Considering you link something that has a non comnercial license CC-by-NC, there might be others with permissive licenses. There might be things in their TOS of the site.
Only tangentially related, but I've recently realized that unless you're some sort of business with a valid requirement of that, you can just block incoming traffic from all of AWS, DigitalOcean, Azure, etc.
I think the spark came from some other HN comment I saw? So thank you for that, whoever wrote that.
That alone is not a sufficient strategy of course, but you can get rid of a lot of bots by just refusing to talk to where they tend to live.
Of course, if everyone were to do that, they'd eventually pivot to residential proxies. But I don't see that happening.
I initially thought this was a good idea too until another comment pointed out you'll lose most business or personal customers in offices because they connect through VPN gateways running on those cloud services (especially Azure)
I would argue that more often than not it might not. Really depends on the specifics though.
A lot of stuff on the web actually isn't really relevant for all audiences everywhere I'd say. It just happened to be accessible by all, because academics back in the day dreamt of a better open world that didn't really manifest :(
Let me tell you, at the business I work at, some of our customers work at a company that uses a commercial VDI service for all workstations couldn’t access our service because the VDI egress was in GCP and we had an AWS WAF rule banning datacenter IPs.
Obviously, we removed the rule because it was doing nothing useful but plenty of harm. Real bots come from residential IPs.
It's really not, unless the only qualifier for that is "hosted by a VC incubator". Most of the people here are here to argue about AI or Crypto or whatever, or read announcements from Nvidia and Google. I would bet less then 1% are starting businesses.
And even if we run with that assumption, one might still be fine. It's a trade-off, but, depending on the target audience, a few lost sales might be worth savings in other aspects.
Same, I just checked and this week the vast majority of the bot traffic I get is random residential IPs that all pretend to be the exact same Chrome 155 on Linux.
Then you are not looking. Already have to switch to resi proxies from time to time when encountering yet another smartass who decided to play security theater and block datacenter ips on his shitpile he calls website, because "OUR USERS MUST BE GOOD BOYS WHO LOVE TO LIVE UNDER SURVILANCE AND ALLOW ISP TO TRACK THEM 24/7" (and before you say something like "others can track you too!", your ISP has the ability to knock on your door, they should be given as little information as possible, let them do metadata analysis on per-person basis if they really want it, but no 1-click mass surveillance shit).
If you are valuable, you will be be scrapped. Turning user hostile in a hopeless endeavor to "protect yourself" is not the solution.
I can see that you're having strong emotions about this, but that rant is just hard to read and serves primarily as venting and not really to convince anyone of anything.
Unless one zooms out and thinks "okay, these guys seem to react negatively if we do exactly that. We should do more of it", which is probably not what you want.
Nobody cares what you do, you are not smart enough. If you even entertain the idea of "let's just block datacenter ips!", all you accomplish by doing that is showcasing your incompetence and lose all respect from legitimate users who are good at tech. The scraper will just turn the resi proxy and will continue as is.
But maybe selecting for tech illiterate cattle as your userbase is what you want, then I guess more power to you. Don't be surprised by the scorn though.
I trust my ISP far more than I trust bigtech. The downside of connecting from my ISP is that the site I connect to can fingerprint me trivially from the IP range
I'm sympatic to open3dlab but I think the focus on adult-content is just trying to spark outcry for cheap.
It has been shown times and times against that removing adult content from the training source (at least for diffusion models), results in generally lower-quality output, even outside of adult-content, particularly in terms of representing human bodies.
would the implied intent (from the inclusion of adult content) of training models on open3dlab content, without asking them, render Roblox's actions _less_ antisocial???
The current AI Ethos is morality is just another obstacle on the way to their IPO. ...Lets just hope after they get rich, they stay away, and dont bother us with books, videos and conference speeches on entrepreneurship mentoring...
> The crawler did not respect our robots.txt, (which it did retrieve), ignored our Terms of Service, (which forbid scraping), and defied the creators' licenses: 423 of the 712 projects are licensed for non-commercial use only.
we've spent the entire 2010s with lots of talk whether creating a scraper for google or linkedin and packaging that data to sell is illegal just for the entire thing to turn around where large companies are basically burning small servers down with requests to do the exact same thing
Man if only there was such a thing as good manners, good behaviour, accepted practices from a community to not massively hammer servers. If only these websites had been up for a decade with very few problems, before a notoriously manipulative, lying, deceiving, abusive company that makes money off of child abusers came in and just went hurr durr free data in the WORST possible way instead of just politely asking for a dump.
