>Thanks for the report! This was an overactive anti-abuse system. Fixed.
This is the most interesting line to me. "Anti-abuse system"? I would bet the system is far from being just a conditional on a specific filename. In other words, this supposed anti-abuse system might be far more pervasive without the user's knowledge. And perhaps even more importantly, who thought upcharging instead of blocking is the correct approach to dealing with this alleged "abuse"? Is this some anti-distillation feature they let Claude itself write looking at past distillation attempts producing similar artifacts or what?
If I had to guess, this is a continuation of Anthropic's ongoing war to make third party tool usage go through per-token billing, specifically against a tool called Hermes-agent [0]. You can easily imagine why Anthropic might want to silently re-bill a customer violating their silly ToS restrictions and how an LLM told to implement the feature might arrive at this "solution".
As the other person mentioned, they have said they are restricting third-party agent systems like OpenClaw and Hermes from using the monthly plan. But yeah, this seems like the wrong way to handle it, trying to detect those other harnesses via clues, and auto-changing billing. Instead, seems like it'd be better to allows vs block, like require some special encrypted signature system or similar that only Claude Code and their desktop app implement. Any other requests just get immediately blocked. Then there's a separate key for normal pay-by-the-token usage that is just unrestricted. Would make things waaaay clearer.
You need an account to do anything nowadays. And to have an account on more and more platforms you must verify it with your age providing your face picture and/or ID. LLMs and their consequences accelerated but did not start this trend, and it's only going to get worse. Account fatigue, what must be a real phenomenon at this point, will also incentivize Google Sign-In and worse further impacting privacy and freedom. I don't see how it can get better from here.
I don't like how the question is setup, both in wording and scenario. Saying "everyone will die unless >50% press blue" sounds more impactful. And pressing red is a free win in this scenario making it a nonchoice. Threshold not being announced or red having some condition would make it more interesting (and at the same time, boring).. unless the point of the question is not to make people discuss blue vs red, but why you should make an irrational decision.
If true, very strange change when Codex (at both 20 & 100) is a much, much better deal for a model much better at most coding tasks, with way more usage even with the /fast mode enabled. Is losing most non-enterprise customers the right move for them?
Equally, will offering a presumably unprofitably large quota of Codex tokens at $20 to retain non-enterprise customers turn out to be the right move for OpenAI?
Would not be surprised to see OpenAI follow suit.
Or perhaps OpenAI's LLMs are just so more compute efficient that they can actually offer that sustainably...
Feels to me it's a battle between who has the most compute. OpenAI does not seem to be struggling with their x2 usage on the new 100 Plan, which is very close to unlimited usage with the best performing model on the highest reasoning setting. Not mentioning the resets every 1 million customers, or the other generous usage multipliers last months. Meanwhile Anthropic seems to be desperately trying to cut down on inference with their changes to reasoning effort and more lately, so they might be focusing on what they consider to be more valuable customers for their long-term strategy. The 20 plan with Opus had gotten so bad on CC they might've just pulled the plug to stop people from complaining about usage limits. If OpenAI can burn money longer and capture the market from the bottom, I think they'd win in the long run.
> much better deal for a model much better at most coding tasks
The first assertion is also subject to change (and likely, if this works for A\). The second assertion is very much subjective. I haven't found that to be the case, but everyones needs, use cases, and workflows are different, so glad that it's working that way for you.
That's exactly what I fear- that Mythos/Glasswing has made anthropic confident that they can survive by only serving that type of customer. Would be sad to see.
Some projects or tasks might become impossible to do any debugging or work on in the future, because every bug is potentially exploitable with security implications or can be twisted into something against guidelines. And they're so popular, and any bugs in them so sought for, there's a massive negative signal associated with them. LLM cannot truly infer intent from the user, an innocent request is indistinguishable from a carefully crafted scenario from bad actors, so I would never trust anyone claiming those ambiguities can be solved in their product.
If some LLMs become too strict, they'll simply be impossible to reliably use, and hopefully fail along with their providers. Claude (only reasoning models, after 4) has repeatedly refused to perform translations for text that was not lyrics (poems), it's very stupid.
Cantor Fitzgerald, run by (Commerce Secretary, Epstein neighbor, and island visitor) Lutnick's sons. It should be noted Lutnick himself was a big proponent of tariffs to replace "some" income taxes -- just not your own.
>Public reporting indicates that Cantor has offered companies the opportunity to trade their legal claim to a future tariff refund in exchange for twenty to thirty percent of the duties the company paid.
