Only tangentially related, but I've recently realized that unless you're some sort of business with a valid requirement of that, you can just block incoming traffic from all of AWS, DigitalOcean, Azure, etc.
I think the spark came from some other HN comment I saw? So thank you for that, whoever wrote that.
That alone is not a sufficient strategy of course, but you can get rid of a lot of bots by just refusing to talk to where they tend to live.
Of course, if everyone were to do that, they'd eventually pivot to residential proxies. But I don't see that happening.
Same, I just checked and this week the vast majority of the bot traffic I get is random residential IPs that all pretend to be the exact same Chrome 155 on Linux.
Yeah it's definitely sketchy, but a "media access box" that purports to replace $100 a month in streaming bills with pirate media is kinda awesome.
Of course, the countries the Jellyfin and Plex servers along with IPTV dealers aren't illegal there.
And sure, your device becomes a residential proxy. They don't make that fact clear... But if you told people, I think for that $100-$200 a month streaming bills go poof is probably worth it.
I initially thought this was a good idea too until another comment pointed out you'll lose most business or personal customers in offices because they connect through VPN gateways running on those cloud services (especially Azure)
I would argue that more often than not it might not. Really depends on the specifics though.
A lot of stuff on the web actually isn't really relevant for all audiences everywhere I'd say. It just happened to be accessible by all, because academics back in the day dreamt of a better open world that didn't really manifest :(
Let me tell you, at the business I work at, some of our customers work at a company that uses a commercial VDI service for all workstations couldn’t access our service because the VDI egress was in GCP and we had an AWS WAF rule banning datacenter IPs.
Obviously, we removed the rule because it was doing nothing useful but plenty of harm. Real bots come from residential IPs.
And even if we run with that assumption, one might still be fine. It's a trade-off, but, depending on the target audience, a few lost sales might be worth savings in other aspects.
It's really not, unless the only qualifier for that is "hosted by a VC incubator". Most of the people here are here to argue about AI or Crypto or whatever, or read announcements from Nvidia and Google. I would bet less then 1% are starting businesses.
Who said we control the connecting device? This is a website. Websites are usually pretty arms-length things, and that’s the case with us. They’re our customers but we can’t install certificates on their computers and enforce mTLS. Can you do that with any of your customers?
Some companies don't split because they want all internet traffic to go through their internal MITM proxies to enforce acceptable internet use and data loss policies.
Residential proxies are something that is not supposed to exist.
In the sense that you do not have people that actively sell those services via their home internet connection.
The whole thing just exists because there's this whole predatory ecosystem that uses malware and malicious devices to sell that without the owners even knowing.
That makes it legally questionable, even though I guess technically it is legal enough?
Still radioactive, so as a serious business, you do not want to be seen doing that.
They exist because of GeoIP databases, and spying on "quality of IP address via ASN".
If you try to use a normal VPN, you get rate limited or blocked everywhere. But if you switch to a residential proxy, all those problems go away.
To be fair, if all you're doing is torrenting or similar copyright infringing actions, then a simple VPN is sufficient. But if you want to do web stuff, you gotta use a residential vpn. Not much way around this.
That was not the question.
There are many factors driving crime, yes.
The point however is that this is crime and crime is incorrect and fundamentally shouldn't exist.
But, more importantly, as a serious business, you do not want to be seen doing crime or benefitting from crime or supporting crime or being near crime. At least in a working society that is.
First, copyright violation as non-profit is a tort.
Secondly, it's only for-profit copyright violations that are a crime. But as OFCOM learned the hard way, stuff illegal in the US can be legal elsewhere.
Thirdly, for some fucking reason, the US AI companies are immune to criminal statutes of for-profit copyright violations. Job creators, or some bullshit.
And I'm not sure exactly why you're so dead-set on "crime crime crime". It's all politics and manufactured criminality. And well, I don't particularly care if backing up my movies to a Jellyfin and sharing access is "ill eagle".
The AI companies are bulk pirating AND then selling that access.... But I'm the criminal? Fuck that noise.
If the content is legally obtainable, couldn’t any employee use their own home network to pull data? I don’t think anyone would bother with a resi. Employees have their own network connections available.
Then you are not looking. Already have to switch to resi proxies from time to time when encountering yet another smartass who decided to play security theater and block datacenter ips on his shitpile he calls website, because "OUR USERS MUST BE GOOD BOYS WHO LOVE TO LIVE UNDER SURVILANCE AND ALLOW ISP TO TRACK THEM 24/7" (and before you say something like "others can track you too!", your ISP has the ability to knock on your door, they should be given as little information as possible, let them do metadata analysis on per-person basis if they really want it, but no 1-click mass surveillance shit).
If you are valuable, you will be be scraped. Turning user hostile in a hopeless endeavor to "protect yourself" is not the solution.
I can see that you're having strong emotions about this, but that rant is just hard to read and serves primarily as venting and not really to convince anyone of anything.
Unless one zooms out and thinks "okay, these guys seem to react negatively if we do exactly that. We should do more of it", which is probably not what you want.
It does, measurably. A massively popular site is going to get hammered with more advanced types of scraping, but they're going to have a team that can more easily mitigate it.
A site that doesn't care about corporate users basically loses nothing.
I trust my ISP far more than I trust bigtech. The downside of connecting from my ISP is that the site I connect to can fingerprint me trivially from the IP range
I currently tarpit traffic from AWS, Azure, GCP, etc. since it's not like any of my real customers have their PC inside those networks. (I then use that for experiments with providing bogus data to AI scrapers.)
Doesn't do much to help with the "VPN that uses random consumer PCs and phones" traffic.
Depending on the service, you may not want it to be indexed anyway (IE login pages) or, if you do, most commercial crawlers have methods to allow site owners to verify that the traffic is a legitimate crawler and not an impersonator, see:
maybe stupid question but how is it possible to not be protected against supercrawlers like this, when you own large amounts of data, specially if all requests are coming from the same server ? Aren't cyberprotection services like CloudFlare work against this kind of "attacks" ?
Yeah, I can imagine it being a problem if it was from different IP addresses, but surely putting a limit on requests from a single IP would be a straightforward fix? Although maybe until it happens, you don't think about it.
then in the post "It came from a single Amazon Web Services (AWS) address. It had read the main page of 18,926 projects, which is practically our entire catalogue, in 26,429 requests over a span of 34 hours."
sounds like some R&D dude running solo to be honest, nothing about that is a supercrawler lol
These services cost money. Scrapers also cost money in terms of resource utilization and downtime. There's always a tradeoff.
The ROI of services like Cloudflare bot protection, Datadome, HUMAN, AWS bot mitigation etc. is highly dependent on your income from the data. In the case of publicly hosted freely accessible data it can be hard to justify.
Who actually cares? Isn't the whole premise of the AI revolution just gorging ourselves with other people's data so we can have AGI? I was under the impression that we have accepted this sacrifice with OAI and friends leading the way.
Crypto, big data, AI. It's all just another middle man hoping to scrape some joy out of everyone's lives to they can put a price tag on it and sell it to rubes and the government(and rubes in the government).
I'm sympatic to open3dlab but I think the focus on adult-content is just trying to spark outcry for cheap.
It has been shown times and times against that removing adult content from the training source (at least for diffusion models), results in generally lower-quality output, even outside of adult-content, particularly in terms of representing human bodies.
would the implied intent (from the inclusion of adult content) of training models on open3dlab content, without asking them, render Roblox's actions _less_ antisocial???
The current AI Ethos is morality is just another obstacle on the way to their IPO. ...Lets just hope after they get rich, they stay away, and dont bother us with books, videos and conference speeches on entrepreneurship mentoring...
Not really. Given that roblox is almost entirely children, and given the amount of hot water they're in you'd think they'd stay the hell away from adult content
Discord knows I'm an adult and keeps trying to send me "promoted Quests" to go use Roblox. That seems sketchy to keep baiting adults into childrens' spaces, too.
New kids often don't want to be in the same space as where the "new adults" are though, that's uncool. See: literally any social media site since forever.
Man if only there was such a thing as good manners, good behaviour, accepted practices from a community to not massively hammer servers. If only these websites had been up for a decade with very few problems, before a notoriously manipulative, lying, deceiving, abusive company that makes money off of child abusers came in and just went hurr durr free data in the WORST possible way instead of just politely asking for a dump.
> The crawler did not respect our robots.txt, (which it did retrieve), ignored our Terms of Service, (which forbid scraping), and defied the creators' licenses: 423 of the 712 projects are licensed for non-commercial use only.
The fact someone else may have licenced content for commercial use doesn't entitle someone else to do the same without paying for it. That's the whole point of copyright law.
And before you agitate against that, think deeply about the consequences. A world where website owners can legally dictate exactly what software you use to access their content.
