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Any analogy is flawed and you can kill most analogies very fast. They are meant to illustrate a point hopefully efficiently, not to be mathematically true. They

by jraph 1y ago

Any analogy is flawed and you can kill most analogies very fast. They are meant to illustrate a point hopefully efficiently, not to be mathematically true. They are not to everyone's taste, me included in most cases. They are mostly fine as long as they are not used to make a point, but only to illustrate it. I agree with this criticism of this analogy, I actually had this flaw in mind from the start. There are other flaws I have in mind as well. I have developed more without the analogy in the remaining of the comment. How about we focus on the crux of the matter? > A web server that accepts a GET request and replies 2xx is distinctly NOT "locked" in any way The point is that these scrappers use tricks so that it's difficult not to grant them access. What is unreasonable here is to think that 200 means consent, especially knowing about the tricks. Edit: > you're more than welcome to put an authentication gate around your content. I don't want to. Adding auth so llm providers don't abuse my servers and the work I meant to share publicly is not a working solution.

jack_pp 1y ago
here's my analogy, it's like you own a museum and you require entrance by "secret" password (your user agent filtering or what not). the problem is the password is the same for everyone so would you be surprised when someone figures it out or gets it from a friend and they visit your museum? Either require a fee (processing power, captcha etc) or make a private password (auth) It is inherently a cat and mouse game that you CHOOSE to play. Either implement throttling for clients that consume too much resources for your server / require auth / captcha / javascript / whatever whenever the client is using too much resources. if the client still chooses to go through the hoops you implemented then I don't see any issue. If u still have an issue then implement more hoops until you're satisfied.
- jraph 1y ago
  > Either require a fee (processing power, captcha etc) or make a private password (auth) Well, I shouldn't have to work or make things worse for everybody because the LLM bros decided to screw us. > It is inherently a cat and mouse game that you CHOOSE to play No, let's not reverse the roles and blame the victims here. We sysadmins and authors are willing to share our work publicly to the world but never asked for it to be abused.
  - jack_pp 1y ago
    That's like saying you shouldn't have to sanitize your database inputs because you never asked for people to SQL inject your database. This stance is truly mind boggling to me
    - jraph 1y ago
      Would you take the defense of attackers using SQL injections? Because it feels like people here, including you, are defending the llm scrapers against sysadmins and authors who dare share their work publicly. Ensuring basic security and robustness of a piece of software is simply not remotely comparable to countering the abuse these llm companies carry on. But it's not even the point. And preventing SQL injections (through healthy programming practices) doesn't make things worse for any legitimate user neither.
    - catlifeonmars 1y ago
      It’s both. You should sanitize your inputs because there are bad actors, but you also categorize attempts to sql inject as abuse and there is legal recourse.
ryandrake 1y ago
People need to have a better mental model of what it means to host a public web site, and what they are actually doing when they run the web server and point it at a directory of files. They're not just serving those files to customers. They're not just serving them to members. They're not just serving them to human beings. They're not even necessarily serving files to web browsers. They're serving files to every IP address (no matter what machine is attached to it) that is capable of opening a socket and sending GET. There's no such distinct thing as a scraper--and if your mental model tries to distinguish between a scraper and a human user, you're going to be disappointed. As the web server operator, you can try to figure out if there's a human behind the IP, and you might be right or wrong. You can try to figure out if it's a web browser, or if it's someone typing in curl from a command line, or if it's a massively parallel automated system, and you might be right or wrong. You can try to guess what country the IP is in, and you might be right or wrong. But if you really want to actually limit access to the content, you shouldn't be publishing that content publicly.
- jraph 1y ago
  > There's no such distinct thing as a scraper--and if your mental model tries to distinguish between a scraper and a human user, you're going to be disappointed. I disagree. If your mental model doesn't allow conceptualizing (abusive) scrapers, it is too simplicistic to be useful to understand and deal with reality. But I'd like to re-state the frame / the concern: it's not about any bot or any scraper, it is about the despicable behavior of LLM providers and their awful scrappers. I'm personally fine with bots accessing my web servers, there are many legitimate use cases for this. > But if you really want to actually limit access to the content, you shouldn't be publishing that content publicly. It is not about denying access to the content to some and allowing access to others. It is about having to deal with abuses. Is a world in which people stop sharing their work publicly because of these abuses desirable? Hell no.
- oytis 1y ago
  Technically, you are not serving anything - it's just voltage levels going up and down with no meaning at all.
- Retric 1y ago