I'm just to ignorant to this in context of how the reality just works.
Downloading content on the web is what the web is for. Using the data for training is something lawers need to figure out.
open3dlab should spend the time and energy, as unfortunate it is, to sue them to get this resolved.
Ablog post about this is basically 0 information. The stories about soooo many bots now crawling the internet and creating a lot more traffic is going through news and hn for month.
maybe stupid question but how is it possible to not be protected against supercrawlers like this, when you own large amounts of data, specially if all requests are coming from the same server ? Aren't cyberprotection services like CloudFlare work against this kind of "attacks" ?
Yeah, I can imagine it being a problem if it was from different IP addresses, but surely putting a limit on requests from a single IP would be a straightforward fix? Although maybe until it happens, you don't think about it.
> The crawler did not respect our robots.txt, (which it did retrieve), ignored our Terms of Service, (which forbid scraping), and defied the creators' licenses: 423 of the 712 projects are licensed for non-commercial use only.
It's a community site, first model I looked at (Tanya by Shrimport) is under CC-BY-ND-NC licence (Creative Commons, By attribution, No-derivatives, Non-commercial).
AI training by definition is derivative, and Roblox not using it for commercial purposes if used in production is practically nil.
This is a huge part of why AI upsets people, we can't have nice things such as communities where people are sharing 3d models without it being feeding ground for commercial companies that has little intention to ever honor any licences or compensate authors.
I know it is an unpopular opinion, but if you do not want your content to be scraped, you have to put it behind payment walls and copyright it. In Germany we have decisions from the highest courts that deemed websracping perfectly legal (it was in the context of a competitor scraping airline ticket fares).
I mean, it's not the size of the download, it's the unauthorised scraping of community assets strictly against terms and ignoring robots.txt by an American corporation. Resource of a kind that used to get kids threatened with spending most of their life in prison.
But I agree that this kind of theft by US corporations is no longer news.
(Yes, it's theft: they were aware they may not do it and according to the article attempted to get around further restrictions. I mean it's literally even theft of the $3 you mention — you don't have to be in possession the $3 to illegally deprive its owner of it under common theft statutes)
Of course not. But there’s no indication whatsoever that any license has been violated. Downloading a file from a free access server cannot violate license terms.
Fear that something will happen is not the same thing as evidence it has happened.
Who actually cares? Isn't the whole premise of the AI revolution just gorging ourselves with other people's data so we can have AGI? I was under the impression that we have accepted this sacrifice with OAI and friends leading the way.
How can you start an outcry like this, but host stuff like this, tagged with a permissive license:
https://open3dlab.com/project/e2a0830d-f166-4b1b-aabf-8ca735...
Just an example, there's plenty more on the frontpage.
I have nothing against these guys, but I just can't understand the moral high ground of the complaint.
Considering you link something that has a non comnercial license CC-by-NC, there might be others with permissive licenses. There might be things in their TOS of the site.
DMCA safe harbor? They're not responsible for user uploads until they are made aware of violations.
Oddly, this makes their argument even stronger. Why would Roblox download this?
Only tangentially related, but I've recently realized that unless you're some sort of business with a valid requirement of that, you can just block incoming traffic from all of AWS, DigitalOcean, Azure, etc.
I think the spark came from some other HN comment I saw? So thank you for that, whoever wrote that.
That alone is not a sufficient strategy of course, but you can get rid of a lot of bots by just refusing to talk to where they tend to live.
Of course, if everyone were to do that, they'd eventually pivot to residential proxies. But I don't see that happening.
There have been a number of articles on the frontpage of HN about the residential proxy traffic. It is happening. This was one of the most popular:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49491791
I know, but it's an extra step, more expensive, and less legally solid.
None of these measures alone are a full solution, but if you stack a bunch of cheese slices, eventually, no holes line up anymore.
I initially thought this was a good idea too until another comment pointed out you'll lose most business or personal customers in offices because they connect through VPN gateways running on those cloud services (especially Azure)
True but the question is if that matters.
I would argue that more often than not it might not. Really depends on the specifics though.
A lot of stuff on the web actually isn't really relevant for all audiences everywhere I'd say. It just happened to be accessible by all, because academics back in the day dreamt of a better open world that didn't really manifest :(
> day dreamt of a better open world that didn't really manifest :(
it is open and better. open and better for capital, the true living, flesh-eating god.