The news is that people download it so much that they saturate your server’s connection and/or peg its CPU or disk (whichever is the weakest link in the chain). We used to call this a Denial of Service attack but now it’s apparently just a cost of doing business, even for people who just want to run a non-commercial hobby site.
I mean, it's not the size of the download, it's the unauthorised scraping of community assets strictly against terms and ignoring robots.txt by an American corporation. Resource of a kind that used to get kids threatened with spending most of their life in prison.
But I agree that this kind of theft by US corporations is no longer news.
(Yes, it's theft: they were aware they may not do it and according to the article attempted to get around further restrictions. I mean it's literally even theft of the $3 you mention — you don't have to be in possession the $3 to illegally deprive its owner of it under common theft statutes)
Of course not. But there’s no indication whatsoever that any license has been violated. Downloading a file from a free access server cannot violate license terms.
Fear that something will happen is not the same thing as evidence it has happened.
> If you're downloading it for commercial purposes (clearly the case) you're violating the license.
No. Copyright doesn’t work that way, no matter how much you might wish it did. And it’s a very important thing for the web that it doesn’t.
Legally speaking, it is extremely well established that downloading is not the type of copying that “copyright” concerns itself with. And the GPL and similar licenses are predicated on copyright laws.
Once you make the content available in some other way, then copyright law might have something to say.
People in tech used to make fun of “you wouldn’t download a car”. It’s sad that so many have reversed their principles the moment a convenient villain shows up.
I think technically such a model should abide by the licence of the inputs, hence all models would probably be GPL if the FSF had resources to fight it and the legal profession had an inkling of the processes involved.
Or maybe the FSF is just waiting for everyone using AI code to become hooked and then subpoena every Antrophic/OAI/Codex customer and force the most massive source release in history (If Adobe/MS would file lawsuits vs the Craft apps and with their resources create legal precedent it could create chaos, maybe the only part stopping them right now from filing lawsuits is them realizing it could backfire since they're heavy AI users themselves).
Does it matter? Lawyers don't know either since most majorer cases are still in progress.
So far it seems more cases that have been decided in lower instances or has been settled or gone in the direction of the party with most money for lawyers, still even in those cases there seems to be a slight tilt towards rightsholders.
I'm not saying anything categorically, but if some cases go all the way and towards rightsholders, it could become a real shitshow in the software industry since we've adopted AI so heavily and the non-significatng portion of public GPL licenced code could bite people in the ass.
> Can I scrape all GPL source code from github. Then use the code commercially and then say so what, they made their source code available to download?
Yes, that's the whole point of the GPL. Use it however you want, but don't restrict the next person
You may remember from 2021 that Microsoft's Copilot would gladly regurgitate the GPL-licensed Quake 3 source code, without giving you any indication it got it from there or that the GPL applies.
> The crawler did not respect our robots.txt, (which it did retrieve), ignored our Terms of Service, (which forbid scraping), and defied the creators' licenses: 423 of the 712 projects are licensed for non-commercial use only.
It's a community site, first model I looked at (Tanya by Shrimport) is under CC-BY-ND-NC licence (Creative Commons, By attribution, No-derivatives, Non-commercial).
AI training by definition is derivative, and Roblox not using it for commercial purposes if used in production is practically nil.
This is a huge part of why AI upsets people, we can't have nice things such as communities where people are sharing 3d models without it being feeding ground for commercial companies that has little intention to ever honor any licences or compensate authors.
Except someone can explicitly licence their content saying "this cannot be used for training models, or you're violating the licence you used to download it in the first place".
I think the spark came from some other HN comment I saw? So thank you for that, whoever wrote that.
That alone is not a sufficient strategy of course, but you can get rid of a lot of bots by just refusing to talk to where they tend to live.
Of course, if everyone were to do that, they'd eventually pivot to residential proxies. But I don't see that happening.
That’s probably a decent starting point, but a little older. I am not sure if the situation has changed any in 2026.
Of course, the countries the Jellyfin and Plex servers along with IPTV dealers aren't illegal there.
And sure, your device becomes a residential proxy. They don't make that fact clear... But if you told people, I think for that $100-$200 a month streaming bills go poof is probably worth it.
I would argue that more often than not it might not. Really depends on the specifics though.