by jraph 1y ago

jack_pp 1y ago

here's my analogy, it's like you own a museum and you require entrance by "secret" password (your user agent filtering or what not). the problem is the password is the same for everyone so would you be surprised when someone figures it out or gets it from a friend and they visit your museum? Either require a fee (processing power, captcha etc) or make a private password (auth) It is inherently a cat and mouse game that you CHOOSE to play. Either implement throttling for clients that consume too much resources for your server / require auth / captcha / javascript / whatever whenever the client is using too much resources. if the client still chooses to go through the hoops you implemented then I don't see any issue. If u still have an issue then implement more hoops until you're satisfied.

jraph 1y ago
> Either require a fee (processing power, captcha etc) or make a private password (auth) Well, I shouldn't have to work or make things worse for everybody because the LLM bros decided to screw us. > It is inherently a cat and mouse game that you CHOOSE to play No, let's not reverse the roles and blame the victims here. We sysadmins and authors are willing to share our work publicly to the world but never asked for it to be abused.
- jack_pp 1y ago
  That's like saying you shouldn't have to sanitize your database inputs because you never asked for people to SQL inject your database. This stance is truly mind boggling to me
  - jraph 1y ago
    Would you take the defense of attackers using SQL injections? Because it feels like people here, including you, are defending the llm scrapers against sysadmins and authors who dare share their work publicly. Ensuring basic security and robustness of a piece of software is simply not remotely comparable to countering the abuse these llm companies carry on. But it's not even the point. And preventing SQL injections (through healthy programming practices) doesn't make things worse for any legitimate user neither.
  - catlifeonmars 1y ago
    It’s both. You should sanitize your inputs because there are bad actors, but you also categorize attempts to sql inject as abuse and there is legal recourse.

ryandrake 1y ago

People need to have a better mental model of what it means to host a public web site, and what they are actually doing when they run the web server and point it at a directory of files. They're not just serving those files to customers. They're not just serving them to members. They're not just serving them to human beings. They're not even necessarily serving files to web browsers. They're serving files to every IP address (no matter what machine is attached to it) that is capable of opening a socket and sending GET. There's no such distinct thing as a scraper--and if your mental model tries to distinguish between a scraper and a human user, you're going to be disappointed. As the web server operator, you can try to figure out if there's a human behind the IP, and you might be right or wrong. You can try to figure out if it's a web browser, or if it's someone typing in curl from a command line, or if it's a massively parallel automated system, and you might be right or wrong. You can try to guess what country the IP is in, and you might be right or wrong. But if you really want to actually limit access to the content, you shouldn't be publishing that content publicly.

jraph 1y ago
> There's no such distinct thing as a scraper--and if your mental model tries to distinguish between a scraper and a human user, you're going to be disappointed. I disagree. If your mental model doesn't allow conceptualizing (abusive) scrapers, it is too simplicistic to be useful to understand and deal with reality. But I'd like to re-state the frame / the concern: it's not about any bot or any scraper, it is about the despicable behavior of LLM providers and their awful scrappers. I'm personally fine with bots accessing my web servers, there are many legitimate use cases for this. > But if you really want to actually limit access to the content, you shouldn't be publishing that content publicly. It is not about denying access to the content to some and allowing access to others. It is about having to deal with abuses. Is a world in which people stop sharing their work publicly because of these abuses desirable? Hell no.
oytis 1y ago
Technically, you are not serving anything - it's just voltage levels going up and down with no meaning at all.
Retric 1y ago