This is a website about starting businesses.
Let me tell you, at the business I work at, some of our customers work at a company that uses a commercial VDI service for all workstations couldn’t access our service because the VDI egress was in GCP and we had an AWS WAF rule banning datacenter IPs.
Obviously, we removed the rule because it was doing nothing useful but plenty of harm. Real bots come from residential IPs.
> This is a website about starting businesses.
It's really not, unless the only qualifier for that is "hosted by a VC incubator". Most of the people here are here to argue about AI or Crypto or whatever, or read announcements from Nvidia and Google. I would bet less then 1% are starting businesses.
Hm I mean HN _also_ is that? But not exclusively.
And even if we run with that assumption, one might still be fine. It's a trade-off, but, depending on the target audience, a few lost sales might be worth savings in other aspects.
Can use cloudflare turnstile or similar instead
If you control the connecting device why not use MTLS?
All my business traffic comes from either our own AS, or from ZScaler's AS
Do many companies really use azure etc rather than dedicated services like zscaler?
Allmost all the bottraffic I see is from random residential proxies though.
Same, I just checked and this week the vast majority of the bot traffic I get is random residential IPs that all pretend to be the exact same Chrome 155 on Linux.
Probably all people that fell for the “superbox” TV streamer scam.
true! but how does one find all those ips?
That’s pretty easy - all major providers have public lists of IP ranges, usually as json files.
Just ask RIPE
>But I don't see that happening.
Then you are not looking. Already have to switch to resi proxies from time to time when encountering yet another smartass who decided to play security theater and block datacenter ips on his shitpile he calls website, because "OUR USERS MUST BE GOOD BOYS WHO LOVE TO LIVE UNDER SURVILANCE AND ALLOW ISP TO TRACK THEM 24/7" (and before you say something like "others can track you too!", your ISP has the ability to knock on your door, they should be given as little information as possible, let them do metadata analysis on per-person basis if they really want it, but no 1-click mass surveillance shit).
If you are valuable, you will be be scrapped. Turning user hostile in a hopeless endeavor to "protect yourself" is not the solution.
I can see that you're having strong emotions about this, but that rant is just hard to read and serves primarily as venting and not really to convince anyone of anything.
Unless one zooms out and thinks "okay, these guys seem to react negatively if we do exactly that. We should do more of it", which is probably not what you want.
Nobody cares what you do, you are not smart enough. If you even entertain the idea of "let's just block datacenter ips!", all you accomplish by doing that is showcasing your incompetence and lose all respect from legitimate users who are good at tech. The scraper will just turn the resi proxy and will continue as is.
But maybe selecting for tech illiterate cattle as your userbase is what you want, then I guess more power to you. Don't be surprised by the scorn though.
I mean I am very willing to just try and see what happens?
Maybe I'm an idiot and it is a bad idea. But also maybe not?
Isn't it good if I "showcase my incompetence and lose all respect"? Wouldn't that be beneficial to people that disagree with these ideas?
I trust my ISP far more than I trust bigtech. The downside of connecting from my ISP is that the site I connect to can fingerprint me trivially from the IP range
It's hostile to you personally, but I wouldn't call it "user hostile".
Blocking "scrapping [sic]" is also not security theater, you misunderstand the intent of GP.
Anyone who thinks blocking datacenter ips helps with blocking scraping is a clown.
exactly, there are lots of other more effective ways to block the likes of you
I'm sympatic to open3dlab but I think the focus on adult-content is just trying to spark outcry for cheap.
It has been shown times and times against that removing adult content from the training source (at least for diffusion models), results in generally lower-quality output, even outside of adult-content, particularly in terms of representing human bodies.
would the implied intent (from the inclusion of adult content) of training models on open3dlab content, without asking them, render Roblox's actions _less_ antisocial???
The current AI Ethos is morality is just another obstacle on the way to their IPO. ...Lets just hope after they get rich, they stay away, and dont bother us with books, videos and conference speeches on entrepreneurship mentoring...
if you put stuff available to download, dont be surprised that someone will download it
What is the actual news here, can anyone explain ????
They didn't do it in the intended manner.
> The crawler did not respect our robots.txt, (which it did retrieve), ignored our Terms of Service, (which forbid scraping), and defied the creators' licenses: 423 of the 712 projects are licensed for non-commercial use only.
honestly for me is the hypocrisy
we've spent the entire 2010s with lots of talk whether creating a scraper for google or linkedin and packaging that data to sell is illegal just for the entire thing to turn around where large companies are basically burning small servers down with requests to do the exact same thing
"Leopard ate MY face" ?
