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Kind of the opposite of the semantic web.

Not only will people not mark up their data in useful ways, often they're actively hostile to you using or remixing it, but the screenshot will always get through. Unless the display-driver level DRM gets involved.



A camera will take the picture of the screen that could not be screenshotted. Unconvenient, lower quality, unstoppable.


a few years ago there were talks about having cameras shut down when they detect watermarked content to close the analog hole. Luckily it didn't go anywhere, but start hoarding cameras!


Cinavia does this for audio.


"Unstoppable" only as long as camera manufacturers don't add the stop. You cannot make a color photocopy of (at least European) paper currency. That sort of thinking could be pushed to cameras too.

(Though the original EURion was more about counterfeiting than about Hollywood studios.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation


Could you use machine learning to reconstruct the original screenshot?


I've wondered about this, although you have to be careful with both the "enhance" process and subsequent OCR to not just insert lies. See this old Xerox bug: https://hexus.net/tech/news/peripherals/58605-serious-number...

I expect someone will do "reconstruct original HD movie from one or more theater cam pirated copies" at some point too.


Or even better, a way of reproducing the work of Harmy's Despecialized Edition of Star Wars. You have a lot of frames of video in the blu-ray reissues that didn't really differ in content from the frames of video in the old laser disc, VHS, bad interlaced DVD transfers. I imagine it wouldn't be hard for AI to fill in the gaps to produce despecialized high-definition frames from the old Star Wars transfers.

In other cases, I'd imagine you could use old post production NTSC broadcast and the OG 35mm films to do something much more akin to how Star Trek TNG was updated, than a simple interpolated upsampling.


Maybe prospective transformations would be enough, plus some pixel polishing.


The analogue aperture, so to speak.


> the screenshot will always get through

Dubious. Cloudflare and friends promote a culture of demonizing bots. For this to work you'd need to put as much energy into pretending to be a human as parsing the screenshot.

At least with a dedicated API you declare that you aren't hostile to a user who wants to use the website on their own terms.


> Cloudflare and friends promote a culture of demonizing bots

What does this mean? Usually it's the website owners who are hostile to scraping for commercial reasons, or simply bandwidth, to which Cloudflare is the solution; it's not some prejudice which has to be marketed to people.


Here's one example of Cloudflare marketing.

https://www.bigmarker.com/innovatus-digital/The-newest-appro...

> We know a third of web traffic comes from bots with their insatiable appetite for attacks. From credential stuffing, to stealing inventory, to price and content scraping, stopping bots is critical to a strong web experience for customers that is not undermined by bots.

This seems like classic demonizing tactics to me. Generalizing a whole class of users as an out-group, associating them with negative behaviour, painting them as criminals.


> Generalizing a whole class of users as an out-group, associating them with negative behaviour

Isn't this the reverse: the only criterion for this "out group" is behavior. Specifically that some people use a large number of automated clients to engage in behavior which the site owner regards (rightly or wrongly) as harmful. I can see that you're trying to draw racism analogies but that's not going to work.

And ("stealing inventory") sometimes this is at the expense of other customers, who might want to buy at the RRP from the official website rather than have to go through scalpers.


Then talk about 'scalpers' or 'scammers'. Not 'bots'.


They added explicit qualifiers to “bots” that make apparent they are referring to abuse, not “bots” in the more general sense, such as a search crawler/indexer.

Do you disagree that credential stuffing, scalping, content-scraping (to build fake social media profiles, phish, and scam advertisers/consumers) are problems and that bots perform those activities?

Your defensiveness doesn’t seem justified, to me, unless you’re using bots for those purposes.


This is marketing copy so I assume that the sentence was deliberately constructed.

> We know a third of web traffic comes from bots with their insatiable appetite for attacks.

I read that run-on "with their" as a universal quantifier. There are no bots in that sentence that do not have an insatiable appetite. They could have added that quantifier to indicate the subset of bots they refer to:

> We know a third of web traffic comes from THOSE bots WITH AN insatiable appetite for attacks.

or even, simpler:

> We know a third of web traffic comes from bots with AN insatiable appetite for attacks

That's how I read the grammar. Language can be slippery, and can be made slipperyer. If we read it different ways we read it different ways.

To your question, of course those things are bad, and of course people use bots to do this. They also use web browsers and humans to do it. Some bots are bad. Some people are bad.




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