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Comment Re:News flash, subtext (Score 2) 33

AI scrapers use these residential proxies. It's not (just) VPNs and Tor routing. Several bottom-feeding companies openly advertise such scraping services, for pretty much any country you may want. I administer a wiki that's been on the receiving end of such scraping, and the majority of these scraping requests are in fact coming from residential IP-addresses rather than data centers.

I don't know whether these are hacked accounts, people getting tricked or paid to run these scraping apps on their devices, but it's impossible to block them all. Even if you let fail2ban block entire /24s for every detected hit (even disregarding the collateral damage and the fact that these blocks don't solve the issue, the fail2ban and iptables overhead starts to outweigh the apache load at some point).

Anubis seems to be taking care of it for now, but it's obviously only a matter of time before they can deal with that one too. Although its delay does enable fail2ban rules to block the IP-addresses before they get to stress the mediawiki php scripts, attempting to diff 2 revisions of a random page from 10 years ago.

Comment Re:It's the 'investment climate' (Score 1) 89

It's indeed not AI, but it's not particularly related to quantitative easing either. It's a regular cycle that's been repeated since forever by publicly traded companies, and game companies are just getting better at playing that game as well (pun intended): https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3F...

Comment Re:Not surprising (Score 5, Informative) 226

"Made in China" and then transported to and consumed everywhere else in the world isn't powered by fairy dust and unicorn smiles. It's easy to have low emissions when you externalise production. Let's see how it goes once (if) the process of bringing manufacturing back gets under steam.

Comment Re:The users of fossil fuels release the carbon (Score 1) 158

Nice try, but they already do. Electricity companies have to buy electricity on the open market if their own power sources don't produce enough to satisfy the demands of their customers. They don't just pull free spare electricity out of the thin air in which the CO2 gets dumped.

Comment Re:The users of fossil fuels release the carbon (Score 5, Insightful) 158

It's an argument of not hiding externalities. By requiring the producers to take care of cleaning up (part of) the pollution, the clean-up cost will get factored into the price (so the competition is not at an unfair disadvantage) and you ensure it actually gets done. That said, at least until now the carbon capture implementations I have read about haven't exactly had stellar results. See e.g. https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fen... or https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Freneweconomy.com.au%2Fdo... (although I admit I haven't followed it recently, so maybe massive strides forward have been made since then)

Comment Re:Oh, *now* they are concerned (Score 1) 192

You did not in any way explain how the quantitative easing/stimulus/whatever-you-want-to-call-it of the past couple of years is causing the current inflation spike. You really think everyone saved up that money and is now using it to buy gas and oil, thereby driving up demand and prices?

Comment Re:Oh, *now* they are concerned (Score 4, Insightful) 192

When a government that directly control their central bank spends money, they have their central bank create it out of nothing. When they tax, the money they collect gets destroyed again. It's not useful to think of them as a household budget with "a certain amount of trillions", because not a single household can create its own money supply, force others to use it, or tax it back.

While it's absolutely true that such governments cannot create an infinite supply of money without massive causing inflation, nor get rid of taxes at will without causing inflation (hi Liz Truss), it's much less simple than "bigger money supply = more inflation" (as the past couple of years have shown). The current inflation is not driven by too big a supply of money causing massive spikes in consumer demand, but by high energy prices (Russian/Ukraine war) and still not fully recovered supply chains and production after covid.

Furthermore raising interest rates is what is more likely to trigger a recession than not: it will make more people default on their mortgages and unable to pay other bills, which will have a domino effect on other spending and businesses. Inflation has that effect as well, but central banks cannot fight this kind of inflation in a meaningful way by raising interest rates. It's not going to stop Putin, reduce energy prices (although I'll grant you that kicking people out of their houses and business shutting down will reduce demand for electricity and gas on those premises), or fix supply chain problems.

A more in-depth explanation: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.taxresearch.org.uk...

Comment Re:Do people really believe this crap (Score 4, Interesting) 214

have amassed hundreds of interactions on Facebook and Twitter.

A conspiracy theory with "hundreds of interactions" on Facebook and Twitter sounds like something on the fringe of fringes. The only agenda here seems to write a random fluff piece, or in the best case a hook to get people to read something about important science.

Or it could be another instance of Discordianism's Operation Mindfuck, one that will hopefully be less successful than the one attributing everything that's wrong with the world to a hidden cabal of Illuminati.

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