Scientists say this is the first occurance of the word "model" in the title of a post on HN that does not refer to a neural network of some sort since 2023
You laugh, but this is the kind of data that allows you to train models that actually catch a lot of corner cases, as well as generalizing to other 3D applications.
I'm not gonna comment on the morality of mass acquisition of all of this data, but as someone who deals in 3d in the medical/dental space everyday..
there's absolutely no doubt that all of that data is as valuable as gold in research.
On a tangential but related note..
I mean, people in possession of troves of data, especially in the medical or 3D industries, really ought to start understanding the value of the data they're sitting on. You can give it away if you like, but don't be upset when someone turns it into a couple hundred billion dollars and doesn't compensate you.
but I'd prefer to have an industry expert involved, for the accuracy of the model, model to supervise and co-create model trained on models then would generate a model of a model.
Personally, I'd never build on top of Roblox itself, but... and I hate to say this, if they made a generic 3D service that let you export to any game engine, I think I'd pay Roblox for said tool if it was good enough, which, they have so many games and capital, I could see them pulling that off, I mean they already have a base model.
I would love to see more text to 3D model models that can wire up straight to a game engine, I think we'll see a lot of interesting things, like children prompting the worlds of their imagination into reality, and the 50 million memes that will plague social media.
Scroll through the site, there are A LOT of assets from games, packaged by users. It's a nice subtrefuge, in practice it is a place to get ripped assets and the platform washes it's hands.
Again, I don't have any particularly strong issue with this, just with the pearl clutching regarding roblox downloading the data.
Considering you link something that has a non comnercial license CC-by-NC, there might be others with permissive licenses. There might be things in their TOS of the site,
There's more with different licenses. If you scroll through the pages, there are a lot of assets ripped from games, with a variety of licenses CC-by-NC, or just "beerware":
Just remember, the morals of someone making an argument have no bearing on whether an argument is sound.
If the purpose of every argument is to prevail, then sure, invoking morals in any discussion can seem like a tactic. Moral hypocrisy can be particularly exhausting.
If the invocation of morals is always evidence of manipulation, though, then any ethical position can be easily dismissed.
Moral hypocrisy is cynical. But that doesn’t erase the value of morals and ethics. Morality, sincerity, and rhetorical effectiveness are still very different things
If you read the article, you'd find they admit to that, their position is nuanced, and this is not a "gotcha".
> We'll be honest about where we stand. We don't like copyright as it exists. We'd like to see it radically reformed, and we wouldn't mourn it if it were abolished. Our community lives in its grey areas every day: many of the models on our sites are fan ports of characters from commercial games, made out of love and shared for free. When a studio sends us a takedown notice, we comply.
> While we as small artists and fan communities get copyright used against us, the world's largest companies are committing copyright infringement at a scale unseen in human history. This has been the case since the invention of the internet of course; digital media make duplication, remixing and resharing trivial, but copyright law never caught up. Filesharing stabbed copyright in the gut. AI is just twisting the knife, and completes the creation an unequal system where copyright infringement is only a crime if you're a low net worth individual.
Rich companies are infringing copyright at industrial scale in order to build their LLMs, and even if caught and challenged, they don't suffer any catastrophic punishment. The infringed party gets enough money to shut them up and everyone moves on. A fine is a price. They'll keep doing it with impunity. Meanwhile the small guy who doesn't have copyright lawyers on retainer is getting shafted, time and time again.
But it is okay if not-rich people do it. I have "pirated" and otherwise flaunted copyright my whole life, along with many millions more. Nobody has ever come at me for it. Enforcement of any sort against common people is exceedingly rare. For a long time it was only corporations who took copyright seriously, and now that even they are flaunting copyright people such as yourself suddenly pretend that the little guy has to care.
Well I don't! Copyright is a farce and I continue to wipe my butt with it.
Yep, this is basically the outlook of ChatGPT etc in america, when they try and stop china scraping them. I hope they go bust as soon as possible.
Honestly people need to wake up to this industrial level theft, and get some laws in place. If someone did this by hand you'd call it either a DDOS or IP theft, even if license is permissive. Just cos its from a machine doesn't excuse.
> Rich companies are infringing copyright at industrial scale in order to build their LLMs, and even if caught and challenged, they don't suffer any catastrophic punishment
And the same thing is happening here? They’re hosting copyrighted materials and have also not suffered catastrophic punishment.
"When a studio sends us a takedown notice, we comply." Well, yes, obviously they have to, or risk not existing anymore.
Also, "fan ports" is doing a lot of the heavy lifting. They're assets extracted from commercial games, uploaded with whatever license the person who extracted and packaged them chooses.
From their argument, if they truly think copyright should be abolished, an LLM capable of remixing that work into whatever you want would be a good thing, right? Ultimately this would empower the end-users of the models.
There's an argument to be made that these models trained on the world's knowledge shouldn't be locked behind closed models controlled only by big corps, but in this case it's good that anyone can download data and train such a model, right?
I can't speak for roblox intentions, and I am well aware of their history. But so far they seem to have published at least some of their model work to HuggingFace: https://huggingface.co/Roblox/
I have a question/thought/philosophy. If AES is a relatively strong encryption method right now, _why don't we wait to crack the assets until the encryption method is easy to decrypt_? By the time that's possible, the game assets will likely be old as shit, so it would potentially sit better with everyone. If we wait, it takes on a more archival type feeling.
According to the timestamp, that was uploaded less than 24 hours ago.
I'm not familiar with their site; I assume it's user-uploaded? In that case, it's the same challenge that every user-generated content site has, balancing openness with policing IP violations.
their staff posts these things. their staff creates videos of how to rip assets from games. they are fully aware of what their users are doing and they openly encourage it.
Only tangentially related, but I've recently realized that unless you're some sort of business with a valid requirement of that, you can just block incoming traffic from all of AWS, DigitalOcean, Azure, etc.
I think the spark came from some other HN comment I saw? So thank you for that, whoever wrote that.
That alone is not a sufficient strategy of course, but you can get rid of a lot of bots by just refusing to talk to where they tend to live.
Of course, if everyone were to do that, they'd eventually pivot to residential proxies. But I don't see that happening.
Same, I just checked and this week the vast majority of the bot traffic I get is random residential IPs that all pretend to be the exact same Chrome 155 on Linux.
