"On Saturday, Triplegangers CEO Oleksandr Tomchuk was alerted that his company’s e-commerce site was down. It looked to be some kind of distributed denial-of-service attack.

He soon discovered the culprit was a bot from OpenAI that was relentlessly attempting to scrape his entire, enormous site.

“We have over 65,000 products, each product has a page,” Tomchuk told TechCrunch. “Each page has at least three photos.”

OpenAI was sending “tens of thousands” of server requests trying to download all of it, hundreds of thousands of photos, along with their detailed descriptions.

“OpenAI used 600 IPs to scrape data, and we are still analyzing logs from last week, perhaps it’s way more,” he said of the IP addresses the bot used to attempt to consume his site.

“Their crawlers were crushing our site,” he said “It was basically a DDoS attack.”

Triplegangers’ website is its business. The seven-employee company has spent over a decade assembling what it calls the largest database of “human digital doubles” on the web, meaning 3D image files scanned from actual human models.

It sells the 3D object files, as well as photos — everything from hands to hair, skin, and full bodies — to 3D artists, video game makers, anyone who needs to digitally recreate authentic human characteristics."

techcrunch.com/2025/01/10/how-…

#CyberSecurity #AI #GenerativeAI #OpenAI #WebScraping #DDoS #AITraining

I think #VLC leaning into the “AI” branding for their on-device transcription and translation service is a #marketing blunder. The services offered by the models can be useful, especially for accessibility reasons. But calling it “AI” is tone-deaf, and plays right into the (righteous) anti-AI sentiment which I suspect is shared by much of their user base.

In any case, they’re using OpenAI’s models AFAICT, which were probably created through questionable means, and that gives me pause. AI’s ethics are dubious, even when used for noble ends. Legitimizing #OpenAI as a supplier is problematic, given their high likelihood of proving to be a big net negative to society in the long run.

If you find the feature useful for accessibility, by all means use it. But I don’t think I’ll be enabling it. Hopefully that also saves me several gigabytes of disk storage for not downloading the models.

#ai #accessibility

“VLC player demos real-time AI subtitling for videos”

theverge.com/2025/1/9/24339817…