| > There are significant knock-on effects You are describing the experience that Tor users have endured for
years now. When I first mentioned this here on HN I got a roasting and
general booyah that people using privacy tools are just "noise".
Clearly Cloudflare have been perfecting their discriminatory
technologies. I guess what goes around comes around. "first they came
for the...." etc etc. Anyway, I see a potential upside to this, so we might be optimistic.
Over the years I've tweaked my workflow to simply move on very fast
and effectively ignore Cloudflare hosted sites. I know... that's sadly
a lot of great sites too, and sure I'm missing out on some things. On the other hand, it seems to cut out a vast amount of rubbish.
Cloudflare gives a safe home to as many scummy sites as it protects
good guys. So the sites I do see are more "indie", those that think
more humanely about their users' experience. Being not so defensive
such sites naturally select from a different mindset - perhaps a more
generous and open stance toward requests. So what effect will this have on AI training? Maybe a good one. Maybe tragic. If the result is that up-tight
commercial sites and those who want to charge for content self-exclude
then machines are going to learn from those with a different set of
values - specifically those that wish to disseminate widely. That will
include propaganda and disinformation for sure. It will also tend to
filter out well curated good journalism. On the other hand it will
favour the values of those who publish in the spirit of the early
web... just to put their own thing up there for the world. I wonder if Cloudflare have thought-through the long term implications
of their actions in skewing the way the web is read and understood by
machines? |