soviets look economically advantageous for America, and due to political instability in Germany and Italy. There was a strong sense of shit hitting the fan soon and that America would be with the Soviet Union through it. FDR officially recognized the Soviet Union in 1933, during the peak of Stalin's famine in Ukraine, which the New York Times was actively denying.
As for other newspapers, the Times isn't worse but bears the brunt of the criticism because they are after all America's foremost, most influential newspaper.
The EFF has a lukewarm stance on AI, but criticizes everyone else. AI is clearly ruining the Internet and the job market.
How about thinking about your mission and take an anti-AI hardliner stance? But I see multiple corporate sponsors that would not be pleased:
https://www.eff.org/thanks
All these so called freedom organizations like the OSI and the EFF have been bought and are entirely irrelevant if not harmful.
Does Internet Archive have a distributed residential IP crawler program? I would enthusiastically contribute to that.
There must be some mechanism to prevent tampering in such a setup.
The Internet Archive does not, but Archive Team does: https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/ArchiveTeam_Warrior
Yes! I'm running an instance right now.
No, IA does everything above board and even honors invalid DMCA takedowns.
> There must be some mechanism to prevent tampering in such a setup.
Trivial as long as they terminate the TLS on their end, not yours. So you'd just be a residential proxy.
> But in recent months The New York Times began blocking the Archive from crawling its website, using technical measures that go beyond the web’s traditional robots.txt rules. That risks cutting off a record that historians and journalists have relied on for decades. Other newspapers, including The Guardian, seem to be following suit.
I'm a bit surprised I never read about this till now, though while disappointing it is unfortunately not surprising.
> The Times says the move is driven by concerns about AI companies scraping news content. Publishers seek control over how their work is used, and several—including the Times—are now suing AI companies over whether training models on copyrighted material violates the law. There’s a strong case that such training is fair use.
I suspect part of it might be these corps not wanting people to skip a paywall (whether or not someone would pay even if they had no access is a different story). But this argument makes no sense for the Guardian.
I went to Guardian's website to cross check their motto (getting confused with WaPo's motto) and got served this (hilarious? sad?) banner. As if blocking cross website tracking is somehow bad.
> Rejection hurts … You’ve chosen to reject third-party cookies while browsing our site. Not being able to use third party cookies means we make less from selling adverts to fund our journalism.
We believe that access to trustworthy, factual information is in the public good, which is why we keep our website open to all, without a paywall.
If you don’t want to receive personalised ads but would still like to help the Guardian produce great journalism 24/7, please support us today. It only takes a minute. Thank you.
The Guardian’s ads asking for contributions have got progressively more desperate. I find their commitment to keeping their site paywall free admirable, but the current almost-begging (and selling off their Sunday paper) has got so intense that it feels like it’s only a matter of time until they introduce some kind of paid content.
Begging users to turn the tracking gun on themselves so they can be bombarded with ads is totally pathetic, and I’ve seen this on multiple news sites. These guys can’t go out of business fast enough.
>If you don’t want to receive *personalised ads*
So ads, just not personalized. Remind me again why personalized ads are good for me if I have to pay to have non-personalized ads?
I think their plea is: 'we make more money from personalized ads so help us make up the difference through donation (or whatever they're selling).'
When you disappear from the historical record, that's called you becoming irrelevant. The world moves on, and pays attention to someone else. Not sure why the Times doesn't seem to see this angle.
Does IA use a known set of IPs? Should be trivial to let them through. But yeah, news companies aren't technically capable of this kind of finesse, they probably have by-the-hour contractors doing any coding/config changes, and closing the ticket is the goal there.
Archive now, make public after X amount of time. So, maybe both publisher and archiver are happy (or less sad).
I am really tired of this kind of moralizing. The reality is that every time geeks come up with some utopian ideal, such as that we should publish all our software under free licenses or make all human knowledge freely accessible to anyone, the same geeks later show up and build extractive industries on top of this. Be a part of the open source revolution... so that you do unpaid labor for Facebook. Make a quirky homepage... so that we can bootstrap global-scale face recognition tech. Help us build the modern-day library of Alexandria... so that OpenAI and Anthropic can sell it back to you in a convenient squeezable tube.