Yeah it's definitely sketchy, but a "media access box" that purports to replace $100 a month in streaming bills with pirate media is kinda awesome.
Of course, the countries the Jellyfin and Plex servers along with IPTV dealers aren't illegal there.
And sure, your device becomes a residential proxy. They don't make that fact clear... But if you told people, I think for that $100-$200 a month streaming bills go poof is probably worth it.
I initially thought this was a good idea too until another comment pointed out you'll lose most business or personal customers in offices because they connect through VPN gateways running on those cloud services (especially Azure)
I would argue that more often than not it might not. Really depends on the specifics though.
A lot of stuff on the web actually isn't really relevant for all audiences everywhere I'd say. It just happened to be accessible by all, because academics back in the day dreamt of a better open world that didn't really manifest :(
Let me tell you, at the business I work at, some of our customers work at a company that uses a commercial VDI service for all workstations couldn’t access our service because the VDI egress was in GCP and we had an AWS WAF rule banning datacenter IPs.
Obviously, we removed the rule because it was doing nothing useful but plenty of harm. Real bots come from residential IPs.
And even if we run with that assumption, one might still be fine. It's a trade-off, but, depending on the target audience, a few lost sales might be worth savings in other aspects.
It's really not, unless the only qualifier for that is "hosted by a VC incubator". Most of the people here are here to argue about AI or Crypto or whatever, or read announcements from Nvidia and Google. I would bet less then 1% are starting businesses.
Who said we control the connecting device? This is a website. Websites are usually pretty arms-length things, and that’s the case with us. They’re our customers but we can’t install certificates on their computers and enforce mTLS. Can you do that with any of your customers?
Residential proxies are something that is not supposed to exist.
In the sense that you do not have people that actively sell those services via their home internet connection.
The whole thing just exists because there's this whole predatory ecosystem that uses malware and malicious devices to sell that without the owners even knowing.
That makes it legally questionable, even though I guess technically it is legal enough?
Still radioactive, so as a serious business, you do not want to be seen doing that.
They exist because of GeoIP databases, and spying on "quality of IP address via ASN".
If you try to use a normal VPN, you get rate limited or blocked everywhere. But if you switch to a residential proxy, all those problems go away.
To be fair, if all you're doing is torrenting or similar copyright infringing actions, then a simple VPN is sufficient. But if you want to do web stuff, you gotta use a residential vpn. Not much way around this.
That was not the question.
There are many factors driving crime, yes.
The point however is that this is crime and crime is incorrect and fundamentally shouldn't exist.
But, more importantly, as a serious business, you do not want to be seen doing crime or benefitting from crime or supporting crime or being near crime. At least in a working society that is.
If the content is legally obtainable, couldn’t any employee use their own home network to pull data? I don’t think anyone would bother with a resi. Employees have their own network connections available.
Then you are not looking. Already have to switch to resi proxies from time to time when encountering yet another smartass who decided to play security theater and block datacenter ips on his shitpile he calls website, because "OUR USERS MUST BE GOOD BOYS WHO LOVE TO LIVE UNDER SURVILANCE AND ALLOW ISP TO TRACK THEM 24/7" (and before you say something like "others can track you too!", your ISP has the ability to knock on your door, they should be given as little information as possible, let them do metadata analysis on per-person basis if they really want it, but no 1-click mass surveillance shit).
If you are valuable, you will be be scraped. Turning user hostile in a hopeless endeavor to "protect yourself" is not the solution.
I can see that you're having strong emotions about this, but that rant is just hard to read and serves primarily as venting and not really to convince anyone of anything.
Unless one zooms out and thinks "okay, these guys seem to react negatively if we do exactly that. We should do more of it", which is probably not what you want.
It does, measurably. A massively popular site is going to get hammered with more advanced types of scraping, but they're going to have a team that can more easily mitigate it.
A site that doesn't care about corporate users basically loses nothing.
I trust my ISP far more than I trust bigtech. The downside of connecting from my ISP is that the site I connect to can fingerprint me trivially from the IP range
I currently tarpit traffic from AWS, Azure, GCP, etc. since it's not like any of my real customers have their PC inside those networks. (I then use that for experiments with providing bogus data to AI scrapers.)
Doesn't do much to help with the "VPN that uses random consumer PCs and phones" traffic.
I'm sympatic to open3dlab but I think the focus on adult-content is just trying to spark outcry for cheap.
It has been shown times and times against that removing adult content from the training source (at least for diffusion models), results in generally lower-quality output, even outside of adult-content, particularly in terms of representing human bodies.
would the implied intent (from the inclusion of adult content) of training models on open3dlab content, without asking them, render Roblox's actions _less_ antisocial???
The current AI Ethos is morality is just another obstacle on the way to their IPO. ...Lets just hope after they get rich, they stay away, and dont bother us with books, videos and conference speeches on entrepreneurship mentoring...
Not really. Given that roblox is almost entirely children, and given the amount of hot water they're in you'd think they'd stay the hell away from adult content
Discord knows I'm an adult and keeps trying to send me "promoted Quests" to go use Roblox. That seems sketchy to keep baiting adults into childrens' spaces, too.
The entire article points the finger at "roblox" as an entity, but the behavior seems to indicate it's just an individual doing the scraping - possibly not for corp use.
Look at the timelines - this scraper was running on someone's laptop: it turns off when they shut down for the weekend and lunch.
It's certainly possible, but I'd say the evidence fits the opposite explanation more: if it was not for business purposes, why do it on your work machine, during working hours, with your work email address in the User-agent?
Man if only there was such a thing as good manners, good behaviour, accepted practices from a community to not massively hammer servers. If only these websites had been up for a decade with very few problems, before a notoriously manipulative, lying, deceiving, abusive company that makes money off of child abusers came in and just went hurr durr free data in the WORST possible way instead of just politely asking for a dump.
> The crawler did not respect our robots.txt, (which it did retrieve), ignored our Terms of Service, (which forbid scraping), and defied the creators' licenses: 423 of the 712 projects are licensed for non-commercial use only.
The fact someone else may have licenced content for commercial use doesn't entitle someone else to do the same without paying for it. That's the whole point of copyright law.
The news is that people download it so much that they saturate your server’s connection and/or peg its CPU or disk (whichever is the weakest link in the chain). We used to call this a Denial of Service attack but now it’s apparently just a cost of doing business, even for people who just want to run a non-commercial hobby site.
