Apparently serving HTML + other static content is more expensive than ever, probably because people go the most expensive routes for hosting their content. Then they complain about bots making their websites cost $100/month to host, when they could have thrown up Nginx/Caddy on a $10/month VPS and basically get the same thing, except they would need to learn server maintenance too, so obviously outside the question.
1. non-humans can create much more content than humans. There's a limit to how fast a human can write, a bot is basically unlimited. Without captchas, we'd all drown in a see of Viagra spam, and the misinformation problem would get much worse.
2. Sometimes the website is actually powered by an expensive API, think flight searches for example. Airlines are really unhappy when you have too many searches / bookings that don't result in a purchase, as they don't want to leak their pricing structures to people who will exploit them adversarially. This sounds a bit unethical to some, but regulating this away would actually cause flight prices to go up across the board.
3. One way searches. E.g. a government registry that lets you get the address, phone number and category of a company based on its registration number, but one that doesn't let you get the phone numbers of all bakeries in NYC for marketing purposes. If you make the registry accessible for bots, somebody will inevitably turn it into an SQL table that allows arbitrary queries.
i run a small wiki/image host and for me it's mainly:
4. they'll knock your server offline for everyone else trying to scrape thousands of albums at once while copying your users' uploads for their shitty discord bot and will be begging for donations the entire time too
Imagine where we would be if we considered murders to be only a technical problem. Let's just wear heavier body armors! Spend less time outside!
Well, spam is not a technical problem either. It's a social problem and one day in a distant future society will go after spammers and other bad actors and the problem will be mostly gone.
Indeed. But value is a subjective matter, and if a company believes they're receiving the requisite amount of value from their expenditure, then that's all that matters really isn't it?
Sure the data is out there, if you have billions of dollars you can set up your own data center, gather the same data, hire the engineers and pay the networking inference costs and make it free to everyone.
If it had stayed a non profit, would people have donated enough to keep it in business? Enough people aren’t willing to donate to keep a browser maker in business.
devil's advocate says that lawyer is just doing the job hired to do by the copyright owner. if a copyright owner didn't care, they wouldn't hire these lawyers. if a lawyer is somehow the copyright owner, well, they obviously care
Patent trolls and the like are often lawyers who decided it wasn't enough working hard to do evil/represent evil - they want to be evil without really working either.
For that matter, even Russia describes their war that way (not agreeing, just saying that they do in propaganda). We don't know the politics of the person posting, they may be patriotic to whatever country it is, just because they described the war that way, doesn't mean a neutral observer would agree.
I think the best argument against it being Israel, is that it appears to have happened suddenly and unexpectedly. News reporting makes it sound like the Israeli system is very predictable - people get conscripted at a specific age (even in peace time), and then afterwards serve in reserves, that might get called up. Ukraine on the other hand has a significant manpower problem and has been somewhat desperately trying to increase the conscription pool. Someone being unexpectedly caught up in conscription seems more likely in Ukraine's situation where the rules are being actively changed to get more recruits.
When we initially made it public, we avoided stating the country but it was heavily implied. The goal was getting help while explicitly avoiding taking a political stance on their use of conscription.
The final paragraph was added later after further internal discussion about how people were misinterpreting the country as being Russia or Israel. It was carefully worded to make it obvious which country we were referring to to almost everyone while also making it clear we weren't taking a stance against them defending themselves. It was meant to be very obvious after the addition of the final paragraph.
> Someone being unexpectedly caught up in conscription seems more likely in Ukraine's situation where the rules are being actively changed to get more recruits.
It wasn't due to a change in rules. They've lowered the age range to 25 through 60 and people age into it but it wasn't either of those things.
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