A lot of stuff on the web actually isn't really relevant for all audiences everywhere I'd say. It just happened to be accessible by all, because academics back in the day dreamt of a better open world that didn't really manifest :(
Let me tell you, at the business I work at, some of our customers work at a company that uses a commercial VDI service for all workstations couldn’t access our service because the VDI egress was in GCP and we had an AWS WAF rule banning datacenter IPs.
Obviously, we removed the rule because it was doing nothing useful but plenty of harm. Real bots come from residential IPs.
And even if we run with that assumption, one might still be fine. It's a trade-off, but, depending on the target audience, a few lost sales might be worth savings in other aspects.
It's really not, unless the only qualifier for that is "hosted by a VC incubator". Most of the people here are here to argue about AI or Crypto or whatever, or read announcements from Nvidia and Google. I would bet less then 1% are starting businesses.
it is open and better indeed. open and better for capital - the true, living, flesh-eating god.
Do many companies really use azure etc rather than dedicated services like zscaler?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49491791
None of these measures alone are a full solution, but if you stack a bunch of cheese slices, eventually, no holes line up anymore.
In the sense that you do not have people that actively sell those services via their home internet connection.
The whole thing just exists because there's this whole predatory ecosystem that uses malware and malicious devices to sell that without the owners even knowing.
That makes it legally questionable, even though I guess technically it is legal enough? Still radioactive, so as a serious business, you do not want to be seen doing that.
If you try to use a normal VPN, you get rate limited or blocked everywhere. But if you switch to a residential proxy, all those problems go away.
To be fair, if all you're doing is torrenting or similar copyright infringing actions, then a simple VPN is sufficient. But if you want to do web stuff, you gotta use a residential vpn. Not much way around this.
The point however is that this is crime and crime is incorrect and fundamentally shouldn't exist.
But, more importantly, as a serious business, you do not want to be seen doing crime or benefitting from crime or supporting crime or being near crime. At least in a working society that is.
Secondly, it's only for-profit copyright violations that are a crime. But as OFCOM learned the hard way, stuff illegal in the US can be legal elsewhere.
Thirdly, for some fucking reason, the US AI companies are immune to criminal statutes of for-profit copyright violations. Job creators, or some bullshit.
And I'm not sure exactly why you're so dead-set on "crime crime crime". It's all politics and manufactured criminality. And well, I don't particularly care if backing up my movies to a Jellyfin and sharing access is "ill eagle".
The AI companies are bulk pirating AND then selling that access.... But I'm the criminal? Fuck that noise.
Which then was countered with a broad range of classic HN dysfunction, hostility and pedantry.
When the truth of the matter is that it's actually just a decent idea for some use-cases and a less-decent idea for others.
But instead of acknowledging that nuance, an explosion of nonsense happened here.
I genuinely do not understand why you've suddenly started talking about yourself and your own residential proxy use? Why does that belong here?
Either by technical means or by a whistleblower.
Which might be a gamble worth doing, but also might not. And regardless, the fact that it is a gamble alone slows down velocity.
Yes, yes there is always something. Yes there can always be workarounds.
But that is not the point. The point is that things are made harder. That is the point. To make things harder
Not impossible. Harder
Jesus Christ. It's all just a game of probabilities and friction. One needs to understand that to understand reality.
Then you are not looking. Already have to switch to resi proxies from time to time when encountering yet another smartass who decided to play security theater and block datacenter ips on his shitpile he calls website, because "OUR USERS MUST BE GOOD BOYS WHO LOVE TO LIVE UNDER SURVILANCE AND ALLOW ISP TO TRACK THEM 24/7" (and before you say something like "others can track you too!", your ISP has the ability to knock on your door, they should be given as little information as possible, let them do metadata analysis on per-person basis if they really want it, but no 1-click mass surveillance shit).
If you are valuable, you will be be scraped. Turning user hostile in a hopeless endeavor to "protect yourself" is not the solution.
Unless one zooms out and thinks "okay, these guys seem to react negatively if we do exactly that. We should do more of it", which is probably not what you want.
Blocking "scrapping [sic]" is also not security theater, you misunderstand the intent of GP.
A site that doesn't care about corporate users basically loses nothing.
Doesn't do much to help with the "VPN that uses random consumer PCs and phones" traffic.
https://developers.google.com/crawling/docs/crawlers-fetcher...
