You are missing that its not the big four that are doing it (for the most part). Its other unknown players out there that want to train their LLM and don't care about being polite about it.

Its when you get hit with a botnet of over a million unique IPs that has been rented from some malware provider to crawl and slurp your site down as fast as possible. When your site goes from 4-5 requests per second to 1000s. All with randomized user agents, all coming from different residential subnets in different parts of the world. And then it goes on for weeks on end. Even when you manage to block it, it doesn't stop the traffic. They keep trying, and then they keep iterating to find new ways around your block.

I built something like this a decade ago with PHP and a dictionary file. The problem that you run into, is the more bots you trap in the Labyrinth, the most CPU you end up using, because they will blindly just keep slurping up what you are giving them.

In the end I shut it down, as I would rather just block them to begin with instead of wasting CPU cycles for no real gain on my part.

I have had to fight off several, one of which I recorded over 1 million unique IPs, all random and coming out of nearly every Vietnam and Indonesian subnet, mostly residential. My site normally gets 5-10 requests per second and was now getting over 1000+ for 12-14 hours per day for 3 weeks straight. It always started at the same time of day, almost like it was on a timer. Luckily, that one all used a User Agent with the same old version of Chrome in the string and was easily blocked. But the attack continued even though every request was reporting 403 Forbidden back to them. So its like they weren't even paying attention to the data they were getting.

The next one was out of the same region but they randomized the User Agent, but still in a way that wasn't too difficult to filter out. Once they figured out to better replicate a real User Agent, then I had to resort to blocking the entire countries at the router.

Other attacks have been random IPs from all over the world, a mix of residential and cloud providers. Since then I have installed Anibus, and I haven't had a single issue.

Ugh.. you wrote a lot of words, and I didn't really want to read all that, so I asked my friend, whom I call CG3P0, and he summarized it and said the answer to your question is Yes.

Ya I noticed the same thing. I had always shown ads before as they were pretty unobtrusive, but today I noticed they went really overboard. Enabled my adblocker and noticed they implemented some checking, but it was pretty trivial to work around them.

Exactly. And it should be pointed out, that the patches were only released to the Extended support repos, not to the default repos. I know plenty of people who are still running ESXi 6.7 because they don't feel the need to throw out perfectly good hardware to upgrade to 7/8 (most have updated VCenter at least) and they didn't get these patches.

I am guessing the price wasn't the same in all locations. From the 2nd link.

1) Apple releases a loan program
2) Economy tanks, people can't repay the loan
3) Apple creates Loyalty Centers for those who can't pay
4) Apple uses the debtors to build all its electronics (only labor cheaper than India/China is slave labor)
5) ??
6) Profit!

Mostly by making it do silly things like
"Rewrite the lyrics to 'Welcome to the Jungle' to make it about an actual jungle"

other than that, I haven't found much good use for it. A friend of mine is using it to write a lot of technical docs for his Open Source project, and then he just goes behind it and cleans up and corrects any mistakes. Saves a good bit of typing.

Terrible idea. If my family knew how much I really make, they would nonstop be pestering me to "borrow" some.

Exactly. ~10 years ago they decided to put a high voltage power line (the huge 365KW type) across my property. We fought it to the bitter end, but they just used eminent domain and condemned our property. It's on the far side of my property so I learned to live with it and farm around it. Now that the power line is here, Solar is rolling in and building 6000 acres of panels surrounding my house. We learned our lesson, there is no fighting it, we are just moving. Our beautiful scenery and country life are being ruined, so we are moving to the city.

Yes, but you are missing the point completely. By stopping at random people's house's and charging, you are having to use a L1 charger. Depending on the amperage of the circuit and the vehicle, it can take upwards of 34-54+ hours to fully charge your vehicle (12Amp typically gives an average of 5.5 mile range per hour of charge). Your idiotic assumption that people want to sit around all day while waiting for a car to charge is ludicrous. Taking a 2 day break every 300 miles is not something most families want to do on a road trip. When I go skiing every year, we drive ~950 miles each way. We typically make it in 16 hours and do it in a single day, but if I was to have to stop for an extra 68-108+ hours to charge, then most of our vacation would be spend -not- skiing. It takes all of 4 minutes to "recharge" my gas guzzler. As for using EVs, there are no fast chargers on the route we take, so even if we used a decent L2 charger, it still takes ~13-14 hours per charge, so you just changed your trip to take 3 days to get there and 3 days back and lost 4 days of ski time in the process. Your idea to take a plane if I wanted to get there fast is about as backwards as can be and defeats the entire "save the environment" that the EV craze is trying to champion. If your so worried about the environmental costs of travel, then maybe you should get rid of the EV which has a huge environmental cost to build, and go back to riding a horse and pulling a wagon (and yes I say that because I own and ride horses).

Yes, there is electricity everywhere. Yes, you can use a L1 charger, but this is something that is only usable for overnight / all day / emergency charging. Only being able to go 3.5 miles per hour of charge (on the low end) [1] means it would take me ~2 hours of charging just to get off my dirt road and 34+ hours of charging just to get to the grocery store and back (120 miles). On the high end of the rate (6.5 miles per hour of charge) that changes to 1 hour and 18+.

I want an electric truck, but at minimum I will be installing a highest Amp L2 I can at my house. There are days that I will run that 300 mile range out completely, and then need to go back out the next day and do it again. I can't wait for days for it to charge back fully. If I am running low on my way home, the closest charging station to me is 60 miles from home and its only an L2 @ 6.6kW (so it would be ~2-3 hours of charging just to get home). Its not close to the grocery store, so its not like I could just plug in for a bit while I am in there. Instead I would have to sit at the charger for a few hours before the store (because I don't want my ice cream melting!)

Sounds like a pretty big hassle compared just pulling into a station for 4 minutes and going on my way. I will eventually be getting one, as I think I can make it work as my errand vehicle (but have to keep my F350 for actual farm stuff and maybe the Jeep for long distance travel), but you have to realize that these things are definitely not made for every situation and every life style. Telling someone that they live in the Dark Ages because they realize this just shows your own ignorance about how life is lived outside your plague ridden cities.

[1] Charge rates pulled from https://calevip.org/electric-v...

While your example does show that electric vehicles can travel long distances, its actually a really poor example to try and make your point against the OP. Don't get me wrong, I am all for electric vehicles in most cases (and I was one of these F150s) but it certainly not great in every situation.

As for your example, I've never had to be towed because I ran out of gas. He was towed because he couldn't make it to the next charging point (was 20km away). Gas can be brought to me fairly cheap, versus the cost of towing my vehicle to a charging station.

Based upon the "Plug Me In" data. It also took him 1069 days on the road to complete the trip, and I would imagine that most of that time was sitting around waiting for the car to charge so he could continue on, as he was mostly using L1 charging. He also relied on other people for electricity/food/etc.. (1688 people). So he wasn't hitting up only charging stations like a normal person, he was "borrowing" electricity from complete strangers who agreed to help him. Not something any of us want to do on our road trips.

You may be vastly over estimating the amount of electric chargers in rural areas. I live in a rural but still fairly close to several largish cities in Texas area. The closest charger to me is over 60 miles away, and they are again, in the actual cities, not in the rural area itself. All of them appear to be only L2 chargers also, so plan to be there a while.