Posted by ChrisArchitect 17 hours ago
It serves nobody except CloudFlare and hardware companies when one side set up blockers and the other side spend money putting VPN SDKs in consumer TVs.
I am also curious how the (Russian?) paywall bypass mirror archive.is is doing given that they are probably subject to similar amounts of traffic.
The problem with this perspective is that it ignores the victimization which is happening to all sorts of sites right now.
On one hand, you have content owners/suppliers which are trying to place restrictions on how much free bulk use is allowed.
When scrapers go to exotic lengths to evade the blocks, eg by using thousands of ephemeral IP addresses to collect an entire corpus, saying stuff like that makes it sound like it's all a wash.
"Oh, what a silly situation... How did we ever end up like this? It's not good for anyone ..."
No, there is a victim trying to defend themselves from rampant theft of resources, and a corporate asshole which doesn't care about the effects of their actions.
Content creators could charge by page instead of depending on malware/ad/surveillance revenue. Spam is cut if there's a charge per mail. Scraping abuse goes away, along with a bunch of DDOS garbage.
The impact is a few cents per page or mail, negligible for a human. But if you're consuming a trillion pages per day, you'd reconsider.
Whenever the topic of micropayments for internet content comes up, a bunch of people start talking about payment processors and their floor on prices, and so on. That's not wrong, but it can be designed around and I think it's a scapegoat to avoid confronting the fact that users despise micropayments and we'd rather blame credit card companies for the lack of adoption.
My ideal experience would be I load $20 into the browser somewhere like a wallet in one block (that could be a payment processor step). If I visit a participating page, it decrements my wallet $.01 or whatever.
The downside is the possibility of abuse and tracking by governments, which would have to be handled at the source, not the symptom.
You visit website A,A,A,B,C,D,A,A
At the end of the month, you send your entire 20$ randomly to one of the websites you visited.
This will level out everyone's contribution and reward websites with lots of traffic. It eliminates the need for micropayments.
This is a major "this is why we can't have nice things" situation in my opinion. IA is one of the most valuable gems of the Internet. The only thing that even comes close to preserving our shared history. The damage being caused (both by the effective DDOSing and by the knock-on impact that abuse has in encouraging publishers to remove their content from the archive) is incredibly serious.
Because then you're definitely violating US copyright law. There are four prongs of fair use analysis, and one of them is the "nature of the use." In this case, you'd be turning into a commercial use.
Using the information for training purposes is not the same thing. Not legally the same and otherwise.
Great take: "This private website is owned by a man I don't like, so I refuse to pay for it - or even give it the possibility to monetize my traffic with ads!"
Still quite mainstream take: "... so I'll use an adblocker on it"
Immature take: "This private website that I hate and boycott is also an important part of our culture, but the posts on it are too important and valuable to ignore, so I'll use a proxy to scrape it"
Some of the content is good, the site sucks and is run by a guy who seig-heils crowds.
Even if the content sucked, your post has big "you want to improve `X`, yet you participate in `X`"[0] energy.
0 – https://kitzy.com/content/assets/images/we-should-improve-so...
Feels good when you get to dish it out doesn’t it?
It's surely to serve as data to help tell humans apart from bots.
> Changes made by IA shouldn't become my responsibility.
They're a free service. It's ultimately not their responsibility to service you either.
IA have broken it and have no real idea how to make it better so they are going to whitelist IPs or browsers or entire operating systems? Wild.
Wild.
You can't be serious. Are you ok? The entire point is that they're trying to tell bots and humans apart. They're trusting email (and how you write your email) as a good signal that you're human. What are you talking about getting it from the log? The point is to correlate. How do you expect them to know who you are in the log unless you give them that info?
> They created a problem
No, they're dealing with a problem, and compromised that some human users may unfortunately get blocked.
> and now users have to pay for the inconvenience
You don't have to anything. You can just not use them. They don't owe you their service.
Somebody is handing out free apple lollipops, they ran out, compromised on giving grape ones, and now you're complaining you're being forced to eat a grape one and you don't like grape. Don't eat it.
The fact you can even access the Internet Archive for free is a result of tens thousands of human hours striving for one goal. Digital Preservation. If you rely so much on IA, you should consider donating.
