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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: 0.22s | 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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gausswho ◴[29 Aug 25 17:26 UTC] No.45066945[source]▶
What we need is some legal teeth behind robots.txt. It won't stop everyone, but Big Corp would be a tasty target for lawsuits.
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1. jopsen ◴[29 Aug 25 20:08 UTC] No.45068809[source]▶
I have the feeling that it's the small players that cause problems.

Dumb bots that don't respect robot.txt or nofollow are the ones trying all combinations of the filters available in your search options and requesting all pages for each such combination.

The number of search pages can easily be exponential in the number of filters you offer.

Bots walking around in these traps, do it because they are dumb. But even a small degenerate bot can send more requests than 1M MAUs.

At least that's my impression of the problem we're sometimes facing.

Signed agents seems like a horrific solution. And many serving the traffic is just better.