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Comment Re:if these were criminal operations, wouldn't the (Score 2) 48

Even if they try to hide their traffic through mules they need trunk connections for their volume. They can only get those from a handful of companies and even with mules those are easy enough to find for the CIA. Cut them off, or cut who provides them off, or cut who provides their provider off ... it will work.

Comment Well that was fast (Score 2) 48

Said they could/should do just that here a while ago. With heuristics and triangulation it's easy for them to find these operations.

For some reason Feds and Starlink suddenly woke up and stopped looking the other way. They let it grow to ridiculous size in the meantime though.

Now keep going and (secondary) sanction any telecom company cooperating with these outfits into bankruptcy, they are easy enough to track. These centralized criminal enterprises reliant in telecom should not exist, it's far too easy to track and stop.

Comment Re:I still don't see how there's a basis to compla (Score 1) 37

It's easy enough to look at Reddit's robots.txt file:

# Welcome to Reddit's robots.txt
# Reddit believes in an open internet, but not the misuse of public content.
# See https://support.reddithelp.com... Reddit's Public Content Policy for access and use restrictions to Reddit content.
# See https://www.reddit.com/r/reddi... for details on how Reddit continues to support research and non-commercial use.
# policy: https://support.reddithelp.com...

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Comment Re:at least three lies (Score 2) 37

"...the data-scraping companies circumvented its data protection measures in order to steal data that Perplexity "desperately needs" to power its "answer engine" system."

Really, what would those be?

Arguably they are in breach of the CFAA.. Reddit's robots.txt file:
# Welcome to Reddit's robots.txt
# Reddit believes in an open internet, but not the misuse of public content.
# See https://support.reddithelp.com... Reddit's Public Content Policy for access and use restrictions to Reddit content.
# See https://www.reddit.com/r/reddi... for details on how Reddit continues to support research and non-commercial use.
# policy: https://support.reddithelp.com...

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Comment Re:Does Reddit themselves "own" that data? (Score 2) 37

Can't they just build the A.I.s to cite their sources whenever it outputs something that has a definite source, or are we past all that since they've already used all this content as training data already.

If a Reddit post amounts to a human-summary of a StackOverflow disussion, which itself is a complilation from a forum posts on a discussion board and a Wordpress blogger, who got *their* information from man pages and error outputs...who do you cite? Each of them validates the others in order to minimize the amount of "SEO Blogger Spam" that also ended up in the meat grinder somewhere.

The problem with the meat grinder is that the whole point is essentially to make it impossible to trace sources to the point where the actual answer came from.

More to the main point...the bigger issue is that Perplexity is looking to make money off their training data. Nobody was given the opportunity to opt-in to sharing, and none of the creators even get Spotify-amounts of profit sharing. On the one hand, I hope Perplexity loses because they're the most creepy of an inherently-creepy industry. On the other hand, just because I don't like them doesn't mean it's fair that Perplexity gets slapped with a lawsuit while OpenAI gets off scot-free because they managed to scrape Reddit first.

Comment Re:avoiding COMMONS tragedy (Score 1) 53

American culture has already decided that air/water/sewage are "public" resources. You may-not spew benzine over your own property, because its ill effects of necessity spread to MY property with no benefit to me. Same with water pollution. Now the issue is "energy pollution" ... for want of a better term; really another case of "commons" tragedy, but with energy instead of over-grazing sheep.  Same argument; regulations on energy use are both just and prudent. 

Comment fraud (Score 1) 99

"States that used an antiquated [unemployment insurance]-benefit system experienced a 2.8 percentage point decline in total credit and debit card consumption"

Any chance that 2.8%  'consumption' difference is due to fraud built-into modern non-COBOL software?  I mean, a time existed when thieving would embarrass ...  thieves. But, post-modern business feels  no such moderating  constraint and corrupted software ( browsers are the trivial example ) is one of the  expressive venues.

Comment Too specific (Score 3, Insightful) 92

This is really only suitable to large package delivery, so you either land one of the handful of fleet contracts or you're shot.

A small percentage of Americans could barely get used to cab over vans, but those ultra-utilitarian box vans aren't going to sell as work vans or even small independents delivery.

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