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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • Here’s the heart of the not-so-obvious problem:

    Websites treat the Google crawler like a 1st class citizen. Paywalls give Google unpaid junk-free access. Then Google search results direct people to a website that treats humans differently (worse). So Google users are led to sites they cannot access. The heart of the problem is access inequality. Google effectively serves to refer people to sites that are not publicly accessible.

    I do not want to see search results I cannot access. Google cache was the equalizer that neutralizes that problem. Now that problem is back in our face.


  • From the article:

    “was meant for helping people access pages when way back, you often couldn’t depend on a page loading. These days, things have greatly improved. So, it was decided to retire it.” (emphasis added)

    Bullshit! The web gets increasingly enshitified and content is less accessible every day.

    For now, you can still build your own cache links even without the button, just by going to “https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:” plus a website URL, or by typing “cache:” plus a URL into Google Search.

    You can also use 12ft.io.

    Cached links were great if the website was down or quickly changed, but they also gave some insight over the years about how the “Google Bot” web crawler views the web. … A lot of Google Bot details are shrouded in secrecy to hide from SEO spammers, but you could learn a lot by investigating what cached pages look like.

    Okay, so there’s a more plausible theory about the real reason for this move. Google may be trying to increase the secrecy of how its crawler functions.

    The pages aren’t necessarily rendered like how you would expect.

    More importantly, they don’t render the way authors expect. And that’s a fucking good thing! It’s how caching helps give us some escape from enshification. From the 12ft.io faq:

    “Prepend 12ft.io/ to the URL webpage, and we’ll try our best to remove the popups, ads, and other visual distractions.

    It also circumvents #paywalls. No doubt there must be legal pressure on Google from angry website owners who want to force their content to come with garbage.

    The death of cached sites will mean the Internet Archive has a larger burden of archiving and tracking changes on the world’s webpages.

    The possibly good news is that Google’s role shrinks a bit. Any Google shrinkage is a good outcome overall. But there is a concerning relationship between archive.org and Cloudflare. I depend heavily on archive.org largely because Cloudflare has broken ~25% of the web. The day #InternetArchive becomes Cloudflared itself, we’re fucked.

    We need several non-profits to archive the web in parallel redundancy with archive.org.





  • Not exactly. !showerthoughts@lemmy.world was a poor choice, as is:

    • !showerthoughts@zerobytes.monster ← Cloudflare
    • !showerthoughts@sh.itjust.works ← Cloudflare
    • !showerthoughts@lemmy.ca ← Cloudflare
    • !showerthoughts@lemm.ee ← Cloudflare
    • !hotshowerthoughts@x69.org ← Cloudflare, and possibly irrelevant
    • !showerthoughts@lemmy.ml ← not CF, but copious political baggage, abusive moderation & centralized by disproportionate size

    They’re all shit & the OP’s own account is limited to creating a new community on #lemmyWorld. !showerthoughts@lemmy.ml would be the lesser of evils but the best move would be create an acct on a digital rights-respecting instance that allows community creations and then create showerthoughts community there.

    (EDIT) !showerThoughts@fedia.io should address these issues.


  • Normal users don’t have these issues.

    That’s not true. Cloudflare marginalizes both normal users and street-wise users. In particular:

    • users whose ISP uses CGNAT to distribute a limited range of IPv4 addresses (this generally impacts poor people in impoverished regions)
    • the Tor community
    • VPN users
    • users of public libraries, and generally networks where IP addresses are shared
    • privacy enthusiasts who will not disclose ~25% of their web traffic to one single corporation in a country without privacy safeguards
    • blind people who disable images in their browsers (which triggers false positives for robots, as scripts are generally not interested in images either)
    • the permacomputing community and people on limited internet connections, who also disable browser images to reduce bandwidth which makes them appear as bots
    • people who actually run bots – Cloudflare is outspokenly anti-robot and treats beneficial bots the same as malicious bots

    There are likely more oppressed groups beyond that because there is no transparency with Cloudflare.




