Didn’t have the link to hand. But a search turned this one up: https://reggiodigital.com/blog/nginx-rule-blocking-bad-bots/ it looks to be the same list, and you can see the ones I’ve added to the end of that list.

Hmm, I took an original list and added to it. You got a website I can check? If so I’ll happily remove. I don’t mind slow web crawlers at all.

So on my mbin instance, it’s on cloudflare. So I filter the AS numbers there. Don’t even reach my server.

On the sites that aren’t behind cloudflare. Yep it’s on the nginx level. I did consider firewall level. Maybe just make a specific chain for it. But since I was blocking at the nginx level I just did it there for now. I mean it keeps them off the content, but yes it does tell them there’s a website there to leech if they change their tactics for example.

You need to block the whole ASN too. Those that are using chrome/firefox UAs change IP every 5 minutes from a random other one in their huuuuuge pools.

Yeah, I probably should look to see if there’s any good plugins that do this on some community submission basis. Because yes, it’s a pain to keep up with whatever trick they’re doing next.

And unlike web crawlers that generally check a url here and there, AI bots absolutely rip through your sites like something rabid.

If you’re running nginx I am using the following:

if ($http_user_agent ~* "SemrushBot|Semrush|AhrefsBot|MJ12bot|YandexBot|YandexImages|MegaIndex.ru|BLEXbot|BLEXBot|ZoominfoBot|YaK|VelenPublicWebCrawler|SentiBot|Vagabondo|SEOkicks|SEOkicks-Robot|mtbot/1.1.0i|SeznamBot|DotBot|Cliqzbot|coccocbot|python|Scrap|SiteCheck-sitecrawl|MauiBot|Java|GumGum|Clickagy|AspiegelBot|Yandex|TkBot|CCBot|Qwantify|MBCrawler|serpstatbot|AwarioSmartBot|Semantici|ScholarBot|proximic|GrapeshotCrawler|IAScrawler|linkdexbot|contxbot|PlurkBot|PaperLiBot|BomboraBot|Leikibot|weborama-fetcher|NTENTbot|Screaming Frog SEO Spider|admantx-usaspb|Eyeotabot|VoluumDSP-content-bot|SirdataBot|adbeat_bot|TTD-Content|admantx|Nimbostratus-Bot|Mail.RU_Bot|Quantcastboti|Onespot-ScraperBot|Taboolabot|Baidu|Jobboerse|VoilaBot|Sogou|Jyxobot|Exabot|ZGrab|Proximi|Sosospider|Accoona|aiHitBot|Genieo|BecomeBot|ConveraCrawler|NerdyBot|OutclicksBot|findlinks|JikeSpider|Gigabot|CatchBot|Huaweisymantecspider|Offline Explorer|SiteSnagger|TeleportPro|WebCopier|WebReaper|WebStripper|WebZIP|Xaldon_WebSpider|BackDoorBot|AITCSRoboti|Arachnophilia|BackRub|BlowFishi|perl|CherryPicker|CyberSpyder|EmailCollector|Foobot|GetURL|httplib|HTTrack|LinkScan|Openbot|Snooper|SuperBot|URLSpiderPro|MAZBot|EchoboxBot|SerendeputyBot|LivelapBot|linkfluence.com|TweetmemeBot|LinkisBot|CrowdTanglebot|ClaudeBot|Bytespider|ImagesiftBot|Barkrowler|DataForSeoBo|Amazonbot|facebookexternalhit|meta-externalagent|FriendlyCrawler|GoogleOther|PetalBot|Applebot") { return 403; }

That will block those that actually use recognisable user agents. I add any I find as I go on. It will catch a lot!

I also have a huuuuuge IP based block list (generated by adding all ranges returned from looking up the following AS numbers):

AS45102 (Alibaba cloud) AS136907 (Huawei SG) AS132203 (Tencent) AS32934 (Facebook)

Since these guys run or have run bots that impersonate real browser agents.

There are various tools online to return prefix/ip lists for an autonomous system number.

I put both into a single file and include it into my web site config files.

EDIT: Just to add, keeping on top of this is a full time job! EDIT 2: Removed Mojeek bot as it seems to be a normal web crawler.

The sun always shines on pc.

I think it’ll be a “we’ll see” situation. This was the main concern for y2k. And I don’t doubt there’s some stuff that was partially patched from y2k still around that is still using string dates.

