Yet another Hacker News

Stay discoverable in search while disallowing AI training

74 points djfergus 8 hours ago 43 comments

gchamonlive 8 hours ago | parent

Cloudflare, enabling the problem and the solution since, how long has it been?

arm32 8 hours ago | parent

(checks watch)

17 years

Fun lava lamp story, though

gleezard 8 hours ago | parent

A bit too late honestly (?). With so many people who have shifted over to reading AI summaries as a primary search response, those with AI-enabled sites will win by attrition.

There is no going back from this. And the internet is a relatively new phenomenon. Recklessly, blindly applying ads to pages in hopes of generating revenue is a very silly thing to do. Technology with ad blockers and now AI summaries has taken that away. New business models, perhaps actually decent ones are required.

Death of ads everywhere? Good fucking riddance.

Posted from LibreWolf.

tracerbulletx 7 hours ago | parent

All this attitude does is tear down the only viable income source for independent publishers and demonizes them for trying to make money, while everyone let's huge corporations off the hook for it because "well that's just what they do"

gleezard 7 hours ago | parent

Advertising in the way it’s done is demonic in and of itself. I don’t care - find a better business model.

antonvs 2 hours ago | parent

A better business model won’t help. What you need is a better economic and political system. If you “let the market decide” what advertising looks like, you get what we have today, because “let the market decide” is an incoherent claim that’s really shorthand for the rule of a wealthy minority. Advertising is just a convenient way to extract wealth from a society without having to go to all the trouble of satisfying customers.

octoberfranklin 6 hours ago | parent

Independent publishers can't afford to run an ad network.

You aren't independent. You work for the BigTech company that serves ads on your site.

arm32 8 hours ago | parent

What does this new setting actually do? Does it block their IP ranges too, I hope? As if Meta, for instance, is actually going to respect Accountable, via themselves or their partners, quite frankly is eyebrow raising at best.

zergrush 8 hours ago | parent

what weirds me out is the analytics

theres no way my index.html page with nothing is getting 10000 hits a day

wtf?

itake 7 hours ago | parent

7 per minute.

I use my high school’s website to test Internet connectivity bc the domain is short and they don’t do a TLS redirect (making it easy to detect WiFi portals).

JoshTriplett 7 hours ago | parent

neverssl.com

itake 5 hours ago | parent

I use this too, but my high school url is 8 characters. neverssl.com is 12. :)

DaSHacka 5 hours ago | parent

Wish the admin never added the SSL redirect, its literally the namesake lol

I just want basically captive.apple.com with a shorter domain and the webserver not even listening on port 443 at all.

Surprised someone hasn't made this yet, it only requires one spare public IP.

jesterson 4 hours ago | parent

They bullshit big time on that, I have caught them not once.

For a site with proven visitors 100,000 per month CF tell me they saved 90,000 over 1,000,000 visitors (rough numbers).

Sure they know large numbers make people feel good.

AnonC 7 hours ago | parent

> Accountable mixed-use crawlers remain allowed for search. Every other training crawler is blocked, including the training-only crawlers run by Amazon, Anthropic, Meta, and OpenAI — blocking those does not affect search.

> We also categorize the relevant crawlers from Amazon, Anthropic, Meta, and OpenAI as Accountable. These organizations separate their Search and Training crawlers, so Cloudflare can block the Training crawler without affecting search.

I find it difficult to trust that either Meta or OpenAI would use their separate search and training crawlers only for the respective purposes. Their pinky promises have no value, IMO. Both companies are premised on deceptive behaviors.

skybrian 7 hours ago | parent

I didn't know websites could opt out of providing data to Google's AI training. Looks Google added support for this via 'Google-Extended' in robots.txt back in 2023:

https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/products/an-update-on-...

mskalski 7 hours ago | parent

I wonder if protocols like Web Bot Auth [1] will see wider adoption. At least as a supported mechanism for those bots which identify themselves. The rest probably still have to be treated with Anubis. In my free time I've recently been experimenting with a Web Bot Auth implementation as an Envoy dynamic module [2] to have a way to define some additional policies for the traffic from bots.

[1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-webbotauth-https... [2] https://github.com/michalskalski/envoy-web-bot-auth

fraywing 7 hours ago | parent

I'm playing around with it for my MCP hiring protocol ojcp[1] and it seems to work very well for signing attestations at the header level.

[1] https://github.com/ojcp-org/ojcp

mskalski 7 hours ago | parent

Thanks for sharing, it is interesting use case

kinduff 7 hours ago | parent

I maintain a cloud IP ranges database, and I'm going to test this out.

