does anyone know who's behind "open.news"?

https://open.news/

> Open.News is the command center for the decentralized newsverse.

Looks like they're ingesting people's fediverse feeds into LLMs and feeding slop to people. I only noticed because it was mostly visiting non-existent or malformed URLs.

> We index live conversations across RSS, Bluesky, and Mastodon so you never miss the story behind the story. FeedBrainer's conversational AI transforms the firehose into a calm, contextual briefing tailored to you.

#slop #scrapers

@Codeberg my problem ain't #scrapers - otherwise I'd #SelfHost my stuff in my own home LAN - but rather #bots flooding #Issues and #PullRequests with garbage.

• Cuz I do expect #bots to scrape #FLOSS which I permissively licensed...

The problem I dread is once people start abusing their " #AI" #bullshit and #FloodTheZoneWithShit aka. " #AIslop" for no good reason.

• Kinda like @bagder had to deal with "AI" slop #SecurityReports that didn't even try to show #ProofOfConcept or actually evidence their claims in a scientifically reproduceable fashion but merely wasted lifetime of maintainers!

And @Erpel 's original issue is just that: #spam in the #IssueTracker...

does anyone know who's behind "open.news"?

https://open.news/

> Open.News is the command center for the decentralized newsverse.

Looks like they're ingesting people's fediverse feeds into LLMs and feeding slop to people. I only noticed because it was mostly visiting non-existent or malformed URLs.

> We index live conversations across RSS, Bluesky, and Mastodon so you never miss the story behind the story. FeedBrainer's conversational AI transforms the firehose into a calm, contextual briefing tailored to you.

#slop #scrapers

AI scrapers request commented scripts

https://cryptography.dog/blog/AI-scrapers-request-commented-scripts/

#HackerNews #AI #scrapers #commented #scripts #technology #automation

I just published a blog post summing up my most pertinent thoughts about dealing with badly-behaved web-scraping bots:

https://cryptography.dog/blog/AI-scrapers-request-commented-scripts/

It isn't exactly a Hallowe'en-themed article, but today is the 31st and the topic is concerned with pranking people who come knocking on my website's ports, so it's somewhat appropriate.

#infosec #bots #halloween #scrapers #AI #someMoreHashtagsHere

I just published a blog post summing up my most pertinent thoughts about dealing with badly-behaved web-scraping bots:

https://cryptography.dog/blog/AI-scrapers-request-commented-scripts/

It isn't exactly a Hallowe'en-themed article, but today is the 31st and the topic is concerned with pranking people who come knocking on my website's ports, so it's somewhat appropriate.

#infosec #bots #halloween #scrapers #AI #someMoreHashtagsHere

The developer of Bear Blog on the latest wave of scrapers he faced.

They've depleted all human-created writing on the internet, and are becoming increasingly ravenous for new wells of content.

[...]

I'm still speculating here, but I think [mobile] app developers have found another way to monetise their apps by offering them for free, and selling tunnel access to scrapers.

https://herman.bearblog.dev/agressive-bots

#ai #scrapers #crawlers

The developer of Bear Blog on the latest wave of scrapers he faced.

They've depleted all human-created writing on the internet, and are becoming increasingly ravenous for new wells of content.

[...]

I'm still speculating here, but I think [mobile] app developers have found another way to monetise their apps by offering them for free, and selling tunnel access to scrapers.

https://herman.bearblog.dev/agressive-bots

#ai #scrapers #crawlers

sysadmins/webmasters of fedi:

I am looking for suggestions of which search engine crawlers I should consider permitting in my robots.txt file.

There can definitely be value in having a site indexed by a search engine, but I would like to deliberately exclude all of those which are using the same data to train LLMs and other genAI. More specifically, I would only like to allow those which have an explicit stance against training on others data in this fashion.

Currently I reject everything other than Marginalia (https://marginalia-search.com/). Are there any others I should consider?

#AI #search #robots #crawlers #scrapers

sysadmins/webmasters of fedi:

I am looking for suggestions of which search engine crawlers I should consider permitting in my robots.txt file.

There can definitely be value in having a site indexed by a search engine, but I would like to deliberately exclude all of those which are using the same data to train LLMs and other genAI. More specifically, I would only like to allow those which have an explicit stance against training on others data in this fashion.

Currently I reject everything other than Marginalia (https://marginalia-search.com/). Are there any others I should consider?

#AI #search #robots #crawlers #scrapers

Scraping for AI training may or may not be legal. But the effort crawlers put into evading detection and blocking is a smoking gun, an admission this scraping is not fair.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/08/ai-industry-horrified-to-face-largest-copyright-class-action-ever-certified

#AIscraping #scrapers #ai

Website owner? Not keen on the Mellowtel browser library building a botnet of untraceable scrapers from unwitting users who are using a browser plugin that contains Mellowtel? I've raised a GitHub issue for them to explain how much contempt they have for our consent. Join in, politely, make them look like the jerks they are. https://github.com/mellowtel-inc/mellowtel-js/issues/41

#Mellowtel #botnet #scrapers

Website owner? Not keen on the Mellowtel browser library building a botnet of untraceable scrapers from unwitting users who are using a browser plugin that contains Mellowtel? I've raised a GitHub issue for them to explain how much contempt they have for our consent. Join in, politely, make them look like the jerks they are. https://github.com/mellowtel-inc/mellowtel-js/issues/41

#Mellowtel #botnet #scrapers