Fixating on the adult content is weird. Why make so many moral judgements about what Roblox is or isn't doing with the data? It is trivial to run a script to filter out stuff that doesn't meet your standard after you download it. You also need a ton of adult content to train classifiers that detect and remove adult content.
Farming outrage by implying "Roblox is downloading adult content to show to kids!!!" with zero proof is pathetic.
It's entirely plausible to me that they could be training an NSFW 3D model detector, specifically because of their very minor userbase. TFA seems to presume it's all being used to train genAI, in exactly the same fashion.
We know NSFW data pollutes many otherwise non-adult datasets, so genAI is going to be trained on naughty stuff inadvertantly regardless - they might need a smut neuron specifically to turn off that sort of output.
Or they are just being irresponsible. point is, we dont know.
It's still a tad icky to scrape tons of data without asking, and downright rude to ignore robots.txt and ToS, but that's the world we live in.
I mean, it's not the size of the download, it's the unauthorised scraping of community assets strictly against terms and ignoring robots.txt by an American corporation. Resource of a kind that used to get kids threatened with spending most of their life in prison.
But I agree that this kind of theft by US corporations is no longer news.
(Yes, it's theft: they were aware they may not do it and according to the article attempted to get around further restrictions. I mean it's literally even theft of the $3 you mention — you don't have to be in possession the $3 to illegally deprive its owner of it under common theft statutes)
maybe stupid question but how is it possible to not be protected against supercrawlers like this, when you own large amounts of data, specially if all requests are coming from the same server ? Aren't cyberprotection services like CloudFlare work against this kind of "attacks" ?
Yeah, I can imagine it being a problem if it was from different IP addresses, but surely putting a limit on requests from a single IP would be a straightforward fix? Although maybe until it happens, you don't think about it.
then in the post "It came from a single Amazon Web Services (AWS) address. It had read the main page of 18,926 projects, which is practically our entire catalogue, in 26,429 requests over a span of 34 hours."
sounds like some R&D dude running solo to be honest, nothing about that is a supercrawler lol
These services cost money. Scrapers also cost money in terms of resource utilization and downtime. There's always a tradeoff.
The ROI of services like Cloudflare bot protection, Datadome, HUMAN, AWS bot mitigation etc. is highly dependent on your income from the data. In the case of publicly hosted freely accessible data it can be hard to justify.
> The crawler did not respect our robots.txt, (which it did retrieve), ignored our Terms of Service, (which forbid scraping), and defied the creators' licenses: 423 of the 712 projects are licensed for non-commercial use only.
It's a community site, first model I looked at (Tanya by Shrimport) is under CC-BY-ND-NC licence (Creative Commons, By attribution, No-derivatives, Non-commercial).
AI training by definition is derivative, and Roblox not using it for commercial purposes if used in production is practically nil.
This is a huge part of why AI upsets people, we can't have nice things such as communities where people are sharing 3d models without it being feeding ground for commercial companies that has little intention to ever honor any licences or compensate authors.
Except someone can explicitly licence their content saying "this cannot be used for training models, or you're violating the licence you used to download it in the first place".
New kids often don't want to be in the same space as where the "new adults" are though, that's uncool. See: literally any social media site since forever.
The internet must understand one simple rule. What’s downloadable will always be downloaded. There are plenty of people who don’t give a flying fk about your LICENSE.md, robots.txt, ToS and whatnot. It’s like leaving your bike unlocked in the public. Even if there is a giant cardboard next to it saying: “please, don’t steal the bike” - nobody cares. Someone will strikethrough the “don’t” and grab the bike.
I know it is an unpopular opinion, but if you do not want your content to be scraped, you have to put it behind payment walls and copyright it. In Germany we have decisions from the highest courts that deemed websracping perfectly legal (it was in the context of a competitor scraping airline ticket fares).
And how were those license conditions violated by downloading? Their are permissive in the first place, and violating without passing on to a third party is almost impossible.
Supposedly they are, that is enforceable how? Download is not anything. Training AI on them is not anything. Using the trained model is not a violation of the terms just because you think it should be.
i see. as long as i can download Software that is made available for free for students its completely legal to do so and use them commercially as a non-student, after all its freely downloadable.
good thing you explained how copyright works legally, almost spend my money unnecessarily.
COPYright becomes relevant once you COPY something. As in, give it to a third party. I don't see any third party involved here. The download itself is not subject to copyright - licensing terms may or may not apply - and just because the license text says something doesn't mean it holds up in court.
Tons of those are (as the site admins admit) models that are themselves infringing on copyright, and thus any license based on copyright ownership is invalid.
You can't enforce a license on a 3d model you in turn stole from a game.
I'm just to ignorant to this in context of how the reality just works.
Downloading content on the web is what the web is for. Using the data for training is something lawers need to figure out.
open3dlab should spend the time and energy, as unfortunate it is, to sue them to get this resolved.
Ablog post about this is basically 0 information. The stories about soooo many bots now crawling the internet and creating a lot more traffic is going through news and hn for month.
Of course not. But there’s no indication whatsoever that any license has been violated. Downloading a file from a free access server cannot violate license terms.
Fear that something will happen is not the same thing as evidence it has happened.
> If you're downloading it for commercial purposes (clearly the case) you're violating the license.
No. Copyright doesn’t work that way, no matter how much you might wish it did. And it’s a very important thing for the web that it doesn’t.
Legally speaking, it is extremely well established that downloading is not the type of copying that “copyright” concerns itself with. And the GPL and similar licenses are predicated on copyright laws.
Once you make the content available in some other way, then copyright law might have something to say.
People in tech used to make fun of “you wouldn’t download a car”. It’s sad that so many have reversed their principles the moment a convenient villain shows up.
I think technically such a model should abide by the licence of the inputs, hence all models would probably be GPL if the FSF had resources to fight it and the legal profession had an inkling of the processes involved.
Or maybe the FSF is just waiting for everyone using AI code to become hooked and then subpoena every Antrophic/OAI/Codex customer and force the most massive source release in history (If Adobe/MS would file lawsuits vs the Craft apps and with their resources create legal precedent it could create chaos, maybe the only part stopping them right now from filing lawsuits is them realizing it could backfire since they're heavy AI users themselves).
