As of late we’ve gotten two or three spam comments that have made it past our filters… And the vibe on them is decidedly different than the usual.
These ones are antagonizing and rude, clearly seeking to get a rise out of you.
Yet another thing to watch out for.
Robb Knight, a software developer who found that Perplexity was circumventing robots.txt to scrape websites it wasn’t supposed to, told 404 Media there are many cases where it’s hard to tell what a user agent does or who operates it. “What’s happening to people, including me, is copy-pasting lists of agents without verifying every agent is a real one,” he said. Knight added that the Wall Street Journal and many News Corp-owned websites are currently blocking a bot called “Perplexity-ai,” which may or may not even exist (Perplexity’s crawler is called “PerplexityBot.”)
Source: Websites are Blocking the Wrong AI Scrapers (Because AI Companies Keep Making New Ones)
The solution we used on this here blargh is simple: We blocked everyone on robots.txt:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
Crawl-delay: 360
We also like to have a terminal window to look at what’s currently hitting the server and we block bots liberally. We’ve already blocked ahrefs.com and perplexitybot for being assholes without rate limits. Does this mean this here blargh will be that much harder to find? Yeah, but we don’t particularly care about it.
We briefly lived in an era in which the photograph was a shortcut to reality, to knowing things, to having a smoking gun. It was an extraordinarily useful tool for navigating the world around us. We are now leaping headfirst into a future in which reality is simply less knowable. The lost Library of Alexandria could have fit onto the microSD card in my Nintendo Switch, and yet the cutting edge of technology is a handheld telephone that spews lies as a fun little bonus feature.
Source: No one’s ready for this – The Verge
Years ago I remember reading a story about a technology that lets you remember everything as it truly happened, no as you remember it happening. The main character realized most of his adult life he had been the one to fuck up. Another one I remember is The Light of Other Days, by Stephen Baxter based on a synopsys by Arthur C. Clarke.
Until we develop a technology like it, any visual media cannot be granted any authoritative display of fact. In a few months (hopefully years) the same will happen to video.
This is all about to flip — the default assumption about a photo is about to become that it’s faked, because creating realistic and believable fake photos is now trivial to do. We are not prepared for what happens after.
Source: No one’s ready for this – The Verge
Considering the current state of reading comprehension and media literacy in the United States the situation is going to become horrible extremely quickly.
Take in point— conservative media blowing up over “Haitian immigrants eating pets“, which was from the get-go a fake issue, created by Springfield neo-nazis as blood libel. We were already familiar with this kind of racial perception from previous situations so I was already disbelieving of it. But other people on social media outside the US truly believed it. Ourselves we corrected a couple people. One of them blocked us for it 🤷♀️
But in both these cases there were no fake pictures to complicate the issue. At some point a fake picture is going to blow up and it’s going to be almost impossible to dispel the issue unless there’s video of the specific situation. But then genAI is going to then start faking video and we’ll be in the same situation.
Humanity will lose the ability to remember things as they truly were, choosing instead to remember things how they wished they were.
Websites are Blocking the Wrong AI Scrapers (Because AI Companies Keep Making New Ones)
This is an example of “how much of a mess the robots.txt landscape is right now,” the anonymous operator of Dark Visitors told 404 Media. Dark Visitors is a website that tracks the constantly-shifting landscape of web crawlers and scrapers—many of them operated by AI companies—and which helps website owners regularly update their robots.txt files to prevent specific types of scraping. The site has seen a huge increase in popularity as more people try to block AI from scraping their work.
We just blocked everyone and everything. We don’t particularly care about it being found, it’s not like the blogosphere is still a viable entity.