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- Hacker News
- I’m optimistic about NHP being the middle ground solution for a lot of things. With OS support it can be transparent to users yet still effective.by mlhpdx
- > In 2022, Tech Policy Press received a grant from the Omidyar Network for a research project evaluating vulnerabilities in the design, engineering, and use of encrypted messaging applications.
https://omidyar.com/ is geofenced for me, presumably because they identified me as being anti open web.
The article is ai lobby intended to repel a bill that would
> allow the FTC to pursue penalties of up to $53,000 if a person uses a stealth bot in a way that is “reasonably likely to damage, impair, or burden” a website’s “technical or commercial operation.”
The definition of "stealth bot" is a bot that does not identify itself as such and their main grief to the proposal is
> If researchers cannot easily understand what it means to “deploy” a crawler in a prohibited way, or what activity is “reasonably likely to burden or impair a website,” they may refrain from scraping rather than risk violating the law.
Which is the biggest load of shit I've heard given that all you need to do is identify yourself as a bot and respect robots.txt or be banned, the status quo before a bunch of assholes started systematically destroying the internet.
by za_creature - Sooo... the current status of this appears to be "referred to committee"
https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/9915...
It's hard to tell (especially with my ignorance of current USHouse dynamics) if this is a real threat to pass, or if this is just a "Hey look, campaign contributor, I submitted this bill--look, I care about your issues" with no real intent/hope for it to pass.
As near as I can tell, the congress.gov website says it was introduced in late July, referred to committee the same day, and nothing has happened since.
I wonder, is there reason to think there's a recent push to move it out of committee that means we should actually start to pay attention to it?
by bsammon - Scale seems to be the real issue. Given that there are relatively few actors with the scale to cause serious problems (and those actors have the resources to shrug off minor penalties), perhaps more targeted legislation is necessary. e.g. Different penalties for petty scraping and grand theft scraping. Of course, this would necessarily target the people who pay for election campaigns, so it will never happen.by beloch
- This would be a stronger argument if it hadn't been made for decades by the industry exploiting the open web with bad bots. Every pro-freedom article rings hollow when we've seen the tech world act nothing but extractively and without restraint.by Planktonne
- Genuinely asking here: is there a future where we end up with a version of the open web where everything isn’t paywalled or ID gated?
The article mentions the IETF is working on standards to deal with the proposed legislature and frustration of site operators. Almost any solution is going to be at the expense of user convenience and privacy. I see two interesting solutions mentioned here: micropayments, and proof-of-work. It seems unlikely the future of the open web will land on either. Both are inconvenient but at least could be done by anybody, potentially in a privacy preserving way. Using reputation based decentralized identity is another one (eg. proving you’re coming from a web domain or group), that seems more inconvenient for the platform because of false positives that could come through.
Meanwhile, a worse outcome is requiring attested hardware to get access to anything on the web. This already exists from the media companies pushing for controlled access to streaming. Netflix requires an hardware attested device to stream in 4K. Imagine a future where you now need one to read a New York Times article.
I can see some pushback against the alternatives (eg. digital ID), but if privacy preserving proofs are built in from the get go, it’s much better than not being able to see recipes because I have a rooted Android.
by udbhavs - This is exactly what companies like DataDome do, and sometimes Cloudflare continues to, when their bot protection pages enter endless loops. They don't even realize they are ruining the UX for thousands of legitimate users with their faulty JS browser fingerprinting verifications.by 09172307
- "Knowing the identity behind a crawler tells us relatively little about whether its behavior is harmful. Under the New York bill, a company that discloses its identity and then accesses the website 10,000 times a minute complies with the law even though it is still imposing enormous and likely unjustified costs on the site. But a journalist anonymously using a crawler to investigate potentially anti-competitive practices by tech companies does not."
It does seem like this bill mostly affects normal users and is suspect with more surveillance being pushed. However the biggest problem is that the internet is global and the fees only apply to the US. If bots from Russia, China, India, or even France are scrapping then how would this even reduce the bots? Seems more like a new 'contempt of business model' is the purpose of this bill.
by thereader12