> Can I scrape all GPL source code from github. Then use the code commercially and then say so what, they made their source code available to download?
Yes, that's the whole point of the GPL. Use it however you want, but don't restrict the next person
You may remember from 2021 that Microsoft's Copilot would gladly regurgitate the GPL-licensed Quake 3 source code, without giving you any indication it got it from there or that the GPL applies.
> Some examples include models of Eve from Stellar Blade, Mei from Overwatch, and a Horse cock dildo.
I don't know what's more wrong: that a dumb model started downloading "Horse cock dildo" 3D models (to which end? to stuff that virtual 3D "horse cock dildo" in its own virtual LLM ass?) ...
Or that there exist "horse cock dildo" 3D models.
Seriously in which world are we living?
And I should be thinking about the people who designed that horse cock dildo and care about them? And those viewing those/using those? 3D printing those maybe? And I should care about the retards who can't even prevent their crawler from downloading 145 GB full of horse cock 3D dildo models and the like?
Nah. Fuck that, I care about my family and you're all on your own.
Who actually cares? Isn't the whole premise of the AI revolution just gorging ourselves with other people's data so we can have AGI? I was under the impression that we have accepted this sacrifice with OAI and friends leading the way.
Crypto, big data, AI. It's all just another middle man hoping to scrape some joy out of everyone's lives to they can put a price tag on it and sell it to rubes and the government(and rubes in the government).
Scientists say this is the first occurance of the word "model" in the title of a post on HN that does not refer to a neural network of some sort since 2023
> Some examples include models of Eve from Stellar Blade, Mei from Overwatch, and a Horse cock dildo.
Lmao!
For "research" purposes, no doubt.
You laugh, but this is the kind of data that allows you to train models that actually catch a lot of corner cases, as well as generalizing to other 3D applications.
I'm not gonna comment on the morality of mass acquisition of all of this data, but as someone who deals in 3d in the medical/dental space everyday..
there's absolutely no doubt that all of that data is as valuable as gold in research.
On a tangential but related note..
I mean, people in possession of troves of data, especially in the medical or 3D industries, really ought to start understanding the value of the data they're sitting on. You can give it away if you like, but don't be upset when someone turns it into a couple hundred billion dollars and doesn't compensate you.
You're laughing, but they're probably going to use these models to train a model and allow players design their characters from a prompt.
Design models with a model trained on models. It’s quite straightforward
I'm sure one could recreate a look of some popular model. So the model trained on models then would generate a model of a model.
but I'd prefer to have an industry expert involved, for the accuracy of the model, model to supervise and co-create model trained on models then would generate a model of a model.
All models are wrong, but some models are trained on models of models and still wrong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_models_are_wrong
Already done: https://github.com/roblox/cube
Do they update this frequently enough?
Personally, I'd never build on top of Roblox itself, but... and I hate to say this, if they made a generic 3D service that let you export to any game engine, I think I'd pay Roblox for said tool if it was good enough, which, they have so many games and capital, I could see them pulling that off, I mean they already have a base model.
I would love to see more text to 3D model models that can wire up straight to a game engine, I think we'll see a lot of interesting things, like children prompting the worlds of their imagination into reality, and the 50 million memes that will plague social media.
I modeled a model that’l allow you to model your own model dawg
How’s that for a throw back
How can you start an outcry like this, but host stuff like this, tagged with a permissive license:
https://open3dlab.com/project/e2a0830d-f166-4b1b-aabf-8ca735...
Just an example, there's plenty more on the frontpage.
I have nothing against these guys, but I just can't understand the moral high ground of the complaint.
Oddly, this makes their argument even stronger. Why would Roblox download this?
The game at the moment is capture as much content as possible.
To train their LLM
.. why not? They need models, models are free, so they grab them. They have time to sort them out later.
DMCA safe harbor? They're not responsible for user uploads until they are made aware of violations.
Scroll through the site, there are A LOT of assets from games, packaged by users. It's a nice subtrefuge, in practice it is a place to get ripped assets and the platform washes it's hands.
Again, I don't have any particularly strong issue with this, just with the pearl clutching regarding roblox downloading the data.
Then Roblox trains on it and voila…
Party A: hosts largely copyrighted material, says they are opposed to copyright in its current form
Party B: massive IP business , very aggressive about everything from brand to software, defends and monetizes current copyright regime
I think it’s fair for party A to call out party B for downloading a massive trove of known-copyrighted material.
Considering you link something that has a non comnercial license CC-by-NC, there might be others with permissive licenses. There might be things in their TOS of the site,
There's more with different licenses. If you scroll through the pages, there are a lot of assets ripped from games, with a variety of licenses CC-by-NC, or just "beerware":
https://open3dlab.com/project/0a4538ba-00df-4f6d-b3e3-14d978...
Yet you chose this poor example.
Moral high grounds don't mean much these days. They are weaponized as a way to get an advantage in an argument.
Just remember, the morals of someone making an argument have no bearing on whether an argument is sound.
If the purpose of every argument is to prevail, then sure, invoking morals in any discussion can seem like a tactic. Moral hypocrisy can be particularly exhausting.
If the invocation of morals is always evidence of manipulation, though, then any ethical position can be easily dismissed.
Moral hypocrisy is cynical. But that doesn’t erase the value of morals and ethics. Morality, sincerity, and rhetorical effectiveness are still very different things
If you read the article, you'd find they admit to that, their position is nuanced, and this is not a "gotcha".
> We'll be honest about where we stand. We don't like copyright as it exists. We'd like to see it radically reformed, and we wouldn't mourn it if it were abolished. Our community lives in its grey areas every day: many of the models on our sites are fan ports of characters from commercial games, made out of love and shared for free. When a studio sends us a takedown notice, we comply.
> While we as small artists and fan communities get copyright used against us, the world's largest companies are committing copyright infringement at a scale unseen in human history. This has been the case since the invention of the internet of course; digital media make duplication, remixing and resharing trivial, but copyright law never caught up. Filesharing stabbed copyright in the gut. AI is just twisting the knife, and completes the creation an unequal system where copyright infringement is only a crime if you're a low net worth individual.
Rich companies are infringing copyright at industrial scale in order to build their LLMs, and even if caught and challenged, they don't suffer any catastrophic punishment. The infringed party gets enough money to shut them up and everyone moves on. A fine is a price. They'll keep doing it with impunity. Meanwhile the small guy who doesn't have copyright lawyers on retainer is getting shafted, time and time again.
"It's OK if I do it, but not if someone more successful than me does it" is still blatant hypocrisy.
"it's ok if a rich person or company does it, but not if someone less rich does it" is equally blatant hypocrisy that is worse for society.
What is the relevance to this case? Isn’t this site less rich than Roblox and their hosting copyrighted items and they’re not getting punished.
Or am I misreading the situation?
But it is okay if not-rich people do it. I have "pirated" and otherwise flaunted copyright my whole life, along with many millions more. Nobody has ever come at me for it. Enforcement of any sort against common people is exceedingly rare. For a long time it was only corporations who took copyright seriously, and now that even they are flaunting copyright people such as yourself suddenly pretend that the little guy has to care.
Well I don't! Copyright is a farce and I continue to wipe my butt with it.
Yep, this is basically the outlook of ChatGPT etc in america, when they try and stop china scraping them. I hope they go bust as soon as possible.
Honestly people need to wake up to this industrial level theft, and get some laws in place. If someone did this by hand you'd call it either a DDOS or IP theft, even if license is permissive. Just cos its from a machine doesn't excuse.
> Rich companies are infringing copyright at industrial scale in order to build their LLMs, and even if caught and challenged, they don't suffer any catastrophic punishment
And the same thing is happening here? They’re hosting copyrighted materials and have also not suffered catastrophic punishment.
"When a studio sends us a takedown notice, we comply." Well, yes, obviously they have to, or risk not existing anymore.
Also, "fan ports" is doing a lot of the heavy lifting. They're assets extracted from commercial games, uploaded with whatever license the person who extracted and packaged them chooses.
From their argument, if they truly think copyright should be abolished, an LLM capable of remixing that work into whatever you want would be a good thing, right? Ultimately this would empower the end-users of the models.
There's an argument to be made that these models trained on the world's knowledge shouldn't be locked behind closed models controlled only by big corps, but in this case it's good that anyone can download data and train such a model, right?
I can't speak for roblox intentions, and I am well aware of their history. But so far they seem to have published at least some of their model work to HuggingFace: https://huggingface.co/Roblox/
What nuance am I missing?
well it kinda worked? over on reddit r/gaming thinks the data has been stolen
more radicalization towards AI
https://open3dlab.com/project/04d18c1b-c508-4017-be7b-766904...
Straight up theft, not fan recreations, theft.
Indeed. And they're not even pretending to keep an arms-length distance from their users' infringement; they're openly promoting it,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MidugiRfHaY ("Ripping Encrypted Unreal Engine Models" | Open3DLab)
(Found via a sidebar ad on their webpage).
I have a question/thought/philosophy. If AES is a relatively strong encryption method right now, _why don't we wait to crack the assets until the encryption method is easy to decrypt_? By the time that's possible, the game assets will likely be old as shit, so it would potentially sit better with everyone. If we wait, it takes on a more archival type feeling.
Is your question "why don't decentralized humans don't appropriately self-regulate?"?
According to the timestamp, that was uploaded less than 24 hours ago.
I'm not familiar with their site; I assume it's user-uploaded? In that case, it's the same challenge that every user-generated content site has, balancing openness with policing IP violations.
their staff posts these things. their staff creates videos of how to rip assets from games. they are fully aware of what their users are doing and they openly encourage it.
Funnily enough the YouTube video that came up when I viewed the page was an instructional video on ripping models from Unreal Engine games.
Only tangentially related, but I've recently realized that unless you're some sort of business with a valid requirement of that, you can just block incoming traffic from all of AWS, DigitalOcean, Azure, etc.
I think the spark came from some other HN comment I saw? So thank you for that, whoever wrote that.
That alone is not a sufficient strategy of course, but you can get rid of a lot of bots by just refusing to talk to where they tend to live.
Of course, if everyone were to do that, they'd eventually pivot to residential proxies. But I don't see that happening.
true! but how does one find all those ips?
Just ask RIPE
That’s pretty easy - all major providers have public lists of IP ranges, usually as json files.
Allmost all the bottraffic I see is from random residential proxies though.
Same, I just checked and this week the vast majority of the bot traffic I get is random residential IPs that all pretend to be the exact same Chrome 155 on Linux.
Probably all people that fell for the “superbox” TV streamer scam.
do you have a good link to learn about this ?
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/06/fbi-warning-iot-device...
That’s probably a decent starting point, but a little older. I am not sure if the situation has changed any in 2026.
Yeah it's definitely sketchy, but a "media access box" that purports to replace $100 a month in streaming bills with pirate media is kinda awesome.
Of course, the countries the Jellyfin and Plex servers along with IPTV dealers aren't illegal there.
And sure, your device becomes a residential proxy. They don't make that fact clear... But if you told people, I think for that $100-$200 a month streaming bills go poof is probably worth it.
I initially thought this was a good idea too until another comment pointed out you'll lose most business or personal customers in offices because they connect through VPN gateways running on those cloud services (especially Azure)
True but the question is if that matters.
I would argue that more often than not it might not. Really depends on the specifics though.
A lot of stuff on the web actually isn't really relevant for all audiences everywhere I'd say. It just happened to be accessible by all, because academics back in the day dreamt of a better open world that didn't really manifest :(
This is a website about starting businesses.
Let me tell you, at the business I work at, some of our customers work at a company that uses a commercial VDI service for all workstations couldn’t access our service because the VDI egress was in GCP and we had an AWS WAF rule banning datacenter IPs.
Obviously, we removed the rule because it was doing nothing useful but plenty of harm. Real bots come from residential IPs.
Hm I mean HN _also_ is that? But not exclusively.
And even if we run with that assumption, one might still be fine. It's a trade-off, but, depending on the target audience, a few lost sales might be worth savings in other aspects.
Can use cloudflare turnstile or similar instead
> This is a website about starting businesses.
It's really not, unless the only qualifier for that is "hosted by a VC incubator". Most of the people here are here to argue about AI or Crypto or whatever, or read announcements from Nvidia and Google. I would bet less then 1% are starting businesses.
If you control the connecting device why not use MTLS?
Who said we control the connecting device? This is a website. Websites are usually pretty arms-length things, and that’s the case with us. They’re our customers but we can’t install certificates on their computers and enforce mTLS. Can you do that with any of your customers?
