TEH 270: Bot Traffic Crashing Servers, AI in Politics, and Bank Annoyances

Anyway, I got a few random short things about AI that are related, nothing huge.

One of the things that I've run across actually a couple of months ago is that a lot of servers are getting periodically overloaded with bot traffic.

It's one of those things where all of a sudden, I've noticed it online, that all of a sudden the server comes to a crawl.

And if you take a look at what traffic is hitting it, it's like a specific bot or a bunch of bots or who knows.

Theoretically, it's AI scanners, but it could also be search engines and other things.

It could be even college projects where people are having to write something that scours the internet as part of their senior project or something.

Anyway, that's one of the reasons you see Cloudflare so much more often these days.

Cloudflare can act as a front end to your website and presumably keep out the bots.

And I'm sure everybody has seen this now where you get the Cloudflare interstitial that basically says some form of prove you're a human.

That seems to be happening more and more.

I've not done it for Ask Leo.

I don't plan to do it for Ask Leo.

But I've got a couple of other websites where, you know, The websites actually don't need to be indexed.

They don't need to be slurped up into somebody's AI large language model.

Maybe we'll just throw Cloudflare in front of them so that I don't have to buy a bigger server, which is what I ended up doing for Ask Leo.

So I don't have to buy a bigger server to handle all this additional traffic.

Yeah, so something interesting happened to me this week that's kind of the same, fits in the same thing.

I was asking, I forget if it was, I think it was Claude.

Occasionally I'll do things like I ask either Claude or ChatGPT, hey, what video topics have done well for me in the past but I haven't talked about recently? And yeah, I'm pretty sure this was regular Claude.

And Claude said, well, give me a list of your videos.

And I said, oh, okay.

And I have a page that actually lists all my videos with the dates so it can look and see how old things are.

And he came back and said, yeah, I can't see that web page.

I'm being blocked by your server.

And I was