In one of the best things I've read this week, @monsieuricon Konstantin Ryabitsev provides a deep dive on the infrastructure that is under pressure from bots and scrapers at The #LinuxFoundation - specifically the #linux kernel's git repository.
Even after deploying anti-scraper tools such as #Anubis, Ryabitsev estimates that:
"With a bunch of generous assumptions, legitimate requests are only about 2% of git.kernel.org traffic — everything else are scrapers.
This is one more example of the damage being wrought to #infrastructure in the the #TokenWars - the rampant desire for, and unchecked predation of, publicly accessible #data tokens for feeding into machine learning models.
How are crawlers and bots and scrapers influencing information architectures and re-shaping what it means for data to be open or publicly available?
@KathyReid @monsieuricon we seem to plausibly and rapidly be heading towards a digital version of Liu Cixin's “dark forest hypothesis” – everyone locks down / makes their data & systems as invisible & silent as possible for fear that hostile actors with superior resources will effectively destroy their ability to exist 😕
Dark forest hypothesis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_forest_hypothesis
#DigitalDarkForest
Dark forest hypothesis