> day dreamt of a better open world that didn't really manifest :(
it is open and better indeed. open and better for capital - the true, living, flesh-eating god.
All my business traffic comes from either our own AS, or from ZScaler's AS
Do many companies really use azure etc rather than dedicated services like zscaler?
i can't access reddit through nordvpn
Someone accessing a VPN that's in an Azure IP range is going to have a difficult time using half of the Internet.
I would sure hope they split tunnel their VPN so all traffic isn't going through the VPN...
There have been a number of articles on the frontpage of HN about the residential proxy traffic. It is happening. This was one of the most popular:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49491791
I know, but it's an extra step, more expensive, and less legally solid.
None of these measures alone are a full solution, but if you stack a bunch of cheese slices, eventually, no holes line up anymore.
... less legally solid? What?
Residential proxies are something that is not supposed to exist.
In the sense that you do not have people that actively sell those services via their home internet connection.
The whole thing just exists because there's this whole predatory ecosystem that uses malware and malicious devices to sell that without the owners even knowing.
That makes it legally questionable, even though I guess technically it is legal enough? Still radioactive, so as a serious business, you do not want to be seen doing that.
They exist because of GeoIP databases, and spying on "quality of IP address via ASN".
If you try to use a normal VPN, you get rate limited or blocked everywhere. But if you switch to a residential proxy, all those problems go away.
To be fair, if all you're doing is torrenting or similar copyright infringing actions, then a simple VPN is sufficient. But if you want to do web stuff, you gotta use a residential vpn. Not much way around this.
That was not the question. There are many factors driving crime, yes.
The point however is that this is crime and crime is incorrect and fundamentally shouldn't exist.
But, more importantly, as a serious business, you do not want to be seen doing crime or benefitting from crime or supporting crime or being near crime. At least in a working society that is.
Sure, that's why they sanitize the User-Ggent header when using these proxies. Good luck attributing the scraping to anyone at all.
It just needs one case where someone manages to attribute it to the corp using these illicit services.
Either by technical means or by a whistleblower.
Which might be a gamble worth doing, but also might not. And regardless, the fact that it is a gamble alone slows down velocity.
If the content is legally obtainable, couldn’t any employee use their own home network to pull data? I don’t think anyone would bother with a resi. Employees have their own network connections available.
Can you people please for the love of God stop missing the bigger picture?
Yes, yes there is always something. Yes there can always be workarounds.
But that is not the point. The point is that things are made harder. That is the point. To make things harder
Not impossible. Harder
Jesus Christ. It's all just a game of probabilities and friction. One needs to understand that to understand reality.
The scrapers and AI companies resorting to residential proxy traffic like intelligence and hackers is pretty crazy.
>But I don't see that happening.
Then you are not looking. Already have to switch to resi proxies from time to time when encountering yet another smartass who decided to play security theater and block datacenter ips on his shitpile he calls website, because "OUR USERS MUST BE GOOD BOYS WHO LOVE TO LIVE UNDER SURVILANCE AND ALLOW ISP TO TRACK THEM 24/7" (and before you say something like "others can track you too!", your ISP has the ability to knock on your door, they should be given as little information as possible, let them do metadata analysis on per-person basis if they really want it, but no 1-click mass surveillance shit).
If you are valuable, you will be be scraped. Turning user hostile in a hopeless endeavor to "protect yourself" is not the solution.
I can see that you're having strong emotions about this, but that rant is just hard to read and serves primarily as venting and not really to convince anyone of anything.
Unless one zooms out and thinks "okay, these guys seem to react negatively if we do exactly that. We should do more of it", which is probably not what you want.
It's hostile to you personally, but I wouldn't call it "user hostile".
Blocking "scrapping [sic]" is also not security theater, you misunderstand the intent of GP.
Anyone who thinks blocking datacenter ips helps with blocking scraping is a clown.
exactly, there are lots of other more effective ways to block the likes of you
Let's hope you enjoy killing your real userbase with collateral damage, because that's the only thing you are going to accomplish.
It does, measurably. A massively popular site is going to get hammered with more advanced types of scraping, but they're going to have a team that can more easily mitigate it.
A site that doesn't care about corporate users basically loses nothing.
I trust my ISP far more than I trust bigtech. The downside of connecting from my ISP is that the site I connect to can fingerprint me trivially from the IP range
Won't this harm SEO? What about agentic software suites where authorized users should be able to drop an app passkey into grokbot or such?
"Yes, but who cares" is the sentiment.
I currently tarpit traffic from AWS, Azure, GCP, etc. since it's not like any of my real customers have their PC inside those networks. (I then use that for experiments with providing bogus data to AI scrapers.)
Doesn't do much to help with the "VPN that uses random consumer PCs and phones" traffic.
I'm sympatic to open3dlab but I think the focus on adult-content is just trying to spark outcry for cheap.
It has been shown times and times against that removing adult content from the training source (at least for diffusion models), results in generally lower-quality output, even outside of adult-content, particularly in terms of representing human bodies.
would the implied intent (from the inclusion of adult content) of training models on open3dlab content, without asking them, render Roblox's actions _less_ antisocial???
The current AI Ethos is morality is just another obstacle on the way to their IPO. ...Lets just hope after they get rich, they stay away, and dont bother us with books, videos and conference speeches on entrepreneurship mentoring...
hi jared
They should change their name to openish3dlab.
Not really. Given that roblox is almost entirely children, and given the amount of hot water they're in you'd think they'd stay the hell away from adult content
You'd think! But they don't. Roblox is also notorious for tolerating a ridiculous amount of grooming.
Discord knows I'm an adult and keeps trying to send me "promoted Quests" to go use Roblox. That seems sketchy to keep baiting adults into childrens' spaces, too.
The entire article points the finger at "roblox" as an entity, but the behavior seems to indicate it's just an individual doing the scraping - possibly not for corp use.
Look at the timelines - this scraper was running on someone's laptop: it turns off when they shut down for the weekend and lunch.
It's certainly possible, but I'd say the evidence fits the opposite explanation more: if it was not for business purposes, why do it on your work machine, during working hours, with your work email address in the User-agent?
Couldn't the adult file download just as well be used to train a model that rejects adult uploads to roblox? I don't see the outrage.
if you put stuff available to download, dont be surprised that someone will download it
What is the actual news here, can anyone explain ????
