Re: Linux 7.2

On 8/18/26 18:16, Computer Nerd Kev wrote:
> Rich <[email protected]> wrote:
>> The pixie girl is there to *try* to halt the onslaught of the AI
>> companies that do abjectly stupid things like download every version of
>> linux on kernel.org from 0.0.1 through to 7.2 278 times a day, every
>> day, times 75 AI companies to feed to their AI models.
>>
>> I setup a really simple markov chain text generator as an AI honey pot
>> on a server I admin and linked it to one, hidden (display: none; in the
>> css) link on the page footer, with a robots.txt saying "don't access
>> this link".
> 
> You don't need to try hard to trap one of these crawlers like that.
> Just enable PHPSESSID on a PHP website and every time it gets a new
> session variable it will think it's found a whole new website,
> while remembering to still go back and re-crawl the site with all
> the old PHPSESSIDs it's ever received. "AmazonBot" is still trying
> old PHPSESSID URLs on one site many months after I disabled
> generating them.
> 
> It's more than a little ironic that the "AI revolution" seems to
> have born a whole new level of idiocy in web crawling. We'll just
> have to keep waiting until their money runs out I suppose...
> 
>> That's why the pixie girl is there on kernel.org.  You can like or
>> dislike it, but the "burn" from the AI companies irresponsible accesses
>> is the underlying cause.
> 
> But how much "burn" for real users of such websites is acceptable?
> They could password-protect the whole site and send out passwords
> to just the people who they think matter, telling everyone else to
> bugger off. Somewhere between that and trying to optimise/upgrade
> their website to handle the new AI load without adding any new
> access restrictions is the "pixie girl" solution which just tells
> people like me using obscure web browsers to bugger off. I still
> won't be OK with effectively being told to bugger off, especially
> by an organisation with as much money as The Linux Foundation
> (though browsing their Git repos is still working for me in Dillo).


   Sounds more like LAWYERS, rather than creaky tech
   fixes, is what's needed. Multiple orgs can hire
   a firm specializing in tech abuse.