Google Search rests on a social contract: their bots can crawl our sites, they can index our sites, and they can show excerpts of our sites because
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RE: https://tldr.nettime.org/@tante/116605858023186072
Google Search rests on a social contract: their bots can crawl our sites, they can index our sites, and they can show excerpts of our sites because
and •only because•
they send people to our sites. •Our• sites, our words, with our design, with our links, with our context and our aesthetics, shared the way we want to share them.
Google is announcing — unambiguously and with great fanfare — that they are now fully breaking that already-ragged contract. We should reciprocate.
1/2
@inthehands Hey, I'm curious if you have an opinion on what that contract *should* say? I don't think "pay with traffic" has worked for a long time. What would?
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@inthehands As I said just a while ago: Every big tech press event these last few years have felt like "Announcing our exciting plans for oligarchs to strip-mine the entire world and immiserate all of humanity! Get on board, and also death to the unbelievers!"
My recommendation is always "Follow the Money" .
Google is now an adjunct of the fossil fuel industry & its fossil fuel funded public corruption.Go after the wealth of the billionaires & oil oligarchs funding Google's #Enshittification
#PrinceBonesaw
Alwaleed bin Talal
Chris Hohn
Elon Musk
Sergey Brin
Peter Thiel
Larry Ellison
Charles Kochhttps://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/05/13/trump-tech-execs-riyadh/
https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/billionaire-hohn-more-google-layoffs-17736530.php
Fossil fuel phase out.
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This is clearly how copyright law as written •should• work. Not sure if it’s how it •does• work, but if anybody’s trying, they have my sword.
It almost certainly is but that means going to court. I've not yet seen anyone trying.
Someone who can demonstrate avtual financial damages absolutely should. Especially with the explicit statements of intent from Google now.
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@inthehands @ShadSterling if you can live with exposing yourself to the demon core a bit, using a locally hosted LLM to generate the poison also seems like a good way to get a lot of hard-to-detect variability, and hopefully also slightly accelerate model collapse in the process
@joe @inthehands @ShadSterling i like to prop the demon core open with a screwdriver and point the aperture at the internet
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OK, a •lot• of replies need this reponse:
Yes, of •course• they will start ignoring robots.txt etc as soon as they think it hurts their business. Of course.
It is important to •force that fight•, rather than just capitulating in advance.
@inthehands All this, and a little more! When Google *does* start ignoring robots.txt and other mechanisms, that's another victory for us, not them, even if it means we have to react to it.
Not all of Google's infrastructure is servers in a giant building, or software systems running on top of it, or even offices full of stressed out tech workers. Part of their infrastructure, the cladding on the castle walls, is their false pretense of being good citizens on the internet. When we call their bluff and they eventually drop the pretense, that's us getting them to tear down the outer layers of the castle themselves. We know what they are, and we can make them admit it, and that's power.
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OK, a •lot• of replies need this reponse:
Yes, of •course• they will start ignoring robots.txt etc as soon as they think it hurts their business. Of course.
It is important to •force that fight•, rather than just capitulating in advance.
@inthehands I know of at least one professional artist who has deliberately poisoned their images, in an attempt to deter AI scraping (mostly because the scrapers blast her small site and effectively DoS it). If they follow robots.txt, they're not affected... but they were already ignoring robots.txt
I just read an IARPA paper that said poisoning as little as .1% of training data can disrupt a model. If content creators choose to deliberately poison content that they ask not to be scraped, it might be a nice way to deter bad behavior.
The tools I know of work on imagery, but with effort people may come up with stuff that works on data as well. E.g., burying base64-encoded malicious prompts in your text, posting tables as poisoned images rather than text, etc.
Seems like we should start organizing and taking firm action now, before AI companies start buying politicians and making such defenses illegal.
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@joe @inthehands @ShadSterling i like to prop the demon core open with a screwdriver and point the aperture at the internet
@dotstdy You saw what happened to the last guy who did that, right?
*blue flash*
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This is clearly how copyright law as written •should• work. Not sure if it’s how it •does• work, but if anybody’s trying, they have my sword.
What they'll *need* is your wallet.
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OK, a •lot• of replies need this reponse:
Yes, of •course• they will start ignoring robots.txt etc as soon as they think it hurts their business. Of course.
It is important to •force that fight•, rather than just capitulating in advance.
