Re: strange problems with some gentoo sites as seen from Russia

Dale posted on Mon, 25 May 2026 11:57:51 -0500 as excerpted:

> My biggest problem is websites that block users just because they use a
> VPN even tho that person, or IP address, has never abused anything.

I've been trying to resist replying to this thread... So much for that...  
But attempting to keep it short/narrow.

The problem now is AI, either as an enablement for spam posting (to forums 
or misconfigured email), or now, simply due to the gigabytes of scraping 
they do trying desperately to harvest every bit of human-generated content 
they can access for AI training, which is very literally putting a lot of 
small-time sites out of business/off-the-net!  That's affecting both 
small-time-commercial and volunteer/nfp, and gentoo sites of course aren't 
immune which I'm sure infra can vouch for being behind some of the 
availability issues.

No VPN here but after I upgraded firefox today, the forums on (at least) 
one particular cloudflare-protected site are unavailable to me -- 
verifying human... doesn't (the now stronger anti-fingerprinting is 
probably the trigger)!  I'd love to say I'm only trying to read, let me 
thru for that at least -- I don't even have a posting account -- and six 
months or a year ago that might have worked, but with the AI scraping he 
probably had little choice, it was behind the cloudflare verification even 
for reading or fight with poor performance and frequent unavailability, 
not to mention astronomical bandwidth bills.

Unfortunately, as a practical matter, the old rules simply don't work any 
more, and now "we can't have nice things".  And given that many of those 
AI harvesters are surely trying to use VPNs or otherwise appear to come 
from "everywhere"... yes, the VPNs are going to have even MORE problems of 
that nature, and it's not likely to get better any time soon.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman