Jonathan Corbet on Nostr: Today I got a cheery email from somebody who claims to be the "ethics and compliance" ...
Today I got a cheery email from somebody who claims to be the "ethics and compliance" officer for a company called Bright Data. He wanted to have a "no pressure" conversation about the whole AI scraperbot problem. Looking at their web site, this company offers an API that, and I quote, "Bypasses anti-scraping mechanisms and solves CAPTCHAs, ensuring uninterrupted access to the most protected web sites".
After careful consideration for several milliseconds, I have concluded that I really don't have anything to discuss with this person.
But at least their claimed "100M+" of residential IP addresses that they use for their DDOS attacks are "ethically sourced".
Published at
2025-03-30 15:20:58 UTCEvent JSON
{
"id": "c7c95b6e7f09054b0bf0204bec28b893f0ae5446196cefce270ffb8a70761963",
"pubkey": "470971b51213a29fd7306f444124ed43eea6a3d70beb17002e2e51f7b6142367",
"created_at": 1743348058,
"kind": 1,
"tags": [
[
"proxy",
"https://social.kernel.org/objects/d2ab7e00-11b5-424b-ad96-f2dfe44b802c",
"activitypub"
],
[
"L",
"pink.momostr"
],
[
"l",
"pink.momostr.activitypub:https://social.kernel.org/objects/d2ab7e00-11b5-424b-ad96-f2dfe44b802c",
"pink.momostr"
],
[
"-"
]
],
"content": "Today I got a cheery email from somebody who claims to be the \"ethics and compliance\" officer for a company called Bright Data. He wanted to have a \"no pressure\" conversation about the whole AI scraperbot problem. Looking at their web site, this company offers an API that, and I quote, \"Bypasses anti-scraping mechanisms and solves CAPTCHAs, ensuring uninterrupted access to the most protected web sites\".\r\n\r\nAfter careful consideration for several milliseconds, I have concluded that I really don't have anything to discuss with this person.\r\n\r\nBut at least their claimed \"100M+\" of residential IP addresses that they use for their DDOS attacks are \"ethically sourced\".",
"sig": "707e61f40fa3b3ccffc89e16237ca638c81782d95883e7727217f4165c117e0085c81548fd90d6bb96edb1e2d62901b64cf078016863016c69ce690b6cd99e20"
}