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Discussion (95 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
I'm pretty certain this is scrapers that are trying to workaround blocks on accessing original sites by hitting the Wayback Machine copy instead. Appalling behavior.
In addition to the load it puts on this vital non-profit piece of Internet infrastructure, we've ålso already seen some sites opt out of the Wayback Machine to prevent their content from being scraped via this alternative route.
Sadly this sort of thing is probably not really possible anymore, but I can't really blame anyone for making this sort of decision. I can't imagine how much more traffic they get now vs 2021 when we were doing this.
> Hacker News and the Rails forum are blocking the text fetcher, so I'm using the browser workflow to inspect the pages directly
Unfortunately I sometimes have to browbeat Claude into acting like an agent of the user is supposed to. Usually it works, though last time it refused to recognize my moral argument (on the grounds that it's not bound to my interests exclusively and needs to protect the interests of its maker too).
Appalling, yes. But also expected. I'm surprised they haven't been the target of scrapers for years. But sites putting their content behind login walls and other anti-bot mechanisms has certainly exacerbated this. But again, this isn't at all a surprising progression.
> we've also already seen some sites opt out of the Wayback Machine to prevent their content from being scraped via this alternative route.
To be fair, another big motivation was likely users on sites like HN using archive.org (and similar sites) to get around their paywalls. In fact, I'd be surprised if this wasn't a big motivator.
Again, it sucks, but it's not at all surprising to see it progress like this. I wouldn't be surprised to see similar blocks on other archive sites eventually.
Very understandable, you can't store all 15000 pages of any random website and update them etc etc, but that makes them pretty useless for indirect scraping because you usually don't want a tiny taste, you want everything.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
(no affiliation)
On the other hand, the Internet Archive is a non-profit offering a free public resource.
The Internet Archive is in a really bad spot being attacked from multiple sides at once. But — while service has not been consistent — they have maintained open access. I can still access anonymously from Tor without Cloudflare or some other centralized gatekeeper showing me the middle finger.
If you got some money to spare, consider donating to them. They need it.
The future is bleak :\
I really don't see any solution to this; the scrapers probably wouldn't even mind destroying sources like IA too much, which would leave them as the only "authorative" source of knowledge in the end. Best way is likely regulation incl. hefty (!) fines, but politics are too slow and too fragmented to be effective. So... Enjoy it while it lasts, I guess.
- charging (news / journalist services)
- gate-keeping (X forcing log-ins)
- enshittifying (lots of ads and degraded service)
The fact that the way back machine is incredibly useful but most people didn't know about it or use it very much doesn't change the fact that it has basically become very popular... only with LLM agents rather than humans. Ads alone aren't enough to support human traffic for many sites with human traffic.
Beginning to think that the difficulty to browse most websites nowadays due to throttling, is yet another negative externality of AI development that society is forced to bear.
I've not been able to access web.archive.org from my work computer - I always get the 429 error.
But I then pull out my phone and can access it just fine. All along I was assuming my company was blocking it. Still weird that it happens every time from my work PC and never from my home one.
Try making a vpn via digital ocean for example and you'll see similar patterns.
Unfortunately, the restrictions have been way too strict for the last few months: from my residential IP, simply moving the mouse on the calendar for a specific URL is enough to get stuck on 429 error messages for a while; and from corporate ISPs (for example, on airport WiFi), you often can't access the WM at all. I hope they'll find a way to relax those.
It's surely to serve as data to help tell humans apart from bots.
> Changes made by IA shouldn't become my responsibility.
They're a free service. It's not their responsibility to service you either.
Downloader pays.
I make some content and upload it. When you want to download it, you pay Amazon the egress fees. And maybe I get to charge just a bit more, to help me with the Ingress, storage, content creation, etc.
I mean, I know that there's going to be problems with rate limiting, etc. And yes, we have those problems with LLM tokens today. But this just feels like such a useful thing that it baffles me that it doesn't exist already.
Note that Archive Team is separate from the Internet Archive.
Some approaches that I think are promising:
- A robots.txt V2[0] as a standard way for website owners to state how bots and AI crawlers can use their online content and where to go (e.g. distinguish search from AI training use cases, point to a downloadable file instead of crawling everything, etc.).
- Something like Web Bot Auth[1] as a non-centralized standard for self-identifying bots and agents cryptographically. This would allow websites to allow or deny bots very precisely.
- what else?
[0] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-vaughan-machine-reada...
[1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-meunier-http-mes...
It serves nobody except CloudFlare and hardware companies when one side set up blockers and the other side spend money putting VPN SDKs in consumer TVs.
I am also curious how the (Russian?) paywall bypass mirror archive.is is doing given that they are probably subject to similar amounts of traffic.
Content creators could charge by page instead of depending on malware/ad/surveillance revenue. Spam is cut if there's a charge per mail. Scraping abuse goes away, along with a bunch of DDOS garbage.
The impact is a few cents per page or mail, negligible for a human. But if you're consuming a trillion pages per day, you'd reconsider.
Whenever the topic of micropayments for internet content comes up, a bunch of people start talking about payment processors and their floor on prices, and so on. That's not wrong, but it can be designed around and I think it's a scapegoat to avoid confronting the fact that users despise micropayments and we'd rather blame credit card companies for the lack of adoption.
Because then you're definitely violating US copyright law. There are four prongs of fair use analysis, and one of them is the "nature of the use." In this case, you'd be turning into a commercial use.
This is a major "this is why we can't have nice things" situation in my opinion. IA is one of the most valuable gems of the Internet. The only thing that even comes close to preserving our shared history. The damage being caused (both by the effective DDOSing and by the knock-on impact that abuse has in encouraging publishers to remove their content from the archive) is incredibly serious.
Using the information for training purposes is not the same thing. Not legally the same and otherwise.
Are the abusive bots in the room with us?