But the vast majority of software now works with timestamps and of course some things will need work. But with y2k the vast majority of business software needed changing. I think in this case the vast majority will be working correctly already and it’ll be the job of developers (probably in a panic less than a year before as is the custom) too catch the few outliers and yes some will escape through the cracks. But that was also the case last time round too.

You’re right on every point. But, I’m not sure how that goes against what I said.

Most applications now use the epoch for date and time storage, and for the 2038 problem the issues will be down to making sure either tiime_t or 64bit long values (and matching storage) which will be a much smaller change then was the case for y2k. Since more people also use libraries for date and time handling it’s also likely this will be handled.

Most databases have datetime types which again are almost certainly already ready for 2038.

I just don’t think the scale is going to be close to the same.

Not really processor based. The timestamp needs to be ulong (not advised but good for date ranges up to something like 2100, but cannot express dates before 1970). Or llong (long long). I think it’s a bad idea but I bet some people too lazy to change their database schema will just do this internally.

The type time_t in Linux is now 64bit regardless. So, compiling applications that used that will be fine. Of course it’s a problem if the database is storing 32bit signed integers. The type on the database can be changed too and this isn’t hard really.

As for the Y10K problem. It will almost entirely only be formatting problems I think. In the 80s and 90s, storage was at a premium, databases were generally much simpler and as such dates were very often stored as YYMMDD. There also wasn’t so much use of standard libraries. So this meant that to fix the Y2K problem required quite some work. In some cases there wasn’t time to make a proper solution. Where I was working there was a two step solution.

One team made the interim change to adjust where all dates were read and evaluate anything <30 (it wasn’t 30, it was another number but I forget which) to be 2000+number and anything else 1900+number. This meant the existing product would be fine for another 30 years or so.

The other team was writing the new version of the software, which used MSSQL server as a back-end, with proper datetime typed columns and worked properly with years before and after 2000.

I suspect this wasn’t unusual in terms of approach and most software is using some form of epoch datatype which should be fine in terms of storing, reading and writing dates beyond Y10K. But some hard-coded date format strings will need to be changed.

Source: I was there, 3000 years ago.

Resistance alone doesn’t cause heat. Drawing current through resistance causes heat at the point (or points) of resistance. Which is why I clarified that it’s not likely so much a problem on small loads.

This is why resisters come in different physical sizes. Because they have differing abilities to dissipate power as heat.

A good example is of dummy loads in radio use. Which needs to dissipate the power output of a radio. That can be anything from milliwatts to a kilowatt. Up to probably 50w they will have a basic heatsink. I’ve seen huge drums filled with oil as 50ohm resisters to handle up to a kilowatt of dissipation.

I think a lot of people are mostly on the money here. It’s to do with resistance. Now, I’m not a qualified electrician, but I’m an amateur radio license holder and a lot of what you learn for that is applicable here.

The main problem as many have said is resistance. This comes about from both the length of the conductors but also from every plug/socket connection adds resistance. Also in the case of the non extension socket multipliers, as you add more the weight bearing down would also likely start to make the connections less secure causing more resistance and possibly adding to the problem through arcing.

Now the resistance alone on small loads likely wouldn’t be a huge problem. But if you had a large enough load (specifically at the end of the stacked connectors/extensions), or a fault that caused a larger than expected load the current would cause the resistance to generate heat.

There’s a lot of ifs and maybes involved, but really why do it? There’s really no real world situation to need to have a dangerous amount of extensions like this though.

For larger loads here in the UK there’s some very specific other concerns when dealing with ring mains. But really you’d need to do really weird/unusual things for that to become a problem.

To be fair, I bought a really good mini pc for a home server. The problem is, it was marketed as a gaming pc. But with the on chip Intel HD graphics.

I can understand why this would upset people. For my uses though it was perfect. Sits in the TV cabinet, is quiet yet still quite powerful (intel 12900).

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It’s not how ActivityPub (at least Lemmy/*bin servers) works. There isn’t so far as I’ve ever seen an API that allows for this within ActivityPub (now specific to Lemmy/*bin implementations there’s the API the browser/apps use that must provide this, but that’s not ActivityPub). It actually looks to be cleverly designed to prevent it. It might look like backfilling is happening because old stuff appears, but there are reasons for this.

How it works from my experience (I did some work on the federation in kbin a year or so ago).

