Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror

Submission + - Once Unimaginable, Publishers Are Preparing to Opt Out of Google Search (adweek.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: For decades, publishers have done everything in their power, from the legal to the not-explicitly illegal, to rank as highly in Google Search as possible. For many websites, traffic from the search engine was their single greatest source of audience and, as a result, revenue.

Now though, a handful of influential players in the digital media ecosystem have begun moving in the opposite direction, laying the groundwork for what was once unthinkable: removing themselves from Google Search.

Last week, the content delivery network Cloudflare, which hosts roughly one-fifth of the websites in the world, gave Google an ultimatum.

The nuclear option is gaining traction as web traffic collapses and Google refuses to negotiate with content creators

Beginning Sept. 15, all new websites signing up for Cloudflare, as well as all the customers on its free tier, will have the default settings in their bot management protocol set to block “multi-purpose crawlers” on any webpage that has ads. This means that any crawler that scrapes for both search indexing and AI training will be turned away at the door, unless the site owner decides otherwise.

“We’ve been clear about what we want,” said Cloudflare chief strategy officer Stephanie Cohen. “We want a technical solution that allows you to be discoverable without having to give your content away for free.”

While a handful of crawlers fit this description—Apple and Bing, among others—the primary, unnamed target of this action is Google, which infamously uses one crawler to both index sites and train its AI models.

In doing so, Google forces publishers to make an impossible choice: They either allow both functions, enabling Google to scrape their content to train the AI products that are regurgitating their data without compensation; or they shut off both functions and disappear from Google Search, presumably losing their largest source of traffic in the process.

Comment Re:Good news comrad! (Score 1) 36

I guess they could have it, after an appropriate time without comms, key up on the ICAO emergency frequency and start broadcasting its intentions. "Thank you for jamming the satellite communications! This satellite will self-destruct in two minutes and 45 seconds."

"I'm a 30 second bomb! I'm a 30 second bomb! 29... 28... 27..."

Submission + - How Flock Cameras Wrongly Tracked Journalist for Days Over 'Stolen' Plates (thedrive.com)

Submitted by sinij
sinij writes:

The New Jersey plates that were allegedly stolen from the LA dealer were 34 03 DTM, not 34 10 DTM. But when the police report was created and the plate was entered into Flock’s system, it was just recorded as 34 DTM.
Still, he warned me to drive straight home, park the Range Rover, and leave it there. If I were to cross into the neighboring town, I’d probably get flagged again and go through this entire ordeal again with a different set of officers. His parting words were ominous: “You’re lucky we’re in Plymouth. If you were in Minneapolis, they definitely would’ve come at you with guns drawn.”


Comment Re:Learning another language is fun, too. (Score 1) 100

+1 for "Language x isn't just for country x". In my favourite example, I spent a week in Hungary where nobody spoke English (this was a smaller town in the 1990s) but everyone knew German. So my rarely used knowledge of German came in handy, probably more than ever since. It meant I could hang out with the local teens in my off days, instead of hanging on to our guide for translation.

Comment Re:Ok cool (Score 1) 104

by TeknoHog (#66228826) Attached to: Small AI Models Gain Traction Around the World

Machine learning/AI models to help with this are quite common in this field, and have been around for decades to help with spectral library lookups - long before the current LLM hype phase.

Yep, I once worked with NIR spectrometry in the paper industry around 2000. The company developed a kind of robot that measured various qualities of pulp and paper in realtime at paper mills. I was more on the hardware side, and I was kind of annoyed when they wanted to switch to spectroscopy for everything and ditch our nice old mechanical robots, parts of which I'd developed earlier. But at the same time I was excited about the ML and pattern recognition bits.

Comment Re:Today's AI is just Automation! (Score 1) 104

by TeknoHog (#66228808) Attached to: Small AI Models Gain Traction Around the World
I've also been thinking along the same lines. To me, using computers is all about automation, and people in the know have been doing it since before the mainframe era. But to a lot people who got into personal computers in the 1980s and later, a computer is just a fancy word processor, fancy calculator, or a fancy tool for making art. Nothing wrong with those, but it's not exactly automation. To me, automation is something like telling the computer to edit 1000 pictures in a certain way, instead of editing them manually one by one. So in a way, AI is making the scripting/programming part more accessible (though it usually does so very inefficiently).

Comment Re:It's easy to do without an extension (Score 2) 118

Sometimes I just want to look for stuff made by brands I want because I'm doing something somewhat professional and need the name brand to not be SHJWEHAS or I'll get made fun of relentlessly. Its the cost of being accepted and getting work sometimes. You over pay for the hammer to communicate something to the other people you're swinging it with. I don't like it, but I can't change it.

Comment Re:Parent's phone gets dialog to approve .... (Score 1) 120

If that's true, why are they typing my driver's license number into the cash register?

Some states require that, ironically, Texas doesn't.

I'm aware, but unless they're piping the input to /dev/null (which they of course are not) the data is almost certainly going to a "centralized purchase record database" which the grandparent has blithely assured us is not happening.

Comment Re:debit card rewards (Score 1) 52

by Bill, Shooter of Bul (#66227120) Attached to: Major Banks In Talks To Exploit Debit Card Loophole
I mean thats the honest truth. They would just take the money. There really aren't industries that competitive where they would gain a whole lot of market share if they could charge lower interchange fees. It would make a difference on the margin for small struggling businesses. Its one of those things where they look at costs, and see the large number next to processing fees and try to figure out ways of not paying it. They're doing the same with electricity, wages, costs of products they sell, taxes, etc. Its just what companies do: Maximize revenue/profits, minimize costs.

Slashdot Top Deals

Time sharing: The use of many people by the computer.

Close