My PineNote blog posts were linked to from the main body of a discussion thread on Hacker News but due to the consistent and prolific AI scraping it's barely a blip on my traffic. Remember when humans used to hug sites to death? In the old days this would absolutely stick out.

The good news is a human emailed me and asked me for my experience one year in and that was nice (which is also how I found out about the HN post). I'll share my response below until I get around to fleshing out a blog post from it:

I should absolutely do a write-up a year in. I'll give you the highlights:

• I lost my original PineNote and after a few months of trying to get it back, I ended up getting a replacement, which should say something all in itself.
• I wish the device was a little bit smaller and lighter, but I have gotten used to it.
• I use it as a single function device at a time, mostly writing or reading, very occasional computing.
• However, I on a month-long trip and I only brought along my work laptop and the PineNote instead of bringing a personal laptop. I can do all the personal computing that I need on the PineNote and my phone. See my setup here: https://shom.dev/posts/20250406_a-pinenote-only-5-day-weekend/
• I wish Pine64 would update their images with the kernel optimization created by the community member hrdl, they do link to it from their official docs.
• There is also an interesting project called QuillOS, which provides a nice interface to the whole system, but it's not ready for primetime on PineNote.

#PineNote #HackerNews #AIScrapers #AIBots

AI scrapers are driving up your hosting costs while real users are left waiting in the digital lobby 🤖

It is time to take the pressure off your infrastructure by using robots.txt and cache normalization to manage those thirsty bots 💡

We are sharing how to set sane application limits so your site stays fast for humans and does not turn into a villain story for your budget/.

👉 https://developer.upsun.com/posts/insights/the-not-so-hidden-cost-of-ai-scrapers

#WebPerformance #DevOps #AIScrapers #TechInsights

RE: https://mastodon.social/@gamingonlinux/116560908559455886

#RPCS3, open-source PlayStation 3 emulator and debugger, says on Twitter:

> PSA: #Tencent is aggressively scraping the Internet to build yet another AI slop chatbot, DDoSing many websites in the process.
>
> We've found that, as of last week, their scraping bots can now solve Cloudflare challenges and behave like real users while ignoring robots.txt. In the last 24 hours alone, our website received more than 3 million successful requests from Tencent bot IP addresses, plus another 1 million that were blocked by Cloudflare challenges.
>
> These recurring DDoS attacks from Tencent have been going on for over a year, and we have been constantly adjusting our firewall rules to filter them while trying not to impact Tencent's real users. Because that is no longer possible, we're now fully blocking Tencent IP addresses, starting with ASN 132203. We recommend other sysadmins do the same.

https://x.com/rpcs3/status/2061946000734888017

#DDoS #AI #AIChatBot #AIScraping #AIScraper #AIScrapers #PlayStation #PlayStation3 #PS3

I need to actually read the report in depth, but this is a pretty strong summary:

"Amnesty International finds that standalone generative AI systems, based on unlawful web scraping, depend on mass invasions of privacy by design, and are fundamentally incompatible with IHRL. As such, Amnesty International is calling for a prohibition of such systems."

https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/pol40/0996/2026/en/

I wonder if this will make anyone working on this type of scraping pause and reflect?

#noAI #AmnestyInternatinal #aiscrapers

Why is #twitter not properly identifying itself as a bot when trying to scrape my website? (69.12.56.0/21 is AS63179 is Twitter)

Could it be cause they're a malicious party training an #aibot?

(This is extremely low-intensity, but based on the combination of this specific UA and the pages they're trying to reach, I've seen them before, coming in from residential proxies.)

The funny thing is that bots identifying as bots and observing robots.txt would actually be allowed to reach those particular pages.

#aiscrapers #scrapers

After 615 requests over pretty much exactly 24 hours, the #aiscraper abusing #residentialproxies to try and repeatedly request one particular page on #GameSieve - 18 times successfully, before I noticed it being stuck in a loop and added another block rule - finally disappeared. However, its final request was successful and is worrying, as it came through fetch.tunnel.googlezip.net - which apparently is #Google 's Chrome Prefetch Proxy.

I've noticed requests from that range before, but always assumed that was legitimate. Do I now have to think about blocking that bit of infrastructure as well, as #scrapers have found a way to piggyback on it? Urgh!

I guess I'll start by blocking prefetching via .well-known/traffic-advice and see what that does...

#aiscrapers #aibots

Sunday Somewhat Funday

https://mmn.ca/~/English/Sunday%20Somewhat%20Funday/