I have my doubts, though. A formal title like "Accountable" (capitalized) sounds deliberate, but I can't help imagining the renewal email:

"Hey, want to renew your Accountable™ license? Just pinky promise again that you use your IPs for what you say you do."

nirmeetimthebes 6 hours ago | parent

"Accountable" is just a fancy word for "pinky promise, but with a label." Nothing stops the data from ending up in a training run once it's already been fetched.

userbinator 5 hours ago | parent

...and the only way to stop[1] that is by effectively DRM'ing everything, which is a level of dystopia that I don't think even Stallman ever anticipated, nor do I want to happen.

[1] Analog hole and other workarounds aside, naturally.

1vuio0pswjnm7 6 hours ago | parent

"Cloudflare classifies bots by behavior, and a single bot can exhibit more than one behavior."

Is that really true

CF classifies anyone not using a popular browser with Javascript enabled as a "bot"

CF fingerprints www users

As an example, look at CF's Permissions-Policy HTTP response header on a site with CF "bot protection", i.e., the "checking your browser" CAPTCHA nonsense (challenges.cloudflare.com). Then look at IA's Permissions-Policy response header. One CDN is advertiser-focused, the other is user-focused

IA = Internet Archive

devmor 6 hours ago | parent

As far as I can tell, after months of fighting being DDoSed by Anthropic and OpenAI across 50+ sites - Cloudflare also allows what it considers "good bots" through all of your bot blocking rules, with no option to turn this off unless you pay them money.

RobotToaster 2 hours ago | parent

The "good bots" also just happen to be from companies that pay cloudflare a lot of money, I imagine.

actionfromafar 1 hour ago | parent

Goodness Tokens

basilikum 50 minutes ago | parent

How did you dertmine it was those two companies? Also did you disallow them in robots.txt?

userbinator 5 hours ago | parent

CF classifies anyone not using a popular browser with Javascript enabled as a "bot"

This is my biggest complaint about CF. They are implicitly supporting user-agent discrimination in favour of Big Browser, instead of discriminating on actual behaviour.

...and of course there are already companies running tons of VMs with "officially sanctioned" browser + OS stacks, that can get past all these "protections", for a fee.

"AI bots" is the newest boogeyman they came up with to take away freedom.

dzhiurgis 6 hours ago | parent

If this admin is serious about AI growth they’d make anti-scrapping illegal.

DaSHacka 5 hours ago | parent

I don't think this admin even knows what scraping is. Unless it's "scraping the bottom of the barrel", something they're very familiar with.

userbinator 5 hours ago | parent

Just make user-agent-discrimination illegal.

GetSMS 5 hours ago | parent

This seems useful for my site. I don't really want competitors' AI systems use our research data to train their models.

gdiamos 5 hours ago | parent

I wouldn’t trust an AI company to honor this as far as I could throw them

DharmaPolice 5 hours ago | parent

I feel like most of these schemes to categorise data as "public but not really" are ultimately doomed to failure. Even if you could trust every AI company in the world to respect these terms, is there anything stopping someone else indexing the data and selling them the information? I know there's copyright law but they're apparently ignoring that anyway.

Ultimately this reminds me of those really early social media profiles (before people understood privacy settings if they even existed) which would say "If you're not my friend you're not allowed to read this page".

If you don't want your content to end up in some database/archive don't publish it for the whole world to see.

qsbuilder 4 hours ago | parent

The irony is that search engines are AI companies now. Telling them 'index me for search but don't train your models' is asking them to split a brain that’s already fully merged.

tchalla 2 hours ago | parent

Exactly. I don’t get this. You may decide to not train but your content will still show up in search.

VBprogrammer 38 minutes ago | parent

Even looking for companies which supply services is now far better on AI chats than Google. For me being visible in AI training is going to be more important than search in the next year or two.

If I was a big AI company I'd certainly be tempted to make sure that anyone who excluded themselves from "AI training" also got themselves excluded from AI results.

nullbio 4 hours ago | parent

What does this really mean though? You can use an LLM to search.

nicolodev 3 hours ago | parent

there have been a few links here on hn about content protection based on Markov’s chain. It might be interesting for Cloudflare to add damage for the scraper that tries to query the page, and not just blocking them.

fwlr 3 hours ago | parent

“Pre-label your most valuable data for us and we promise to not make it too obvious that we’re training on it”

shark1 2 hours ago | parent

"Apple, Google, and Microsoft honor or have committed (in a specified time frame) to honor this setting."

Specified Time Frame ;)

RobotToaster 2 hours ago | parent

"infinity is a timeframe!"

OroPla 2 hours ago | parent

In a world where people's searches are already mostly answered by AI, is there any point to disallow the training?

I could totally see a future where Google just stops showing you links to actual web pages altogether and just gives you their chatbot.