Man if only there was such a thing as good manners, good behaviour, accepted practices from a community to not massively hammer servers. If only these websites had been up for a decade with very few problems, before a notoriously manipulative, lying, deceiving, abusive company that makes money off of child abusers came in and just went hurr durr free data in the WORST possible way instead of just politely asking for a dump.
"Leopard ate MY face" ?
They didn't do it in the intended manner.
> The crawler did not respect our robots.txt, (which it did retrieve), ignored our Terms of Service, (which forbid scraping), and defied the creators' licenses: 423 of the 712 projects are licensed for non-commercial use only.
> did not respect our robots.txt
I don't see a problem
> ignored our Terms of Service
ban them from the service then and case closed?
> and defied the creators' licenses: 423 of the 712 projects are licensed for non-commercial use only
because it's been proven they have been used commercially?
I do. It's wrong to ignore a robots.txt.
The fact someone else may have licenced content for commercial use doesn't entitle someone else to do the same without paying for it. That's the whole point of copyright law.
The news is that people download it so much that they saturate your server’s connection and/or peg its CPU or disk (whichever is the weakest link in the chain). We used to call this a Denial of Service attack but now it’s apparently just a cost of doing business, even for people who just want to run a non-commercial hobby site.
https://therecord.media/linkedin-wins-court-order-blocking-m...
Which is it then? Megacorps can enforce their TOS through the law but small companies cannot?
Fixating on the adult content is weird. Why make so many moral judgements about what Roblox is or isn't doing with the data? It is trivial to run a script to filter out stuff that doesn't meet your standard after you download it. You also need a ton of adult content to train classifiers that detect and remove adult content.
Farming outrage by implying "Roblox is downloading adult content to show to kids!!!" with zero proof is pathetic.
Because of the implication
It's entirely plausible to me that they could be training an NSFW 3D model detector, specifically because of their very minor userbase. TFA seems to presume it's all being used to train genAI, in exactly the same fashion.
We know NSFW data pollutes many otherwise non-adult datasets, so genAI is going to be trained on naughty stuff inadvertantly regardless - they might need a smut neuron specifically to turn off that sort of output.
Or they are just being irresponsible. point is, we dont know.
It's still a tad icky to scrape tons of data without asking, and downright rude to ignore robots.txt and ToS, but that's the world we live in.
3$ in outbound traffic on a public service, how is this news?
I mean, it's not the size of the download, it's the unauthorised scraping of community assets strictly against terms and ignoring robots.txt by an American corporation. Resource of a kind that used to get kids threatened with spending most of their life in prison.
But I agree that this kind of theft by US corporations is no longer news.
(Yes, it's theft: they were aware they may not do it and according to the article attempted to get around further restrictions. I mean it's literally even theft of the $3 you mention — you don't have to be in possession the $3 to illegally deprive its owner of it under common theft statutes)
Aaron Swartz pulled down by the legal system for trying to get things accessible for people instead of being blocked by profit requirements.
Companies copying things to make profit for themselves not being held accountable.
Progress is one thing, injustice is another.
AI is industrial scale theft. Like if someone else did this we'd be looking to courts to sort this out.
Scraping is legal, last I checked. If you don't want people downloading your content then don't host it.
maybe stupid question but how is it possible to not be protected against supercrawlers like this, when you own large amounts of data, specially if all requests are coming from the same server ? Aren't cyberprotection services like CloudFlare work against this kind of "attacks" ?
Yeah, I can imagine it being a problem if it was from different IP addresses, but surely putting a limit on requests from a single IP would be a straightforward fix? Although maybe until it happens, you don't think about it.
"supercrawlers like this"
then in the post "It came from a single Amazon Web Services (AWS) address. It had read the main page of 18,926 projects, which is practically our entire catalogue, in 26,429 requests over a span of 34 hours."
sounds like some R&D dude running solo to be honest, nothing about that is a supercrawler lol
> cyberprotection services
These services cost money. Scrapers also cost money in terms of resource utilization and downtime. There's always a tradeoff.
The ROI of services like Cloudflare bot protection, Datadome, HUMAN, AWS bot mitigation etc. is highly dependent on your income from the data. In the case of publicly hosted freely accessible data it can be hard to justify.
If that data is at all important, why is is downloadable?
This is quite simple put in the article.
> The crawler did not respect our robots.txt, (which it did retrieve), ignored our Terms of Service, (which forbid scraping), and defied the creators' licenses: 423 of the 712 projects are licensed for non-commercial use only.
A robots.txt file is not anything, not enforceable, it's politeness. Of course it was ignored.
That fight was already lost back in 2024.
Sue them. They'd sue you for ignoring their ToS.
It's a community site, first model I looked at (Tanya by Shrimport) is under CC-BY-ND-NC licence (Creative Commons, By attribution, No-derivatives, Non-commercial).
AI training by definition is derivative, and Roblox not using it for commercial purposes if used in production is practically nil.
This is a huge part of why AI upsets people, we can't have nice things such as communities where people are sharing 3d models without it being feeding ground for commercial companies that has little intention to ever honor any licences or compensate authors.
If courts say that training models is fair use then copyright and license terms are moot.
It’s not fully played out in the courts yet, but so far doesn’t look like it’s going to be enforced how you want it to be.
Except someone can explicitly licence their content saying "this cannot be used for training models, or you're violating the licence you used to download it in the first place".
"oh no, not the creative commons resources we distribute freely even if they contain copyrighted material!"
I wonder at what point the Roblox kids all reach 18 years old, and Roblox can pivot them all to a separate adult version thereof...
Never, it gets new players constantly. This is like saying I wonder when YouTube is going to turn into Pornhub
> This is like saying I wonder when YouTube is going to turn into Pornhub
To a certain extent, it already has. YouTube for Kids and regular YouTube are worlds apart.
Robloxs original player base is their 20s now and still play.
You know there are new kids being made right..
New kids often don't want to be in the same space as where the "new adults" are though, that's uncool. See: literally any social media site since forever.
The great theft.
The internet must understand one simple rule. What’s downloadable will always be downloaded. There are plenty of people who don’t give a flying fk about your LICENSE.md, robots.txt, ToS and whatnot. It’s like leaving your bike unlocked in the public. Even if there is a giant cardboard next to it saying: “please, don’t steal the bike” - nobody cares. Someone will strikethrough the “don’t” and grab the bike.
