this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2025
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Cloudflare announces AI Labyrinth, which uses AI-generated content to confuse and waste the resources of AI Crawlers and bots that ignore “no crawl” directives. (blog.cloudflare.com)
submitted 1 day ago by Tea@programming.dev to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] lily33@lemm.ee 12 points 1 day ago (2 children)

while allowing legitimate users and verified crawlers to browse normally.

What is a "verified crawler" though? What I worry about is, is it only big companies like Google that are allowed to have them now?

[–] wingiee@lemm.ee 20 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I assume a crawler which adheres to robots.txt

[–] lily33@lemm.ee 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I would love to think so. But the word "verified" suggests more.

[–] killeronthecorner@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago

IP verification is a not uncommon method for commercial crawlers

[–] melpomenesclevage@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I dunno. I don't find any sympathy with any of these fuckers though. this is not a generally useful technology, it is not something the average person ever needs to see, and honestly, just fuck em. Fuck anyone messing with open source to engorge the garbage dispenser.

[–] lily33@lemm.ee 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

Any accessibility service will also see the "hidden links", and while a blind person with a screen reader will notice if they wonder off into generated pages, it will waste their time too. Especially if they don't know about such "feature" they'll be very confused.

Also, I don't know about you, but I absolutely have a use for crawling X, Google maps, Reddit, YouTube, and getting information from there without interacting with the service myself.

[–] melpomenesclevage@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 day ago

yeah. it's pretty fucked. hopefully it's temporary.

so do we make everything inaccessible to everyone, or just inaccessible to disabled people? we don't have a way to include them yet. we should work on it, but we are not the ones who fucked accessibility.

yeah. search engine web crawlers are a public service. they are responsible. but we are in a conflict. we must struggle tooth and nail against capital for every nice thing.