As a hobbyist programmer/game developer, ya basically hit the “as a programmer” part on the nose as in it’s why I care. In my opinion the issue is because we have faster and faster chips, we don’t care as long as it runs which means it’s using as much of the device as possible which means higher energy consumption. Also, DLSS has to be trained so you can lump it into how AI is causing more coal to be burned and water to be wasted cooling data centers designed to train AI.
Is it just me, or is it depressing that modern gaming has succumb to requiring AI gimmicks to run performant? Why does every new AAA title require DLSS and why would I want AI generating 75% (as I perceive the DLSS 4x, correct me if wrong) of the frames that induces artifacts like halos and blur anyway? What is it about these games that some optimization wouldn’t be warranted for them to run without some AI layer on top to get 60 fps, let alone the 144+ fps that consumers now expect?
The only way I can think of is require users to authenticate themselves, but this isn’t much of a hurdle.
To get into the details of it, what do you define as an AI bot? Are you worried about scrappers grabbing the contents of you website? What is the activities of an “AI Bot”. Are you worried about AI bots registering and using your platform?
The real answer is not even cloudflare will fully defend you from this. If anything cloudflare is just making sure they get paid for access to your website by AI scappers. As someone who has worked around bot protections (albeit in a different context than web scrapping), it’s a game of cat and mouse. If you or some company you hire are not actively working against automated access, you lose as the other side is active.
Just think of your point that they are using residential IP addresses. How do they get these addresses? They provide addons/extensions for browsers that offer some service (generally free VPNs) in exchange for access to your PC and therefore your internet in the contract you agree to. The same can be used by any addon, and if the addon has permissions to read any website they can scrape those websites using legit users for whatever purposes they want. The recent exposure of the Honey scam highlights this, as it’s very easy to get users to install addons by selling users they might save a small amount of money (or make money for other programs). There will be users who are compromised by addons/extensions or even just viruses that will be able to extract the data you are trying to protect.
I’d just skip OpenVPN altogether and get started with Wireguard or Headscale/Tailscale.
This one was huge for me. OpenVPN is pretty heavy with CPU overhead, where as wireguard is almost free. I was getting throttled due to the overhead of OpenVPN and roasting the CPU on my Netgear R6350 (it’s what I had lying around). With wireguard I get nearly the same speeds as without a VPN and my loads are very reasonable.
Also with weaker routers like mine, be wary of trying to use QoS, this will probably not help network congestion and instead become a bottleneck (like it did for me). This is where a beefy dedicated router really shines.
My question is, why give it for free? Has their product developed enough to win in the AI developer space? Are we reaching the point where you could self-host an AI code assistant as good as copilot? Or are projects such as johnny.ai (renamed, I’m not going to advertise it) challenging Microsoft’s market share in the AI developer space?
My only guess is Microsoft wants you to get used to their ecosystem and further ingrain developers into their development ecosystem. At best, once you are used to their ecosystem you’ll stick with them out of familiarity. At worst, they can use your input (prompts, refactors, etc) to further the development of copilot.
To me this smells of typical subsidizing of a product to capture market share then lock in that market share. Anything I’m missing?
Edit: johnny.ai seems to be a domain offered for resale by godaddy. I didn’t mean to link them but I’ll leave it here, don’t give godaddy money as they are a terrible domain name registrar.
To add to this spending some time in custody is inconvenient, but losing your rights being convicted of something you didn’t even do is more inconvenient. You think you know what to say until you say the wrong thing and start digging a hole.
This is good to know, but adds an additional step to simply requiring a passcode to unlock on screen lock.
Just the act of refusing makes the act of seizing your phone legal or not. If you legally give them your phone by your own will, they are able to use all evidence they find in the courts. If you deny to give them your phone, and they seize it anyways and access it you have a valid path to throw the evidence they discover out as an illegal search and seizure of your property. I’m not a lawyer but that is the general thought process on denying them access to your property.
Edit: Just want to say this mostly pretains to United States law and similar legal structures. This advice is not applicable everywhere and you should research your countries rights and legal protections.
I personally rather trust that my device isn’t able to be unlocked without my permission, rather than hope I am able to do some action to disable it in certain situations. The availability of such features is nice, but I would assume I would be incapable of performing such actions in the moment.
My other thought is, how guilty is one perceived if they immediately attempt to lock their phones in such a matter, by a jury of their peers? I rather go the deniability route of I didn’t want to share my passcode vs I locked my phone down cause the cops were grabbing me.
To add to this, don’t use bio-metrics to lock your devices. Cops will “accidentally” use these to unlock devices when they are forcibly seized.
When I say residential IP addresses, I mostly mean proxies using residential IPs, which allow scrappers to mask themselves as organic traffic.
Edit: Your point stands on there are a lot of services without these protections in place, but a lot of services are protective against scrapping.