It is so cool
I assume they need the adult content in order to detect adult content generated by their users.
I know it is an unpopular opinion, but if you do not want your content to be scraped, you have to put it behind payment walls and copyright it. In Germany we have decisions from the highest courts that deemed websracping perfectly legal (it was in the context of a competitor scraping airline ticket fares).
They ignored the licenses, so kinda moot point you're making.
And how were those license conditions violated by downloading? Their are permissive in the first place, and violating without passing on to a third party is almost impossible.
Were they used in a commercial context when a commercial entity downloaded it?
If yes, they were in violation of the license. Fyi, that's explicitly stated in the article we're commenting on.
Supposedly they are, that is enforceable how? Download is not anything. Training AI on them is not anything. Using the trained model is not a violation of the terms just because you think it should be.
i see. as long as i can download Software that is made available for free for students its completely legal to do so and use them commercially as a non-student, after all its freely downloadable.
good thing you explained how copyright works legally, almost spend my money unnecessarily.
Yes, as of now, you can do exactly what you assume that Roblox did. How is this still surprising to people?
COPYright becomes relevant once you COPY something. As in, give it to a third party. I don't see any third party involved here. The download itself is not subject to copyright - licensing terms may or may not apply - and just because the license text says something doesn't mean it holds up in court.
How do you know what context it was used in?
If it’s fair use, the license doesn’t matter.
Tons of those are (as the site admins admit) models that are themselves infringing on copyright, and thus any license based on copyright ownership is invalid.
You can't enforce a license on a 3d model you in turn stole from a game.
145GB isn’t much. It fits in RAM in some computers.
145gb of ram? Check out Mr. Moneybags over here!
Ram used to be cheap.
I'm just to ignorant to this in context of how the reality just works.
Downloading content on the web is what the web is for. Using the data for training is something lawers need to figure out.
open3dlab should spend the time and energy, as unfortunate it is, to sue them to get this resolved.
Ablog post about this is basically 0 information. The stories about soooo many bots now crawling the internet and creating a lot more traffic is going through news and hn for month.
So what? You made your content available and someone downloaded it. Why is this even notable?
Would you also say that general licensing is irrelevant for everyone?
Of course not. But there’s no indication whatsoever that any license has been violated. Downloading a file from a free access server cannot violate license terms.
Fear that something will happen is not the same thing as evidence it has happened.
> Downloading a file from a free access server cannot violate license terms.
Sure it can. If you're downloading it for commercial purposes (clearly the case) you're violating the license.
No. Copyright doesn’t work that way, no matter how much you might wish it did. And it’s a very important thing for the web that it doesn’t.
Legally speaking, it is extremely well established that downloading is not the type of copying that “copyright” concerns itself with. And the GPL and similar licenses are predicated on copyright laws.
Once you make the content available in some other way, then copyright law might have something to say.
People in tech used to make fun of “you wouldn’t download a car”. It’s sad that so many have reversed their principles the moment a convenient villain shows up.
If only you could read the article and see that the vast majority of the assets are licensed under a non-commercial clause.
I guess we'll never know until you learn to read anything other than sheet music.
Can I scrape all GPL source code from github. Then use the code commercially and then say so what, they made their source code available to download?
Right now, its legal to use this data to train a model.
Which is different than using the data 1 to 1.
I think technically such a model should abide by the licence of the inputs, hence all models would probably be GPL if the FSF had resources to fight it and the legal profession had an inkling of the processes involved.
Or maybe the FSF is just waiting for everyone using AI code to become hooked and then subpoena every Antrophic/OAI/Codex customer and force the most massive source release in history (If Adobe/MS would file lawsuits vs the Craft apps and with their resources create legal precedent it could create chaos, maybe the only part stopping them right now from filing lawsuits is them realizing it could backfire since they're heavy AI users themselves).
But as far as i know GPL does not prevent you from using it for training?
Not a lawyer, are you?
> Can I scrape all GPL source code from github. Then use the code commercially and then say so what, they made their source code available to download?
Yes, that's the whole point of the GPL. Use it however you want, but don't restrict the next person
Oh, it would be so nice to force the Great Thieves like "open"AI to release their weights on GPL license...
Did someone do that in this case? I don’t see any indication let alone evidence that happened. And I don’t think it’s likely that it will.
Let me refer you to my earlier distinction between things that have happened and things you fear.
You may remember from 2021 that Microsoft's Copilot would gladly regurgitate the GPL-licensed Quake 3 source code, without giving you any indication it got it from there or that the GPL applies.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27710287
https://x.com/mitsuhiko/status/1410886329924194309
Ok, so go yell at Microsoft about that incident instead of speculating about a different party doing a different thing.
> Some examples include models of Eve from Stellar Blade, Mei from Overwatch, and a Horse cock dildo.
I don't know what's more wrong: that a dumb model started downloading "Horse cock dildo" 3D models (to which end? to stuff that virtual 3D "horse cock dildo" in its own virtual LLM ass?) ...
Or that there exist "horse cock dildo" 3D models.
Seriously in which world are we living?
And I should be thinking about the people who designed that horse cock dildo and care about them? And those viewing those/using those? 3D printing those maybe? And I should care about the retards who can't even prevent their crawler from downloading 145 GB full of horse cock 3D dildo models and the like?
Nah. Fuck that, I care about my family and you're all on your own.
I'm not even impressed..
Who actually cares? Isn't the whole premise of the AI revolution just gorging ourselves with other people's data so we can have AGI? I was under the impression that we have accepted this sacrifice with OAI and friends leading the way.
"we" in this sentence is really a handful of encloistered silicon valley weirdos. Most people do not like it and have no real say in the matter.
Who's "we"?
People really still buy into that framing? I think it's pretty clear that it's generally just about money as it has always been.
Tech is full of rubes that eat up the lies.
Crypto, big data, AI. It's all just another middle man hoping to scrape some joy out of everyone's lives to they can put a price tag on it and sell it to rubes and the government(and rubes in the government).
If the authors of the data are paid...ok. and not just the biggest players - every single one. But they are not.
Sam, pay this guy for his shitposts please
Everyone should be hosting a poison fountain and pressing thumbs down on models when they provide really good answers.