Yea and the use of the phrase "severe repression" in the article is arguably a bad faith euphemism given that millions of Muslims have been detained by China while women were forcibly sterilized, which is genocide by the United Nations definition. Meanwhile their culture has been repressed as well, in a manner consistent with cultual genocide, which the United Nations does not recognize as a concept.
After reading about what Rupert Murdoch did in Australia to try to claw money from search engines for simply indexing pages from news websites, I do understand that it's possible to go too far in favor of the "news" organizations (whether they are reputable or not).
I don't think the LLM companies are fully innocent here, to be fair.
I will add, the news websites didn't start paywalling just because of LLM scrapers. They started doing it after certain parts of the GDPR passed, because they could no longer sustain themselves as much from targeted advertising and data sales. News has supplemented itself with advertising for a long time, but targeted advertising has sadly become perceived as mandatory by advertising companies, even before Google's dominance.
So publishers are in a no-win situation: if they lock down their content completely (server-side paywall), they disappear from Google Search and lose traffic. If they keep the "leaky" paywall, their content gets hoovered up for free by Common Crawl to train models that will then compete directly against them. They're trapped
The cynic in me says it will make no difference, because Tencent, Tim Sweenie, and the rest of the Epic Games stockholders care about money; not software freedom.
"It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages. "
It's a downgrade from a native app performance-wise, but from a security and privacy standpoint there are only upsides. The web browser is the most sophisticated end-user sandbox on your computer. A highly internet-connected app from a company like Meta, which is notorious for privacy violations, belongs in a sandbox.
It's only a sandbox in as far as Google lets it be a sandbox. I'm sure Google has telemetry in chrome that deeply tracks users beyond what is publicly known or available.
1. AI scrapers are now a common source of DDoS attacks.
2. Cloudflare is one of the largest DDoS prevention providers.
3. Cloudflare is now, or soon will be, providing AI scraping services, per the linked article.
I would add that other large tech companies in the same problem spaces aren't innocent here, but given 1-3 it does seem like there is potential for monopolistic behavior here.
If platinum-rated, should run fine with latest Proton, and maybe also some environment variables on launch to force using the dedicated GPU. Assuming the kernel and drivers are up-to-date.
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