keithr0 <me@bugger.off.com.au> wrote:
On 26/03/2026 7:45 am, Axel wrote:I agree, although I consider it a separate topic. Posting
don't mention AI to Kev. that's akin to showing a cross to a vampire. it >>> will cause him to recoil in horror, lol"AI" is wrecking the web.
nonsensical AI rubbish to Usenet is wrecking Usenet, which I think
is a more relevent issue to point out here to the people doing it.
[redacted] dealing with trying to decode whether there's
truth in these AI claims is much harder and more distracting than
reading human replies, and it pisses me off more in the end.
It costs money to run a web site, and siteWell no. True the site gets no ad views because the AI doesn't load
owners usually rely on advertising to cover their costs. The amount that
they can charge for advertising depends on the number of page views.
With "AI", it's scraper visits the site once, steals the information,
and the site gets no views.
the ads, but I know for a fact the scrapers don't visit anything
like "once". In fact the problem is they visit at least every minute
or two. "AmazonBot" has been hitting my sites 1-3 times a second for
over a year. Other more abusive crawlers don't say who they are and
use pools of thousands of random IP addresses to send requests from
to avoid blocking. One was hitting one of my sites with millions of
requests a day, fixated on trying endless different strings in a
specific session variable on some dynamically-generated pages. It
was neat to see how litterally one of the cheapest VPSs available
anywhere could take that load, but eventually the number of
simultaneous requests ramped up until it ran out of its 1GB RAM and
I had to take that part of the site down until I worked out a way
of blocking those requests. The requests continued for a few days
in spite of only getting a 503 error response back. Hundreds of
requests per second, which it coped with then since it didn't have
to load the PHP module each time and therefore the memory usage per
request was much less than before.
Another issue is I can't keep Web access logs for long anymore
since they fill up the storage, and I had to add a logrotate rule
to automatically delete those logs early if they start getting too
big.
It's a vicious circle, the web sites don't get enough revenue toWorse for me, since I don't like the major web browsers and use
continue, the "AIs" don't have the information to steal, and get
even worse than they are now.
Dillo or Links for most of my browsing: Websites trying to detect
bots keep blocking me instead. For the first time yesterday even
Wikipedia blocked me from downloading the images on pages with
Dillo, claiming I was a bot. I've had to find alternatives to IMDB
since it now blocks me, and one of those alternatives already
blocked me once, two if you count Wikipedia. Gumtree doesn't even
work for me in Firefox anymore on my usual PC, with them always
redirecting me to an "access denied" page, presumably as a
suspected bot. Weirdly it does work on another Linux PC that I
rarely use, with the same Firefox version. I reported that to
Gumtree about a year ago and they just told me to update the
browser, after I'd already told them the version number, which was
current. The useful web seems to be shrinking by the day thanks to
these Artificial Idiots and website's lazy attempts to block them.
That's not to mention when you do a web search for some topics now
and just get volumes of similar, obviously AI-generated, webpages
in the results. All telling you nothing of value. The only hope is
to spot old forum threads. But I think I already talked/argued
about that here before.
from another newsgroup. I thought it might interest ppl here..
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