@inthehands If they ignore robots.txt, they will be added to the block list in nginx.conf. My robots.txt has a note stating as much. There is plenty of company there!
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@dotstdy You saw what happened to the last guy who did that, right?
*blue flash*
@sennoma @joe @inthehands @ShadSterling it's okay i put an `unsafe` label on the door
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Quick strategy discussion, for those who understand Google indexing and SEO:
If I want to yank a web site out of Google’s now-fully-extractive search, should I (1) disallow googlebot in robots.txt or (2) add `<meta name="googlebot" content="noindex">` to all the page headers?
The goal here is not just to remove my contributions to the commons from Google’s results, but to •make Google aware• that sites are pulling consent. What will best do that?
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@inthehands I think if you really want to sell that point, you should explicitly disallow googlebot in robots.txt, then also setup the middleware to respond with 404 to any other URI requested by googlebot
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Quick strategy discussion, for those who understand Google indexing and SEO:
If I want to yank a web site out of Google’s now-fully-extractive search, should I (1) disallow googlebot in robots.txt or (2) add `<meta name="googlebot" content="noindex">` to all the page headers?
The goal here is not just to remove my contributions to the commons from Google’s results, but to •make Google aware• that sites are pulling consent. What will best do that?
2/2
I return402 Payment Requiredto googlebot user agents
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Defeatism is form of surrender. Cynicism is surrender. Despair is surrender. Nihilism is surrender.
Our job is to •care• and to •keep caring• and to •keep doing and keep building• and to •endure• longer than them.
@inthehands hard agree (even though I'm thinking of this in broader terms). It can be so difficult to keep the will to do so, in practice... but it's important to do it whenever we can.
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I return
402 Payment Requiredto googlebot user agents@khm @inthehands Oooh. I like it. Gonna have to add that to my nginx configs instead of 403. And add a Monero wallet address in the text content
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RE: https://tldr.nettime.org/@tante/116605858023186072
Google Search rests on a social contract: their bots can crawl our sites, they can index our sites, and they can show excerpts of our sites because
and •only because•
they send people to our sites. •Our• sites, our words, with our design, with our links, with our context and our aesthetics, shared the way we want to share them.
Google is announcing — unambiguously and with great fanfare — that they are now fully breaking that already-ragged contract. We should reciprocate.
1/2
@inthehands this is a great point
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@khm @inthehands Oooh. I like it. Gonna have to add that to my nginx configs instead of 403. And add a Monero wallet address in the text content
@hyc @khm @inthehands is there a “how to” on this that one can use to update their web server/site?
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@inthehands this is a fence-post defense against this, google Will Not Care
just start poisoning the data once you detect that google is the one fetching it, just absolutely fucking destroy their LLM output
@ShadowJonathan @inthehands agree. I don't think defense is the best reaction to sustain a healthy internet. this rhetoric has been untrue since... Google (other similar corps).
random offensive approach such as collective data poisoning, public exposé, factual based journalism, education, jailtime, guillotine & other accountability and positive encouragement should coexist to foster the internet to recover better
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Quick strategy discussion, for those who understand Google indexing and SEO:
If I want to yank a web site out of Google’s now-fully-extractive search, should I (1) disallow googlebot in robots.txt or (2) add `<meta name="googlebot" content="noindex">` to all the page headers?
The goal here is not just to remove my contributions to the commons from Google’s results, but to •make Google aware• that sites are pulling consent. What will best do that?
2/2
@inthehands How about blocking port 80 & 443 access from Google's netblocks? 142.250.0.0/15 for starters.
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@hyc @khm @inthehands is there a “how to” on this that one can use to update their web server/site?
@macronaut @khm @inthehands Currently I've created in nginx/conf/server_extra/block-useragent.conf:
if ($http_user_agent ~* meta-externalagent) {
return 403;
}And I've added an
include server_extra/*.conf;in my site's server{} config.
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@macronaut @khm @inthehands Currently I've created in nginx/conf/server_extra/block-useragent.conf:
if ($http_user_agent ~* meta-externalagent) {
return 403;
}And I've added an
include server_extra/*.conf;in my site's server{} config.
@macronaut @khm @inthehands the update would change that 403 to a 402. And add "error_page 402 /402.html;" to the server{} config, and create the /402.html file in the docroot containing whatever desired message.