Man if only there was such a thing as good manners, good behaviour, accepted practices from a community to not massively hammer servers. If only these websites had been up for a decade with very few problems, before a notoriously manipulative, lying, deceiving, abusive company that makes money off of child abusers came in and just went hurr durr free data in the WORST possible way instead of just politely asking for a dump.
145GB isn’t much. It fits in RAM in some computers.
I'm just to ignorant to this in context of how the reality just works.
Downloading content on the web is what the web is for. Using the data for training is something lawers need to figure out.
open3dlab should spend the time and energy, as unfortunate it is, to sue them to get this resolved.
Ablog post about this is basically 0 information. The stories about soooo many bots now crawling the internet and creating a lot more traffic is going through news and hn for month.
maybe stupid question but how is it possible to not be protected against supercrawlers like this, when you own large amounts of data, specially if all requests are coming from the same server ? Aren't cyberprotection services like CloudFlare work against this kind of "attacks" ?
Yeah, I can imagine it being a problem if it was from different IP addresses, but surely putting a limit on requests from a single IP would be a straightforward fix? Although maybe until it happens, you don't think about it.
If that data is at all important, why is is downloadable?
This is quite simple put in the article.
> The crawler did not respect our robots.txt, (which it did retrieve), ignored our Terms of Service, (which forbid scraping), and defied the creators' licenses: 423 of the 712 projects are licensed for non-commercial use only.
A robots.txt file is not anything, not enforceable, it's politeness. Of course it was ignored.
That fight was already lost back in 2024.
It's a community site, first model I looked at (Tanya by Shrimport) is under CC-BY-ND-NC licence (Creative Commons, By attribution, No-derivatives, Non-commercial).
AI training by definition is derivative, and Roblox not using it for commercial purposes if used in production is practically nil.
This is a huge part of why AI upsets people, we can't have nice things such as communities where people are sharing 3d models without it being feeding ground for commercial companies that has little intention to ever honor any licences or compensate authors.
I know it is an unpopular opinion, but if you do not want your content to be scraped, you have to put it behind payment walls and copyright it. In Germany we have decisions from the highest courts that deemed websracping perfectly legal (it was in the context of a competitor scraping airline ticket fares).
They ignored the licenses, so kinda moot point you're making.
Couldn't the adult file download just as well be used to train a model that rejects adult uploads to roblox? I don't see the outrage.
I wonder at what point the Roblox kids all reach 18 years old, and Roblox can pivot them all to a separate adult version thereof...
3$ in outbound traffic on a public service, how is this news?
I mean, it's not the size of the download, it's the unauthorised scraping of community assets strictly against terms and ignoring robots.txt by an American corporation. Resource of a kind that used to get kids threatened with spending most of their life in prison.
But I agree that this kind of theft by US corporations is no longer news.
(Yes, it's theft: they were aware they may not do it and according to the article attempted to get around further restrictions. I mean it's literally even theft of the $3 you mention — you don't have to be in possession the $3 to illegally deprive its owner of it under common theft statutes)
I assume they need the adult content in order to detect adult content generated by their users.
I'm not even impressed..
So what? You made your content available and someone downloaded it. Why is this even notable?
Can I scrape all GPL source code from github. Then use the code commercially and then say so what, they made their source code available to download?
Right now, its legal to use this data to train a model.
Which is different than using the data 1 to 1.
Would you also say that general licensing is irrelevant for everyone?
Of course not. But there’s no indication whatsoever that any license has been violated. Downloading a file from a free access server cannot violate license terms.
Fear that something will happen is not the same thing as evidence it has happened.
> Downloading a file from a free access server cannot violate license terms.
Sure it can. If you're downloading it for commercial purposes (clearly the case) you're violating the license.
If only you could read the article and see that the vast majority of the assets are licensed under a non-commercial clause.
I guess we'll never know until you learn to read anything other than sheet music.
Who actually cares? Isn't the whole premise of the AI revolution just gorging ourselves with other people's data so we can have AGI? I was under the impression that we have accepted this sacrifice with OAI and friends leading the way.
People really still buy into that framing? I think it's pretty clear that it's generally just about money as it has always been.
Who's "we"?
"we" in this sentence is really a handful of encloistered silicon valley weirdos. Most people do not like it and have no real say in the matter.