Thank you so much for taking the time to write about this! I was wondering for the last 4 months what happened to the site.
The story behind TheNumber and also ZEGO is both scary and infuriating. Scary because having a livelihood even remotely connected to the internet has never been so fragile if a single cyberattack could push a 37-year-old business into bankruptcy and a site like TheNumbers to a skeletal state. Infuriating because watching these AI firms destroy things so rapaciously is like watching a train wreck in real time and being unable to do anything about it.
With AI, people also start to realize that 'the internet' has a very fragile memory. I like the Wayback Machine (adding an article about it) but it might end up under a similar threat. It's more than the loss of data, it's the loss of a shared history.
Yep, unlike print publications, we don't have permanent archives of everything being stored. There are many interesting things I remember reading online that I can no longer find, from web sites that no longer exist.
Exactly. Recently I googled myself and realized that there were no traces of some exhibitions or festivals I participated to. Their websites were gone. So I could say or write that I did this and that, there were no longer any proof to backup my claims. All of the sudden everything I did felt very brittle and questionable. My bio doesn't matter of course but I can imagine much more important events vanishing like that.
Thank you, Stephen, for this article. I’ve been acquainted with Bruce since his entrance in the film industry. He is above all a great gentleman as well as a highly intelligent person I respect.
And any government allowing this to happen is akin to watching one’s life partner drink themselves to death with rubbing alcohol as they push a shopping trolley down an empty lane muttering to themselves.. and doing nothing to stop them. Why and how congress or any reasonable government body can allow this insanity to continue is beyond comprehension
Can't thank you enough for taking the time and care to put all this together. It hit me quite a lot -- as someone who has loved the internet just for all the wonderful nerdy stuff it offers guys like me. (And yes, I also contribute substantially in terms of nerdism myself, so I believe my balance sheet is OK...). I have been using this kind of internet and its unique resources both professionally (for my scholarly work) and personally (for the things I love).
I don't know what to say, but this time it sounds existential.
This is appalling. Yet I am well aware of the horror of these scrapping bots on public websites and databases. My best friend has a company and data collection on children’s literature, collected and curated for over forty years. He was advised a couple of years ago to take it offline because of the threat of having his data scrapped by bots. A resource which educators, librarians, students etc used to use is now gone.
There is a solution - poison the well. There is malicious code which can be laid as a ‘honey trap’ within a public website, designed to inflict damage upon these scrapping bots. I believe it is a valid response.
Great post. I worry about the internet losing these sites:
“The web is full of independent archives, hobby databases, local news sites, forums, reference works. Decades of accumulated human effort, running on old code, maintained by small teams or single individuals, quietly holding up far more of our shared knowledge than anyone acknowledges.”
Social media has already damaged this content extensively, with people shutting down independent web sites and forums and migrating themselves to social media accounts on Facebook, Instagram, X, YouTube, etc. Users are locked into using social media, and often don't even understand how to search out independent web sites to find information anymore. Or they just don't bother because social media is their ongoing daily habit. Meanwhile, the Internet Archive is usually incapable or terrible at archiving social media content, because most of it requires a login to access, or other kinds of querying that the archive can't reproduce. So more and more internet content has become fleeting and ephemeral in recent years.
Anyone else still waitin' on that promised $3,000 check per scraped book from the Anthropic lawsuit? Something tells me as long as the system favors billionaires I'll leave this mortal coil without seeing that payment. :-0
Thank you so much for taking the time to write about this! I was wondering for the last 4 months what happened to the site.
The story behind TheNumber and also ZEGO is both scary and infuriating. Scary because having a livelihood even remotely connected to the internet has never been so fragile if a single cyberattack could push a 37-year-old business into bankruptcy and a site like TheNumbers to a skeletal state. Infuriating because watching these AI firms destroy things so rapaciously is like watching a train wreck in real time and being unable to do anything about it.
With AI, people also start to realize that 'the internet' has a very fragile memory. I like the Wayback Machine (adding an article about it) but it might end up under a similar threat. It's more than the loss of data, it's the loss of a shared history.
https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/who-will-save-the-internet-from-disappearing
Yep, unlike print publications, we don't have permanent archives of everything being stored. There are many interesting things I remember reading online that I can no longer find, from web sites that no longer exist.
Exactly. Recently I googled myself and realized that there were no traces of some exhibitions or festivals I participated to. Their websites were gone. So I could say or write that I did this and that, there were no longer any proof to backup my claims. All of the sudden everything I did felt very brittle and questionable. My bio doesn't matter of course but I can imagine much more important events vanishing like that.
Thank you, Stephen, for this article. I’ve been acquainted with Bruce since his entrance in the film industry. He is above all a great gentleman as well as a highly intelligent person I respect.
And any government allowing this to happen is akin to watching one’s life partner drink themselves to death with rubbing alcohol as they push a shopping trolley down an empty lane muttering to themselves.. and doing nothing to stop them. Why and how congress or any reasonable government body can allow this insanity to continue is beyond comprehension
I use numbers almost everyday, one of my most visited sites. THANK YOU, I am a human visitor and I appreciate it.
Can't thank you enough for taking the time and care to put all this together. It hit me quite a lot -- as someone who has loved the internet just for all the wonderful nerdy stuff it offers guys like me. (And yes, I also contribute substantially in terms of nerdism myself, so I believe my balance sheet is OK...). I have been using this kind of internet and its unique resources both professionally (for my scholarly work) and personally (for the things I love).
I don't know what to say, but this time it sounds existential.
This is appalling. Yet I am well aware of the horror of these scrapping bots on public websites and databases. My best friend has a company and data collection on children’s literature, collected and curated for over forty years. He was advised a couple of years ago to take it offline because of the threat of having his data scrapped by bots. A resource which educators, librarians, students etc used to use is now gone.
There is a solution - poison the well. There is malicious code which can be laid as a ‘honey trap’ within a public website, designed to inflict damage upon these scrapping bots. I believe it is a valid response.
Thank you for the thorough explanation. The Numbers has been one of my favorite websites for years, I’m sure it will come back stronger than before.
Great post. I worry about the internet losing these sites:
“The web is full of independent archives, hobby databases, local news sites, forums, reference works. Decades of accumulated human effort, running on old code, maintained by small teams or single individuals, quietly holding up far more of our shared knowledge than anyone acknowledges.”
Social media has already damaged this content extensively, with people shutting down independent web sites and forums and migrating themselves to social media accounts on Facebook, Instagram, X, YouTube, etc. Users are locked into using social media, and often don't even understand how to search out independent web sites to find information anymore. Or they just don't bother because social media is their ongoing daily habit. Meanwhile, the Internet Archive is usually incapable or terrible at archiving social media content, because most of it requires a login to access, or other kinds of querying that the archive can't reproduce. So more and more internet content has become fleeting and ephemeral in recent years.
Thank you for making this AI horror story so accessible to the general public (i.e. non-AI experts). I forwarded it to the podcaster of The AI Fix.
Great reporting. Thanks for speaking for the indie web.
Thank you for a great story that also spells out the impending disasters caused by AI run amok 😞
This is quite alarming.
#feralAI
Anyone else still waitin' on that promised $3,000 check per scraped book from the Anthropic lawsuit? Something tells me as long as the system favors billionaires I'll leave this mortal coil without seeing that payment. :-0
Great read. Thanks