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Comment by grey-area

7 hours ago

Perfect for spammers, scammers and domain squatters, who can now automate their activities even more.

Can’t think of any other uses for this given the current state of LLM ‘agents’, though I can’t wait for the next report of something like ‘openclaw registered 1000 domains for me without asking and now cloudflare won’t refund me’.

LLM generation in general provides the most use to scammers and the like. Generate emails which people won't read, generate articles which are just honeypots or rip-offs, generate images to said articles, generate more and more spam.

Every legit use case for LLM practically requires that human would verify the result manually, at least briefly. But spammers can enjoy skipping that step, since content was never a main priority in the first place.

I have a hobby or we could even say an addiction of having lota of ideas for various kinds of things. Part of the fun is inventing a name, visual identity, logo etc. and donain nane is part of it. Maybe they never reach production but many have. I have tools to automate boring parts like any developer would — and I could essily use something like this.

I'm convinced that one of the top use cases for OpenClaw is orchestrating cold outreach email campaigns, as if there's nothing wrong with using AI to spam people to death. Platforms that enable sending cold emails are taking a sizeable risk that the low engagement of such emails stimulates some worsening inbox deliverability for the rest of their traffic (see [1] - you can't hide just by sending through big tenanted platforms like Amazon).

[1] Every message sent from Amazon SES carries a "Feedback-Id" header that allows Google (and anyone else) to track the Amazon account responsible for the message. The fourth field is an opaque but stable identifier associated with your Amazon account; receivers can and do use this for rate limiting: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/messaging-and-targeting/underst...

And cloudflare can actually sell them priority access to pass their bot protection or introduce micropaiments for agents access content. I feel cloudflare is getting a bit scary tbh. It is like your friendly bot net.

  • This made me realise they’re doing the same thing the AI labs are doing: selling both the problem and the solution.

    They are arming spammers and scammers with these tools so you need their product to protect yourself from them

  • It's the western great fire wall, good thing the things within the fire wall is huge and encapsulate still most of the world.

  • I mean, Cloudflare was always kind of scary. They filter the world wide web, literally.

    • Yea, I appreciate them protecting it from DDOS. I always viewed them as a responsible company.

      To me this feels irresponsible and like it's main goal is to forward autonomous cyber attacks. Which is antithetical to what they do? Maybe I am missing the legitimate use case here, but I can only see this being used for removing responsibility from crime or espionage?

      Does anyone know offhand if cloudflare is a department of war contractor? I never looked into it. But this smells funny to me

      Somehow the Internet needs biometrics and age verification everywhere but also chat bots can buy property there without too much thought.

The DNS provider I recently switched to surprised me with a policy:

To create records for more than one domain, you need to write a personal support email.

They say it's to raise DNSSEC awareness, but I think it's also a robot captcha.

  • Are you perchance talking about deSEC? I've also switched to them, and thought that it was too much work to send an email and wait for replies, so I ended up using dummy inboxes for my other, lesser important domains.

    Though I guess it's still a good thing they do this? At the time I remember being mildly inconvenienced, but not enough to actually care. I just remember thinking, "How is this nonprofit going to handle all that support volume?".

    • Yes, deSEC.

      They replied somewhat quickly (for humans).

      I had accumulated enough hope for them to wait the 25 hours it took them.

      And yes, I wouldn't go this way either.

  • That kind of captcha has a very short half life. Software ate the world now AI is eating software

  • > To create records for more than one domain, you need to write a personal support email.

    I'm not all familiar with this so I don't understand why it's not a ticket or any other non-automated action even for a single domain ?

    I mean what is "the standard" that would actually allow a robot to register a domain to a DNS registry ?

The new goal is to flood the Internet with so much junk that human-created content can be sold back to us in a walled garden.