This continual AI surveillance state and AI moderation crap just keeps reminding me more and more of this particular passage from A Scanner Darkly.

What does a scanner see? he asked himself. I mean, really see? Into the head? Down into the heart? Does a passive infrared scanner like they used to use or a cube-type holo-scanner like they use these days, the latest thing, see into me - into us - clearly or darkly? I hope it does, he thought, see clearly, because I can’t any longer these days see into myself. I see only murk. Murk outside; murk inside. I hope, for everyone’s sake, the scanners do better. Because, he thought, if the scanner sees only darkly, the way I myself do, then we are cursed, cursed again and like we have been continually, and we’ll wind up dead this way, knowing very little and getting that little fragment wrong too.

Imagine how much more they could’ve just paid employees.

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.