this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2025
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Technology
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There's a difference between making information accessible to humans for the purposes of advancing our shared knowledge vs saying that public institutions should subsidize the needs of private for-profit organizations.
It's like, you can say, "Oh yeah, people should have access to freshwater for free," and also say, "Companies shouldn't be allowed to pump infinite freshwater from those sources to bottle it for profit."
Those aren't contradictory if your actual goal is the benefit of humankind and not, like, pendantic genie logic.
Unlike water, though, data can be duplicated easily.
Bandwidth can't, though.
Is it okay to hire a bunch of people to check out half a library's books, then rent them to people for money? Is that fine, or an obvious abuse?
Rendering this service inaccessible to actual human people in order to feed your for-profit software is only different in medium from that.
This
I've been very outspoken about my non-belief in intellectual property; I don't think reading information or making a copy of it is stealing it. On the flipside, these bots are effectively performing a denial-of-service attack on public infrastructure, wasting computing resources, bandwidth, and time that is finite. The internet is for humans first and bots second; I don't care about bots so much as long as they are well-behaved, which these are not.
My own instance went under several weeks back, then I installed Anubis and suddenly it's usable again.