Maybe it's time to admit that the techie community has a pretty bad moral compass and that we're not good stewards of the world's knowledge. We turn lofty ideals into amoral money-making schemes whenever we can. I'm not sure that the EFF's role in this is all that positive. They come from a good place, but they ultimately aid a morally bankrupt industry. I don't want archive.org to retain a copy of everyone's online footprint because I know it be used the same way it always is: to make money off other people's labor and to and erode privacy.
As someone perpetually online it’s also making me rethink that a bit
Unless you love walled gardens, doomscrolling and endless AI slop that seems like the fun is over
The EFF is being obtuse. Using archives sites is a known bypass for reading news articles for free. Every time a paywalled site someone posts an archive link so others can read for free.
>Archiving and Search Are Legal
But giving full articles away for free to everyone is not. Archive.org has the power to make archives private.
Devil's advocate: Anyone seeking to limit AI scraping doesn't have much of a choice in also blocking archivists.
And it's genuinely not that weird for news organisations to want to stop AI scraping. This is just a repeat of their fight with social media embedding.
Sure. The back catalogue should be as close to public domain as possible, libraries keeping those records is incredibly important for research.
But with current news, that becomes complicated as taking the articles and not paying the subscription (or viewing their ads) directly takes away the revenue streams that newsrooms rely on to produce the news. Hence the "Newspaper trying to ban linking" mess, which was never about the links themselves but about social media sites embedding the headline and a snippet, which in turn made all the users stop clicking through and "paying" for the article.
Social media relies on those newsrooms (same with really, most other kinds of websites) to provide a lot of their content. And AI relies on them for all of the training data (remember: "Synthetic data" does not appear ex nihilo) & to provide the news that the AI users request. We can't just let the newsrooms die. The newsroom hasn't been replaced itself, it's revenue has been destroyed.
---
And so, the question of archives pops up. Because yes, you can with some difficulty block out the AI bots, even the social media bots. A paywall suffices.
But this kills archiving. Yet if you whitelist the archives in some way, the AI scrapers will just pull their data out of the archive instead and the newsrooms still die. (Which also makes the archiving moot)
A compromise solution might be for archives to accept/publish things on a delay, keep the AI companies from taking the current news without paying up, but still granting everyone access to stuff from decades ago.
There's just major disagreement about what a reasonable delay is. Most major news orgs and other such IP-holders are pretty upset about AI firm's "steal first, ask permission later" approach. Several AI firms setting the standard that training data is to be paid for doesn't help here either. In paying for training data they've created a significant market for archives, and significant incentive to not make them publicly freely accessible.
Why would The Times ever hand over their catalogue to the Internet Archive if Amazon will pay them a significant sum of money for it? The greater good of all humanity? Good luck getting that from a dying industry.
---
Tangent: Another annoying wrinkle in the financial incentives here is that not all archiving organisations are engaging in fair play, which yet further pushes people to obstruct their work.
To cite a HN-relevant example: Source code archivist "Software Heritage" has long engaged in holding a copy of all the sourcecode they can get their hands on, regardless of it's license. If it's ever been on github, odds are they're distributing it. Even when licenses explicitly forbid that. (This is, of course, perfectly legal in the case of actual research and other fair use. But:)
They were notable involved in HuggingFace's "The Stack" project by sharing a their archives ... and received money from HuggingFace. While the latter is nominally a donation, this is in effect a sale.
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I find it quite displeasing that the EFF fails to identify the incentives at play here. Simply trying to nag everyone into "doing the thing for the greater good!" is loathsome and doesn't work. Unless we change this incentive structure, the outcome won't change.
It would be better if there was some arrangement the papers could reach with Archive where they just delay the release or wait a week then its part of the archive. That way, news stuff gets paid for when its hot and fresh but then it gets archived and the record is preserved