OLDaily

Welcome to Online Learning Daily, your best source for news and commentary about learning technology, new media, and related topics.

Declare your AIndependence: block AI bots, scrapers and crawlers with a single click
The Cloudflare Blog, 2024/07/08

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Cloudflare is a service that acts as a proxy between a user request for a website and the server that delivers the content. It was originally designed to shorten the distance content has to travel globally by creating a network of caches worldwide. The same technology is also used to protect websites from spammers and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. Now it's offering to protect websites from AI bots. "This feature will automatically be updated over time as we see new fingerprints of offending bots we identify as widely scraping the web for model training." The article also offers an analysis of bot activity (pictured).

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The Great Scrape: The Clash Between Scraping and Privacy
Daniel J. Solove, Woodrow Hartzog, SSRN, 2024/07/08

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The argument: AI is wrong because scraping is wrong. Scraping is wrong because it violates privacy. The article (64 page PDF) offers a definition of scraping ("'data scraping' refers to any time 'a computer program extracts data from output generated from another program.'") and proposes a framework based on bedrock principles known as the "Fair Information Practice Principles" (FIPPs) generally accepted by information privacy law. So, I have questions. Like, by this definition, isn't a web browser a scraping engine? When I follow a blog or newsletter, is this a form of surveillance? Should I be required to notify people if I read their posts and stop if I didn't? Are bookmarks now illegal? Can I no longer store summaries of the content I actually read in a database? You can't just say "it's bad because we use tools."

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Four questions about the newly proposed Open European University | Tony Bates
Tony Bates, Online learning and distance education resources, 2024/07/08

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Tony Bates responds to a proposal to create a new super European Open University."that is 'student-centred, inclusive, digital and green' has been supported by the European Commission with a grant of 14.4 million euros (nearly C$21 million)" with four pointed questions related to the theme, "why?" Will the university support credit transfer? help members meet targets? in crease access? or even be governed in some way?

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Let's fix it in production
Ghost, 2024/07/08

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"One small step for pug, one giant leap for pug kind." So says this fun article on how Ghost - the small open source blog and newsletter tool - is adopting ActivityPub, the protocol supporting Mastodon and the rest of the fediverse. They've open-sourced their ActivityPub module (it's developed separately from Ghost's code, which suggests that maybe it could be used by other tools as well) and you can now subscribe to their newsletter on your favourite fediverse tool.

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We publish six to eight or so short posts every weekday linking to the best, most interesting and most important pieces of content in the field. Read more about what we cover. We also list papers and articles by Stephen Downes and his presentations from around the world.

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