đŹđ§ AI BOT FILTERING
As you may know, more than half of all internet traffic now comes from automated accounts known as âbots,â and the proportion of âAI botsâ (AI standing for âArtificial Intelligenceâ) is growing exponentially.
What do these bots do? They visit every website relentlessly and on a massive, automated scale in order to train themselves. In other words, they literally plunder content to reuse it later, in defiance of copyright laws, user licenses, and the creatorsâ wishes (as well as the environment). Worse still, they place such a heavy load on web servers that they end up overloading them.
This is rogue behavior similar to that of malware.
I have therefore decided to fight back, both to protect your content and to prevent performance and availability issues with our servers.
After two weeks of testing and fine-tuning on Lemmy, I will gradually roll out the Anubis solution for this purpose. It provides an excellent protection rate (Iâll share the numbers once everything is stabilized, but theyâre already mind-bogglingâŠ)
This weekend, I plan to protect Mastodon with this solution. I will then gradually extend it to all of our applications in the coming weeks.
How does this affect you? If youâre using an app (such as on a smartphone), thereâs no impact. If youâre using a browser, the first time you access, a verification window will appear for one to two seconds and then disappear automatically. It wonât reappear for a week, or unless you switch your connection method (e.g., on a smartphone).
Normally, everything should work as before, including the visibility of your posts to humans, and this shouldnât bother you. However, in certain âunusualâ configurations, itâs not impossible for a legitimate app to be denied access. If you notice any issues, please let me know!
Itâs a game of cat and mouse, and the trick is to block unwanted traffic without affecting legitimate access. Thatâs why no solution is perfect and you wonât have 100% protection, but this will block a large portion of the unwanted traffic.
Iâll post a blog entry with more details on the choices Iâve made. Notably, I avoid any intrusive third-party solution such as Cloudflare, and as for all the rest everything is deployed locally.
Itâs a shame to have to resort to this. But the ethics and privacy protection I advocate lead me to implement this safeguard.
Thank you for your understanding and feedback!
#gayfr #Anubis #IA #AI #IntelligenceArtificielle #ArtificialIntelligence