...I'm very sensitive to this issue, but fix the chatbots. We need to stop requiring ID for services, it's too much of a risk.

This is to control you, adults, and make you hand over your identity and other information to these providers. It's a scam, don't let the government do this to people.

AI doesn't generate well detailed images to be used this way, what's the angle here or is this just another ad for "AI"?

I also bought nice charging bricks. I don't need any more.

23% of that debt is owned by the Bank of England ("Gilt and Treasury Bill Holding"), which in turn is owned by... the British government.

Some more background information: https://www.taxresearch.org.uk...

In short, it is a choice to be beholden to the bond markets in this way. It is a political choice to outsource the fiscal margins of government spending to the financial sector, and paying them lavishly for that privilege. And no, I'm not saying this means you can spend endlessly on anything without very bad consequences. It's just that it's a very expensive way to provide the money supply and private savings, while giving enormous budgetary power to a sector that has proven time and again that it's unable to properly manage the economy's funding (if it's even interested in that at all, rather than just in enriching itself).

This post was indeed brought to you by ChatGPT.

Far from a MAGA voter, but there were exploding pagers not long ago...

Even though it whitelists the IA crawlers by default?

Anubis has worked well for us to get rid of most of the scrapers from our wiki, including the ones faking regular user agents.

It's not just data centres, many of the requests from regular broadband IP addresses. I think they're using "services" of bottom feeders like Scraper API, or buying from the authors of malicious web browser extensions.

AI scrapers use these residential proxies. It's not (just) VPNs and Tor routing. Several bottom-feeding companies openly advertise such scraping services, for pretty much any country you may want. I administer a wiki that's been on the receiving end of such scraping, and the majority of these scraping requests are in fact coming from residential IP-addresses rather than data centers.

I don't know whether these are hacked accounts, people getting tricked or paid to run these scraping apps on their devices, but it's impossible to block them all. Even if you let fail2ban block entire /24s for every detected hit (even disregarding the collateral damage and the fact that these blocks don't solve the issue, the fail2ban and iptables overhead starts to outweigh the apache load at some point).

Anubis seems to be taking care of it for now, but it's obviously only a matter of time before they can deal with that one too. Although its delay does enable fail2ban rules to block the IP-addresses before they get to stress the mediawiki php scripts, attempting to diff 2 revisions of a random page from 10 years ago.

It's not well defined what he's defending against or what it looks like when an agent goes bad (or how to check their motivations, etc). This is a money grab, nothing more.

Obvious trolls be obvious.

Maybe from NOAA? (at least until they get defunded)

What a sad gaslighter to actually claim no tariffs on Russia isn't a thing.