This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
When a firm outright admits to bypassing or trying to bypass measures taken to keep them out, you think that would be a slam dunk case of unauthorized access under the CFAA with felony enhancements.
Fuck that. I don't need prosecutors and the courts to rule that accessing publicly available information in a way that the website owner doesn't want is literally a crime. That logic would extend to ad blockers and editing HTML/js in an "inspect element" tag.
That logic would not extend to ad blockers, as the point of concern is gaining unauthorized access to a computer system or asset. Blocking ads would not be considered gaining unauthorized access to anything. In fact it would be the opposite of that.
They already prosecute people under the unauthorized access provision. They just don’t prosecute rich people under it.
It's difficult to be a shittier company than OpenAI, but Perplexity seems to be trying hard.
This is a nice CloudFlare ad
yeah. still not worth dealing with fucking cloudflare. fuck cloudflare.
Perplexity argues that a platform’s inability to differentiate between helpful AI assistants and harmful bots causes misclassification of legitimate web traffic.
So, I assume Perplexity uses appropriate identifiable user-agent headers, to allow hosters to decide whether to serve them one way or another?
Uh.. good?
Traveling snake oil salesman complains he can't pick people's locks.
Uh, are they admitting they are trying to circumvent technological protections setup to restrict access to a system?
Isn’t that a literal computer crime?
No-no, see. When an AI-first company does it, it's actually called courageous innovation. Crimes are for poor people
You could say they are... Perplexed.
rare cloudflare w
As far as security is concerned, their w's are pretty common tbh. It's just the whole centralization issue.
That’s the entire point, dipshit. I wish we got one of the cool techno dystopias rather than this boring corporate idiot one.
You'd think that a competent technology company, with their own AI would be able to figure out a way to spoof Cloudflare's checks. I'd still think that.
Or find a more efficient way to manage data, since their current approach is basically DDOSing the internet for training data and also for responding to user interactions.
see, but they're not competent. further, they don't care. most of these ai companies are snake oil. they're selling you a solution that doesn't meaningfully solve a problem. their main way of surviving is saying "this is what it can do now, just imagine what it can do if you invest money in my company."
they're scammers, the lot of them, running ponzi schemes with our money. if the planet dies for it, that's no concern of theirs. ponzi schemes require the schemer to have no long term plan, just a line of credit that they can keep drawing from until they skip town before the tax collector comes
Good. I went through my CF panel, and blocked some of those "AI Assistants" that by default were open, including Perplexity's.
I don't like cloudflare but it's nice that they allow people to stop AI scrapping if they want to
CloudFlare has become an Internet protection racket and I'm not happy about it.
It's been this from the very beginning. But they don't fit the definition of a protection racket as they're not the ones attacking you if you don't pay up. So they're more like a security company that has no competitors due to the needed investment to operate.
ask AI how to do it?
They tried nothing & they're all out of ideas.
Well... Good.
This is why companies like Perplexity and OpenAI are creating browsers.
good, that means it’s working
I’m gonna be frustrated (though not surprised) if the response is anything other than this.
I set up a WAF for my company's publicly facing developer portal to block out bot traffic from assholes like these guys. It reduced bot traffic to the site by something like - I kid you not - 99.999%.
Fucking data vultures.
