Crawlers—even the honest ones—have been spoofing browser User-Agent strings (partially or completely) since the beginning of the commercial Internet. Why would they do this? To dodge bad browser-sniffing scripts, which I still run into from time to time.
nyan
joined 3 years ago
Thing is, "Cloudflare identified this as a normal browser used by a human" doesn't mean it actually is a normal browser with a human in the driver's seat. There are going to be both false positives and false negatives (a browser puppeted by Selenium is still a human-usable browser, after all, and could even be taken over by a human in mid-session; by contrast, a browser whose settings have been chosen by a privacy advocate may make some expected indicators unavailable). So it's hard to make any useful inferences.
You're pretty much only at risk on this one if you're doing Javascript development or running a server. The popular Javascript and Python library repos seem to get successfully attacked a couple of times a year each.
Linux main distro repos haven't been reporting any significant breaches. You should be okay to update your system (but if you're on Arch or one of its downstreams, maybe steer clear of AUR packages for now).
Not quite the same thing, because back then, each wire had to be listened to by a human being in order to see if there was anything actionable passing along it, making surveillance a scarce resource that had to be deployed selectively. Now we have machines listening for keywords on all communications passing through a system, and the resource is no longer scarce: they can listen to everyone, and do.
Unfortunately, people's expectations are still stuck in the phone-tap era.
Only if the Marx they're talking about is Groucho.
Discourse is kind of a moving target at the best of times, and I wouldn't bet on any precanned command older than a couple of months working properly.
The server may have flagged your wget command as an unacceptable bot—as written, it's ID'ing itself as a bot, can pull a new page every half a second if you get unlucky with --random-wait, and isn't respecting robots.txt
The thing with the local index page pointing to the forum threads on the server matches what the wget man page says about --convert-links where the target file wasn't actually downloaded. Is it pulling any files at all other than the index? Do the files' names and extensions match what shows up in the index if you don't pass --convert-links?
Also, I'm pretty sure there's no way to get those images if they aren't hosted on the same server. (This is just common sense, or an offsite link could result in wget trying to mirror the entire Internet.)
A hobby, apparently, and one she isn't very serious about, since one local used book store is quite happy to put together 6-8 banker's boxes of books for my family a couple of times a year and then hold them for pickup. (Needless to say, we don't destroy them to feed to AI.) Even if you don't keep an electronic invertory, finding the books should be as simple as following the authors' names in alphabetical order along the appropriate genre shelf. Putting them in boxes isn't difficult.
"Looking at browser headers" usually means they're parsing the User-Agent string, which all kind of people (and bots) spoof for all kinds of reasons. There even used to (and might still) be a Firefox extension that would generate random ones.
No, actually, that's the one that's going to be fought with sticks and rocks (per Einstein)—either because technology has crashed and burned, or because those will be the only weapons anyone can own.
If it were to become popular enough, AI would learn.
I'd guess that the 1945 report was sound, although I haven't read it. Vannevar Bush was a bright guy who came within a hair of predicting the modern Web at around the same time. He almost certainly didn't mention AI in his report, since even expert systems and such were science fiction back then.
The press release and the modern report? Both total garbage, I'm sure, regardless of whether they were written by an LLM or an overworked intern.
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Given the volume of requests that have been semi-DDOS'ing a lot of servers? 5% is probably an underestimate.
"Surely" is like "assume"—it says more about the speaker than the entity being discussed. They almost certainly don't use completely distinct strings (no one does—they all start with "Mozilla/5.0"); at most they might have tacked an additional bit on at the tail. And that's if they're being aboveboard.
Why not? But actually, this may be due to an incorrect assumption on the part of the stats collectors. Typical strings for bots that admit to being bots don't specify an OS: "Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; ChatGPT-User/1.0; +https://openai.com/bot" as opposed to, say "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/134.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 Edg/134.0.0.0" or "Mozilla/5.0 (Android 15; Mobile; SM-G556B/DS; rv:130.0) Gecko/130.0 Firefox/130.0". If they're dumping anything without OS markers into the "Linux" bucket, that might do it.