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The web does not need gatekeepers: Cloudflare’s new “signed agents” pitch

(positiveblue.substack.com)
454 points positiveblue | 1 comments | 29 Aug 25 16:35 UTC | HN request time: 0.265s | source
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TIPSIO ◴[29 Aug 25 16:57 UTC] No.45066555[source]▶
Everyone loves the dream of a free for all and open web.

But the reality is how can someone small protect their blog or content from AI training bots? E.g.: They just blindly trust someone is sending Agent vs Training bots and super duper respecting robots.txt? Get real...

Or, fine what if they do respect robots.txt, but they buy the data that may or may not have been shielded through liability layers via "licensed data"?

Unless you're reddit, X, Google, or Meta with scary unlimited budget legal teams, you have no power.

Great video: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/M0QyOp7zqcY

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1. sneak ◴[29 Aug 25 17:43 UTC] No.45067180[source]▶
> But the reality is how can someone small protect their blog or content from AI training bots?

First off, there's no harm from well-behaved bots. Badly behaved bots that cause problems for the server are easily detected (by the problems they cause), classified, and blocked or heavily throttled.

Of course, if you mean "protect" in the sense of "keep AI companies from getting a copy" (which you may have, given that you mentioned training) - you simply can't, unless you consider "don't put it on the web" a solution.

It's impossible to make something "public, but not like that". Either you publish or you don't.

If anything, it's a legal issue (copyright/fair use), not a technical one. Technical solutions won't work.

I'm not sure why people are so confused by this. The Mastodon/AP userbase put their public content on a publicly federated protocol then lost their shit and sent me death threats when I spidered and indexed it for network-wide search.

There are upsides and downsides to publishing things you create. One of the downsides is that it will be public and accessible to everyone.