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.

It isn't a chess club's responsibility to investigate crime.

I would disagree. It is absolutely the responsibility of the chess club to investigate crime/potential crime that is committed by someone operating under the auspices of that chess club. Same with any other organization, no matter how far removed from law enforcement. At the least, there is an obligation to contact the appropriate authorities who do investigate crime.

In this particular case, the potential criminal may have access to more victims of abuse because the victims sign up for events due to endorsement by the chess club.

In a similar vein, it would be as silly to say, "Our church doesn't have the resposibility to investigate whether our priests are abusing minors, because it is not the place of a church to investigate crime."

The point of this protest action and the news story is that no action was taken. Even if "a bunch of autists, people with underdeveloped social skills, and emotional growth delays.... are having trouble with social behavior and personal boundaries", their actions need to be looked into, and this wasn't done. If being socially underdeveloped gives a free pass to unquestioned sexual assault, people would live in fear of the socially underdeveloped.

In this case, victims came forward in private to accuse chess grandmasters, and nothing happened. They made public their allegations, and there was a slap on the wrist, and then things went back to the way they were.

By contrast, imagine if someone privately accused some company of making insecure software, and nothing happened. Then they made public the software vulnerability. The company said, "Oh, okay, well it's fixed now. That vulnerability won't be a problem any more." (And also hinted that the fault was the accuser's in making public the vulnerability.) We would be tearing that company to bits in forums like Slashdot. We'd support the accuser even if the accuser didn't have to make sacrifices to his reputation or withdraw from the tech field because of the vulnerability he brought to light.

I'd say alleged victims of sexual assault deserve at least that much, if not more. (Yes, even just "alleged" victims -- they at least deserve a chance to be considered "victims" and not just "alleged victims".)

I think the main thing seems to be that no one did investigating; e.g. the STLCC said "This is not our concern."

It would be one thing to have several people claim to be victims, and then the alleged perpetrator is immediately castigated. I don't think anyone is suggesting that.

It would be an entirely different thing to have several people claim to be victims, and then people say, "Well, there was this case where the accusations were false. So every such case must be due to false accusations," and not investigate anything.

The fact that people are willing to come forward despite having to go through the distress and shame of making their ordeal public lends weight to the fact that they must have a strong motivation to do so. The fact that Jennifer Shahade was a public chess figure, but no longer, does not seem to be because she chose to malign someone else in cooperation with other chess players.

Here on Slashdot, we support people who go through as simple ordeals as losing an YouTube account without adequate explanation. I would say that people who admit details of being victim of a sexual assault, supported by a WSJ article, are more credible than this.

Two people disagreed on the internet. This is NEWS WORTHY!!!!!

Well, I don't agree with you!

I read vitrectomy as vasectomy and wondered how badly the surgery must have went to cause eye damage. Maybe I too should have my eyes checked.

See, you wouldn't have read that wrong if you had installed the Intel Mono One font, where the letters are unmistakeably distinct, and also the emoji for vasectomy and vitrectomy are so different.

Okay, all kidding aside, I'll weigh in on this too. I love the curly braces. Clear, distinct, and stylish.

But when I install the font on GVim, the lines are spaced a bit too far apart. If only I could get it to vertically squeeze out more empty space between the lines, that would be great. It's probably just a GVim thing and not necessarily the font. But I love being able to zoom out and still read the font clearly.

I think the debate about the curly braces will end up rather like I.M.Pei's ultramodern glass pyramid in the middle of Renaissance-era French architecture. It's not what people expected, so people complained, but now the Louvre is iconic for its avant-garde juxtaposition.

What we want is WhatsApp to handle more than one account in the same phone.
What they want is to be able to link multiple phones to the same account.

Way to respond to market needs, WhatsApp.

Does that mean there is a higher chance that people will get to know alternative Android app stores like FDroid? Then, good!

I mean, I don't think Jeri Ryan or Mark Ruffalo are particularly more computer-savvy than us Slashdotters, and they managed to find a server.

It's not about being computer-savvy, it's about users' very low tolerance for complexity (the very reason Twitter succeeded in the first place).
The fact is that Mostodon had it's big moment and it quickly fizzled. Maybe it is the enduring network effect of Twitter, in which case Bluesky is in trouble, or it's that extra bit of complexity that Mastodon has.

Hmm. I guess I should address your point.
s/computer-savvy/tolerant of extra complexity/g

I mean, I don't think Jeri Ryan or Mark Ruffalo are particularly more tolerant of extra complexity than us Slashdotters, and they managed to find a server.

There we go.