Do you think DoS/DDoS activities should be criminal?

If you’re a site operator and the mass AI scraping is genuinely causing operational problems (not hard to imagine, I’ve seen what it does to my hosted repositories pages) should there be recourse? Especially if you’re actively trying to prevent that activity (revoking consent in cookies, authorization captchas).

In general I think the idea of “your right to swing your fists ends at my face” applies reasonably well here — these AI scraping companies are giving lots of admins bloody noses and need to be held accountable.

I really am amenable to arguments wrt the right to an open web, but look at how many sites are hiding behind CF and other portals, or outright becoming hostile to any scraping at all; we’re already seeing the rapid death of the ideal because of these malicious scrapers, and we should be using all available recourse to stop this bleeding.

When sites put challenges like Anubis or other measures to authenticate that the viewer isn’t a robot, and scrapers then employ measures to thwart that authentication (via spoofing or other means) I think that’s a reasonable violation of the CFAA in spirit — especially since these mass scraping activities are getting attention for the damage they are causing to site operators (another factor in the CFAA, and one that would promote this to felony activity.)

The fact is these laws are already on the books, we may as well utilize them to shut down this objectively harmful activity AI scrapers are doing.

When a firm outright admits to bypassing or trying to bypass measures taken to keep them out, you think that would be a slam dunk case of unauthorized access under the CFAA with felony enhancements.

BEAD funds are more or less administered by the state, and nothing is fundementally stopping them from doing the right thing and preferring local bids.

It’s entirely possible too, look at North Dakota, it has near 100% fiber coverage for the entire state, because the same model that brought electrification to them brought them fiber. In Utah and surrounding states there are municipal networks building out to member cities.

The real threat is the states capitulating to the incumbent providers like Comcast – but at least it’s a State level issue instead of being totally a given at the federal level.

We also typically think of these individuals as mature adults with some understanding of the world and social skills — but a lot of the people getting pulled in are kids and teenagers, which are particularly vulnerable for exactly the reason you elucidated.

Ironically enough there’s basically a private version of this through Comcast turning their rented CPEs into their own unlicensed wifi mesh, they call it WiFi Pass – they at least have the courtesy to give it to you gratis if you’re already paying for residential service.

I mean I would’ve preferred Hg.

But to the point, I think GitHub has been instrumental in the success of Git.

Multi-cloud is far from trivial, which is why most companies… don’t.

Even if you are multi-cloud, you will be egressing data from one platform to another and racking up large bills (imagine putting CloudFront in front of a GCS endpoint lmao), you are incentivized to stick on a single platform. I don’t blame anyone for being single-cloud with the barriers they put up, and how difficult maintaining your own infrastructure is.

Once you get large enough to afford tape libraries then yeah having your own offsite for large backups makes a lot of sense, but otherwise the convenience and reliability (when AWS isn’t nuking your account) of managed storage is hard to beat — cold HDDs are not great, and m-disc is pricey.

In this guy’s specific case, it may be financially feasible to back up onto other cloud solutions, for the reasons you stated.

However public cloud is used for a ton of different things. If you have 4TiB of data in Glacier, you will be paying through the absolute nose pulling that data down into another cloud; highway robbery prices.

Further as soon as you talk about something more than just code (say: UGC, assets, databases) the amount of data needing to be “egressed” from the cloud balloons, as does the price.

It really depends, pulling hundreds of GiB out of AWS for backing up on say GCS is going to add up extremely quickly. The cloud companies make it intentionally painful to leave or interop.

Expanding on that, direct water cooling becomes more common the higher power density the racks are.

So as you get into 35kW+ racks it becomes the only way to get that much heat out, lots of GPU compute racks are water cooled by default now, the El Capitan super computer is entirely cooled through direct liquid interfaces, for example.

What a coincidence, I was just reading sections of Blindsight again for an assignment (not directly related to its contents) and had a similar thought when re-parsing a section near the one in the OP — it’s scary how closely the novel depicted something analogous to contemporary LLM output.

Is it? Every house in my neighborhood has a 240V power line running to it, with 100A service typical.

There isn’t a single hydrogen fuel station in my entire state.

Power delivery seems like basically a solved issue, Level 2 charging is attainable for practically all households with minimal personal investment; and Level 3 charging is mostly an investment in the physical stations to rectify AC to high voltage DC, the wires that carry the AC are already there.

I mean a backup of a RAID pool is likely just another RAID pool (ideally off-site) – maybe a tape library if you’ve got considerable cash.

Point is that mfg refurbs are basically fine, just be responsible, if your backup pool runs infrequently then that’s a good candidate for more white label drives.

I’ve had the same experience. The first HDD that failed on me was a Barricuda 7200.11 with the infamous firmware self-brick issue, and a second 7200.11 that just died slowly from bad sectors.

From then on I only bought WD, I have a Caviar Black 1TB from oh, 2009-ish that’s still in service, though it’s finally starting to concern me with it’s higher temperature readings, probably the motor bearings going. After that I’ve got a few of the WD RE4 1TBs still running like new, and 6 various other WD Gold series drives, all running happily.

The only WD failure I’ve had was from improper shipping, when TigerDirect (rip) didn’t pack the drive correctly, and the carrier football tossed the thing at my porch, it was losing sectors as soon as it first started, but the RMA drive that replaced it is still running in a server fine.

If you’ve got a RAID array with 1 or 2 parity then manufacturer recertified drives are fine; those are typically drives that just aged out before being deployed, or were traded in when a large array upgraded.

If you’re really paranoid you should be mixing mfg dates anyway, so keep some factory new and then add the recerts so the drive pools have a healthy split.

And the long term plan there is to strangle sites and take %100 of the adrev spend for themselves since users won’t ever leave the Google site. Either way Google as a search engine enters a death spiral, it’s already bleeding users.

Google used to provide a ton of traffic, they hoard it all themselves now through AI and summaries of content. Eventually the balance of cost/benefit will shift and Google will suddenly see itself rejected from scraping, furthering the product deathspiral.

Imagine the price hikes when they need to get that return on hundreds of billions they’ve poured into these models, datacenters and electricity.

EU should forge ahead and just wait for America to hopefully come to senses and end it’s entitled temper tantrum.