The DMZ

2:02 AM

No, Stack Overflow

I think Schroeder isn't striking, so nothing will show up on Security

nobody

Well, the new AI policy still essentially forbids him from taking any action against GPT posts

lets see how long they take to start popping up here too

nobody

2:20 AM

Just found out loads of reddit users are striking because of their API paywalling

I should invest in popcorn companies

Yes, the coincidence is striking

6 hours later…

forest

8:40 AM

@FireQuacker I've added my own signature to the open letter.

3 hours later…

Journeyman Geek

11:39 AM

@nobody you assume we agreed to anything

forest - on strike

We very much agreed to none of this.

3 hours later…

2:38 PM

Reddit policy is aimed at stopping companies from using its contents to train AI, and that hurts third party apps, devs and users.

subreddits going dark is a good way to bring the attention of reddit owners... like mods striking should bring the attention of SE owners.

Tom K.

2:54 PM

Hey all, just read about the strike and thought I’d pop in. Hope everyone is doing well and happy striking :)

I have not voted on any question this week, or raised any flag, or answered anything...

3:28 PM

@ThoriumBR pff, subreddits and SE mods dont make the company money though ... (yay short sided thinking in favor of catering to investors.)

4:14 PM

it could be opposite reactions to the same problem: SE does not seem AI as a menace, and Reddit sees as an existential threat

lol, I could see a world where it replaces both for acquiring / sifting through information ... right up until both sides go dark due to lack of users and thus the AI would need to find a new source of info.

I mean, if nothing else ChatGPT allows me to search both of those sites more efficiently than they themselves can search their own sites ... all with out advertisements.

It will be interesting to see how this all plays out

Rory Alsop

4:33 PM

@ThoriumBR Oh, I think SE does see AI as an existential threat. If they don't embrace it. Hence all this craziness

if SE sees AI as a threat, why forbid mods from banning users posting AI content?

I mean, its essentially plagiarizing their content w/ out adverts ... and they have zero legal recourse

only thing they can really do is charge for access ... but thats going to kill the userbase

Rory Alsop

@ThoriumBR oh, it is way more complicated than that

cure is maybe worse than the disease

Rory Alsop

part of it could be that if we don't allow it then all those potential visitors go elsewhere - so footfall drops off a cliff, so adverts lose revenue, so SE sinks

4:41 PM

I have a feeling this is just the start of a very long war ... just like Netflix was the start of the war vs Cable

Reddit and SE are only the start of this wave because all the early adopters of things like ChatGPT are tech nerds. This is going to murder News and Blogs and most people wont even see it coming.

just waiting for someone to figure out a way to legally enforce robots.txt

either that or someone to come up w/ a method of flagging and filtering non-human traffic like we currently do w/ spam

though that is going to be a fun game of cat and mouse too ...

> hiQ vs LinkedIn

Web ScrapingMany people consider the question was settled in the US with a Ninth Circuit ruling in mid-April 2022. It was a case between hiQ Labs and LinkedIn. hiQ scrapes data from LinkedIn, creates employment profiles from the data, and sells it to employers.

LinkedIn sent a cease and desist notice to hiQ claiming the scraping was in breach of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). hiQ disagreed and took the issue to court. A five-year legal journey eventually ended with the Ninth Circuit ruling that scraping publicly available web data is not precluded under the CFA…

wonder if thats going to get overturned or of sites are going to enforce login and well defined acceptable use EULAs

4:57 PM

@CaffeineAddiction only tech nerds? I thought it spread to the general public fairly quickly. Lots of school kids using it to get out of homework, etc.

The app went viral

While it has in fact gone viral I dont think people have fully figured it out yet. Even at my company where the company is paying for subscriptions ... people have not figured out how to best make use of it yet. Its like google when google first came out ... sure its a thing, but people had not developed google foo yet.

This is only the beginning ... and if it begins like this, its going to be one hell of a ride.

@CaffeineAddiction Enforcing login by humans will be interesting. CAPTCHA could become super hard pretty soon

Last year, I thought Winograd was a brilliant way to do CAPTCHA...

oh, AI is already better than humans at most CAPTCHAs atm ... no, i think its going to move twards monitoring traffic and doing statistical analysis of traffic patterns

For example, humans dont download all of the html w/ none of the css. Nor do humans download 1000x pages a min.

But you could design a bot to mimic human traffic like that...

But even then you could make an army of proxy servers, and randomize the traffic to make it look human ... massive game of cat and mouse

very akin to the Spam war that is constantly raging

5:04 PM

In 2040, it's all going to merge with DRM and anti-cheating software. You'll be required to have a camera (that provides attestation of non-tampering) filming you the entire time you use a website

Or the governments of the world could just decide to ban computers eventually and we'll have to retrain as mentats

Is SE backed up in any meaningful way? Like in the event that they decided to burn it all to the ground?