(Though restricting the Google UA to only legitimate Google IPs seemingly would break Brave's crawler, though that's their own fault: https://safe.search.brave.com/help/brave-search-crawler/)
https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/duckduc...
https://www.bing.com/webmasters/help/how-to-verify-bingbot-3...
https://kagi.com/bot
then in the post "It came from a single Amazon Web Services (AWS) address. It had read the main page of 18,926 projects, which is practically our entire catalogue, in 26,429 requests over a span of 34 hours."
sounds like some R&D dude running solo to be honest, nothing about that is a supercrawler lol
These services cost money. Scrapers also cost money in terms of resource utilization and downtime. There's always a tradeoff.
The ROI of services like Cloudflare bot protection, Datadome, HUMAN, AWS bot mitigation etc. is highly dependent on your income from the data. In the case of publicly hosted freely accessible data it can be hard to justify.
Crypto, big data, AI. It's all just another middle man hoping to scrape some joy out of everyone's lives to they can put a price tag on it and sell it to rubes and the government(and rubes in the government).
It has been shown times and times against that removing adult content from the training source (at least for diffusion models), results in generally lower-quality output, even outside of adult-content, particularly in terms of representing human bodies.
To a certain extent, it already has. YouTube for Kids and regular YouTube are worlds apart.
What is the actual news here, can anyone explain ????
> The crawler did not respect our robots.txt, (which it did retrieve), ignored our Terms of Service, (which forbid scraping), and defied the creators' licenses: 423 of the 712 projects are licensed for non-commercial use only.
I don't see a problem
> ignored our Terms of Service
ban them from the service then and case closed?
> and defied the creators' licenses: 423 of the 712 projects are licensed for non-commercial use only
because it's been proven they have been used commercially?
The fact someone else may have licenced content for commercial use doesn't entitle someone else to do the same without paying for it. That's the whole point of copyright law.
It's not nice. It is, however, not illegal.
And before you agitate against that, think deeply about the consequences. A world where website owners can legally dictate exactly what software you use to access their content.
Which is it then? Megacorps can enforce their TOS through the law but small companies cannot?
But I agree that this kind of theft by US corporations is no longer news.
(Yes, it's theft: they were aware they may not do it and according to the article attempted to get around further restrictions. I mean it's literally even theft of the $3 you mention — you don't have to be in possession the $3 to illegally deprive its owner of it under common theft statutes)
Companies copying things to make profit for themselves not being held accountable.
Progress is one thing, injustice is another.
Fear that something will happen is not the same thing as evidence it has happened.
Sure it can. If you're downloading it for commercial purposes (clearly the case) you're violating the license.
Legally speaking, it is extremely well established that downloading is not the type of copying that “copyright” concerns itself with. And the GPL and similar licenses are predicated on copyright laws.
Once you make the content available in some other way, then copyright law might have something to say.
People in tech used to make fun of “you wouldn’t download a car”. It’s sad that so many have reversed their principles the moment a convenient villain shows up.
I guess we'll never know until you learn to read anything other than sheet music.
Which is different than using the data 1 to 1.
Or maybe the FSF is just waiting for everyone using AI code to become hooked and then subpoena every Antrophic/OAI/Codex customer and force the most massive source release in history (If Adobe/MS would file lawsuits vs the Craft apps and with their resources create legal precedent it could create chaos, maybe the only part stopping them right now from filing lawsuits is them realizing it could backfire since they're heavy AI users themselves).
I know there was some cases in the past where people swapped licences and changed variablenames,etc but the essential code clearly remained.
So far it seems more cases that have been decided in lower instances or has been settled or gone in the direction of the party with most money for lawyers, still even in those cases there seems to be a slight tilt towards rightsholders.
I'm not saying anything categorically, but if some cases go all the way and towards rightsholders, it could become a real shitshow in the software industry since we've adopted AI so heavily and the non-significatng portion of public GPL licenced code could bite people in the ass.
Yes, that's the whole point of the GPL. Use it however you want, but don't restrict the next person
Let me refer you to my earlier distinction between things that have happened and things you fear.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27710287
https://x.com/mitsuhiko/status/1410886329924194309
> The crawler did not respect our robots.txt, (which it did retrieve), ignored our Terms of Service, (which forbid scraping), and defied the creators' licenses: 423 of the 712 projects are licensed for non-commercial use only.
AI training by definition is derivative, and Roblox not using it for commercial purposes if used in production is practically nil.
This is a huge part of why AI upsets people, we can't have nice things such as communities where people are sharing 3d models without it being feeding ground for commercial companies that has little intention to ever honor any licences or compensate authors.