Technology
This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.
Ask in DM before posting product reviews or ads. All such posts otherwise are subject to removal.
Rules:
1: All Lemmy rules apply
2: Do not post low effort posts
3: NEVER post naziped*gore stuff
4: Always post article URLs or their archived version URLs as sources, NOT screenshots. Help the blind users.
5: personal rants of Big Tech CEOs like Elon Musk are unwelcome (does not include posts about their companies affecting wide range of people)
6: no advertisement posts unless verified as legitimate and non-exploitative/non-consumerist
7: crypto related posts, unless essential, are disallowed
view the rest of the comments
This assumes that just since abuse could happen means we should block access for everyone. Folks might make illegal photocopies of books so we should ban libraries. I & others have done general scraping for our own uses that isn’t done in some abusive manner. But to assume a company beholden to US shareholder is going to “to the right thing” would be to go against the history of US corporations.
And you know who is going to be able to afford to do the scraping? Big US-based “AI Bros” that can do it with venture capital preventing the average user or researcher from grepping the net.
Good points, you made clear this is no black/white case, it depends on how much we can trust cloudflare. It’s a US based for-profit company so the answer is “not much”.
However, if you check the link, you’ll see that they’re able to distinguish AI bot scrapping from other forms of scrapping. They also give the website owners a choice, so if it’s about principles, owners can choose to boycott, as most are already doing with robots.txt, which AI bros have no respect for.
Cloudflare does not benefit from a handful of websites getting all the traffic, and their track record is good so far. They also don’t profit from people visiting websites with a browser, they don’t show/own ads. To me, they have enough credit for me to believe they can protect open web.
We’ll see how this take ages though. I still won’t put all my eggs in a single basket.
https://www.theverge.com/24121399/cloudflare-matthew-prince-internet-free-speech-8chan-ukraine-aristotle-decoder-interview