If this actually works... [LWN.net]

If this actually works...

Posted Jun 3, 2026 15:01 UTC (Wed) by marcH (subscriber, #57642)
In reply to: If this actually works... by pizza
Parent article: Nesbitt: Protestware for coding agents

> The most recent one happened less than a week ago, nearly entirely consisting of residential or cellular IP blocks, making no more than two requests per source IP. over 600K requests over only a few hours.

I must be too naive but I'm really puzzled by this... I have no illusion that big AI players are "ethical" (ethics dies a while ago) and I know they are constantly flirting with legal lines but... using botnets, really? That sounds like they could lose way too much if that was proven in court. So I can imagine only this:

- Legit BigTech companies are delegating the dirty work to other, shadowy companies, pretending not to know how the latter operate
- Buried in the fine print of Terms and Conditions that no one reads, there's a clause that lets their client software double as a crawler.
- Other?

If this actually works...

Posted Jun 3, 2026 16:48 UTC (Wed) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

> I must be too naive but I'm really puzzled by this... I have no illusion that big AI players are "ethical" (ethics dies a while ago) and I know they are constantly flirting with legal lines but... using botnets, really?

Who said anything about it being the "big AI players" ?

Everyone and their dog is independently trying to scrape everything these days.

If this actually works...

Posted Jun 3, 2026 17:18 UTC (Wed) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link]

Umm, in this case, why not attach the cookie to a specific IP address?