• Instance A subscribes to community B hosted on Instance C.
• Instance C notes this and does nothing. No previous content is sent, only future activities will be.
• User on Instance D already subscribed to community B upvotes a comment on a post in community B.
• Instance D sends the activity to Instance C.
• Instance C sends the activity to Instance A.
• Instance A gets the notice of the upvote, but realises it has no context for the upvote. But luckily the upvote has the comment ID of the comment that it was related to. So, now Instance A makes a request for the comment from Instance C.
• Instance A receives the response from Instance C. But it turns out that comment was in reply to another comment. But the comment contains the ID of the parent comment. So Instance A requests that comment (and any parent comments until it gets the parent post).
• By now Instance A has the information about the like, all comments from the liked comment to the post. These are saved to the database and will appear on the local system.
• For each of the likes, comments and posts. If the user isn’t known locally the profile will also be fetched from their instance and stored locally.

And so old posts and comments will begin to appear as activities linked to them happen. But there isn’t a method to ask for “all the posts in community X” using activity pub. I remember because I was specifically looking for this a year or so ago. It let’s you see the parent object but not any children.

Maybe Mastadon etc does it different? No idea.

And all of this is moot because if I block a User Agent, or I block an AS number/IP block. They’re not getting anything either by ActivityPub or scraping unless they change User Agent, AS number, or both.

I don’t think they’re optimising much at all. I think it’s likely just a modified web crawler but without the kind of throttling normal search engine crawlers use. They’re following links recursively. Then probably some basic parsing or even parsing with AI to prepare the data to make another AI model.

But, they aren’t. They’re not after Activitypub specifically. They’re scraping the whole internet, most of them using clear bot User Agents. So, I routinely block their bots because the AI ones are usually hitting you multiple times a second non-stop. If they started making fake Activitypub nodes they would not be scraping as a bot, and they would want specifically fediverse data. Important to note here though, an Activitypub node doesn’t “collect” data, they subscribe (to mastadon users/hashtags or communities) and then get new data delivered to them. So they wouldn’t get the old stuff.

Having said that, I’ve seen some obvious bots using genuine browser user agents on IP addresses from certain very large Chinese companies. For those I just blocked their whole AS number.

I mean personally I did block all the AI scrapers I could find on my instance, around a month or so ago. There were a lot, mostly unscrupulous, some big names included. Probably should look at the logs to see what’s new.

The amount of traffic was quite significant too. I have a theory that they expect legislation soon, so are not playing nice and slow like crawlers do, but are vacuuming as fast as they can.

But you’re right. Everyone would need to do it, to make a difference.

Yes, instead use rozzers, bacon or filth!

I don’t think it’s rose-tinted glasses really. I think it’s just the change in dynamic. It was definitely different during the “real” classic times (I would say classic to Wrath).

In 2005 when I started playing you needed to group up to get things done really. When you did this you met people. You talked, not with a microphone, but you would be talking. You’d get to know people, they’d invite you to dungeon groups and vice-versa, it would widen both of your in game circles and so on.

When I got to the position to raid, I was on an RP-PvP realm and while there were raiding guilds, many people were in smaller guilds that were either role-playing or guilds of friends. So, there were often raiding groups. I was in one of these, and we had our own guild chat-esque thing that everyone in the group could chat through and of course raids were mandatory voice. Because generally you did need to have communications to raid. This increased your in game circle too.

I still speak to some people now, on social media in various forms that I played the game with in 2005-2010. Some I met, others I never did. I’ve not really played retail much for a while now. But, it’s not the same. To an extent, neither is classic now.

Now, probably an unpopular opinion because I think a lot of people think Blizzard’s actions led to this change in community spirit. I actually think it’s the other way round. I think they saw their player-base changing, and adjusted the game to suit. The side effect is that it put off some of those with a more social gaming mindset for good. But, it would have happened anyway.

Times change, and they just rolled with it.

OK, look back at the original picture this thread is based on.

We have two situations.

The first is a dedicated system for providing navigation and other subsystems for a very specific purpose, with very specific hardware that is very limited. An 8 bit CPU with a very clearly known RISCesque instruction set, 4kb of ram and an bus to connect devices.

The second is a modern computer system with unknown hardware, one of many CPUs offering the same instruction set, but with differing extensions, a lot of memory attached.

You are going to write software very differently for these two systems. You cannot realistically abstract on the first system, in reality you can’t even use libraries directly. Maybe you can borrow code from a library at best. On the second system you MUST abstract because, you don’t know if the target system will run an Intel or Amd CPU, what the GPU might be, what other hardware is in place, etc etc.

And this is why my original comment was saying, you just cannot compare these systems. One MUST use abstraction, the other must not. And abstractions DO produce overhead (which is an inefficiency). But we NEED that and it’s not a bad thing.