  • And cf also allows you to block and report child porn

    That’s been tried. When someone reported CP to Cloudflare, CF demanded the identity of the whiste blower then doxxed them to the offending CF user, who then published the whistle blower’s identity so their users could retaliate. When the CEO (Matthew Prince) was confronted about this, his reply was that the whistle blowers “should have used fake names”. Then this company you support had the nerve to claim to have a privacy pledge: “[A]ny personal information you provide to us is just that: personal and private.”

    Also cf is about the only way to make federation affordable and safe. (emphasis mine)

    Forcing children to reveal their residential IP addresses to the fedi whereby any interested person (read: child preditors) can derive their approximate location – do you really think that’s a good idea for safety?

    What are you even thinking? It most certainly is not safe to expose 20%+ of everyone’s traffic to a single corporation.




  • It’s like saying “you’re a bad company. . .but damn do I like your product and will consume it anyway!” it doesn’t make much sense, logically or morally.

    Sony is a dispensible broker/manager who no one likely assigns credit to for a work. I didn’t even know who Sony pimped – just had to look it up. The Karate Kid, Spider-man, Pink Floyd… Do you really think that when someone experiences those works, they walk away saying “what a great job Sony did”?

    I don’t praise Sony for the quality of the works they market any more than I would credit a movie theater for a great movie that I experience. Roger Waters will create his works whether Sony is involved or not.

    You also seem to be implying they have good metrics on black market activity and useful feedback from that. This is likely insignificant compared to rating platforms like Netflix and the copious metrics Netflix collects.

    Can you explain further why grabbing an unlicensed work helps Sony? Are you assuming the consumer would recommend the work to others who then go buy it legitimately?

    If it becomes a trend to shoplift Sony headphones, the merchant takes a hit and has to decide whether to spend more money on security, or to simply quit selling Sony headphones due to reduced profitability. I don’t see how that helps Sony. I don’t shoplift myself but if I did I would target brands I most object to.







  • The difference is that grabbing it pre-FTA is also grabbing a perfect copy. The quality may not matter to many of us, but to some it does. And because it matters to some, major copyright holders have started to treat unlicensed exchanges as “competition” from a business PoV (which is a concession from strictly seeing it as crime). So their business strategy is to compete with the unlicensed channels by offering perfect quality media at a price (they hope) people are willing to pay (also in part to avoid the inconvenience and dodgyness of the black market).

    FWiW, that’s their take and it’s why they get extra aggressive when the unlicensed version is perfect.


  • I don’t get why my fellow pirates try so hard to justify what they’re doing. We want something and we don’t want to pay the price for it because it’s either too expensive or too difficult, so we go the cheaper, easier route. And because these are large corporations trying to fuck everyone out of every last dime, we don’t feel guilt about it.

    Justification is important to those who act against unethical systems. You have to separate the opportunists from the rest. An opportunist will loot any defenseless shop without the slightest sense of ethics. That’s not the same group as those who either reject an unjust system or specifically condemn a particular supplier (e.g. Sony, who is an ALEC member and who was caught unlawfully using GPL code in their DRM tools). Some would say it’s our ethical duty to do everything possible to boycott, divest, and punish Sony until they are buried.

    We have a language problem that needs sorting. While it may almost¹ be fair enough to call an opportunist a “pirate” who engages in “piracy”, these words are chosen abusively as a weapon against even those who practice civil disobedience against a bad system.

    1. I say /almost/ because even in the simple case of an opportunistic media grab, equating them with those who rape and pillage is still a bit off (as RMS likes to mention).

    I think you see the same problem with the thread title that I do - it’s clever but doesn’t really give a solid grounds for ethically driven actions. But it still helps to capture the idea that paying consumers are getting underhandedly deceptively stiffed by crippled purchases, which indeed rationalizes civil disobedience to some extent.