Interesting how he brings up AI companies paying botnets to scrape sites, I hadn't heard of that before. It's extremely malicious behavior because as he mention

Interesting how he brings up AI companies paying botnets to scrape sites, I hadn't heard of that before. It's extremely malicious behavior because as he mentions, it's literally a DDoS attack. > But, increasingly, the scraperbot traffic does not fit that pattern. Instead, traffic will come from literally millions of IP addresses, where no specific address is responsible for more than two or three hits over the course of a week. Watching the traffic on the site, one can easily see scraping efforts that are fetching a sorted list of URLs in an obvious sequence, but the same IP address will not appear twice in that sequence. The specific addresses involved come from all over the globe, with no evident pattern. > In other words, this scraping is being done by botnets, quite likely bought in underground markets and consisting of compromised machines. There really is not any other explanation that fits the observed patterns. Once upon a time, compromised systems were put to work mining cryptocurrency; now, it seems, there is more money to be had in repeatedly scraping the same web pages. When one of these botnets goes nuts, the result is indistinguishable from a distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attack — it is a distributed denial-of-service attack. Should anybody be in doubt about the moral integrity of the people running these systems, a look at the techniques they use should make the situation abundantly clear.