I've had good success doing something similar. Recording requests into an .har file using the web UI and providing it for analysis was a good starting point for me, orders of magnitude faster than it would be without an assistant.
Seems obvious at this point there needs to be EU-level regulations against individual countries, such as Spain and Italy, implementing these absurd restrictions. It would at least make lobbying from those sports companies more difficult. These same companies have been pushing for banning VPNs -- consumer VPNs -- as they easily circumvent half the internet going dark because of some dumb sports event, and they're going to be targeted next when everyone's using them. It doesn't help "piracy" always ends up being an excellent excuse to undermine everyone's privacy.
In theory, we should already be protected against this via the various "Net neutrality" directives, but as the US currently is showing us, laws and regulations are only worth as much as you're willing to enforce them ultimately. But things like these are supposed to be worth at least something:
> Regulation 2015/2120 also states that access providers “shall treat all traffic equally, when providing internet access services, without discrimination, restriction or interference, and irrespective of the sender and receiver, the content accessed or distributed, the applications or services used or provided, or the terminal equipment used,” although they are permitted to apply “reasonable traffic management measures.” In any case, those measures must be “transparent, non-discriminatory and proportionate, and shall not be based on commercial considerations but on objectively different technical quality of service requirements of specific categories of traffic” (Article 3.3) - https://www.cuatrecasas.com/en/global/intellectual-property/...
Remains to be seen if something/someone will put a stop to La Liga's shenanigans, judges have seem unwilling so far, and not a big enough problem for the average person to really care about it (yet?).
There's a "European Declaration on Digital Rights and Principles", signed by the member states, and I believe the right to access internet freely, without companies being permitted to mandate entire IP addresses blocks being forbidden from routing and within 30 minutes from the request surely would fit within that one, or others, in some way or another. No company should hold that power and it's a serious precedent others states in the union would want to leverage for their own reasons too. Reading this recent TorrentFreak article, the regulations should probably align with the following thinktank's analysis, at the very least:
>The report makes 12 formal recommendations. The most significant is that IP-based blocking should be avoided altogether, due to its inherent tendency to block large numbers of legitimate service sites. DNS-level or URL-level blocking should be used instead.
if it interferes with my ability to sell products and services in spain because my website gets blocked as a side-effect, then yes, the EU should care.
for example geo-blocking within the EU is also illegal. if you offer a service or product in any EU country, then anyone in the EU must be allowed to buy it.
among other things this also means that if there is any country in the EU where these sports broadcasts are accessible legally, then spain would not be allowed to block them either.
> if it interferes with my ability to sell products and services in spain because my website gets blocked as a side-effect, then yes, the EU should care.
As long as you’re not disadvantaged compared to a Spanish seller of goods or services or Spain’s law is specifically violating an EU one, I don’t think so.
> for example geo-blocking within the EU is also illegal. if you offer a service or product in any EU country, then anyone in the EU must be allowed to buy it.
Definitely not. You’re not automatically obliged to sell to other EU countries just because you’re selling in one. There are some categories where you have to, but that explicitly excludes video streaming.
There is another regulation for subscribers temporarily traveling to a different EU country not losing access to a service they subscribed to in their home country, but that’s also something else.
so even if not a reality in all sectors, removing geoblocking is in the interest of the EU.
going back to the original question:
Why should other EU members care what websites Spain allows their citizens to access? Does the "EU" even have authority for such a thing?
they do care, and they should, and yes, they have the authority.
personally, when i read the report, seeing how young people are more interested in viewing content from other countries, what first came to my mind is the increased integration of EU countries and cultures that comes from that. that's the why.
> As long as you’re not disadvantaged compared to a Spanish seller of goods or services or Spain’s law is specifically violating an EU one, I don’t think so.
Aren't you being disadvantaged though? A customer in Spain can buy from an EU internet retailer (let's say ~10% of those retailers are in Spain using the population ratio of Spain to the EU), or from a brick and mortar retailer in their location 100% of which are in Spain.
They're blocking the thing where ~90% of the retailers are outside of Spain but not the thing where all of them are in Spain, is that not a disadvantage?
Surely EU members should care if Spain blocks the access to government services offered by EU members. In Finland various government services (like Police's website) do use Cloudflare.
And Spain is not blocking access to Spain's citizens, it's blocking access people in Spain. These could be citizens of other EU members who need to access their government's website for reason or another (e.g. renewing passport) while they visit Spain or reside in Spain.
The question is about the authority to pass laws that only some countries need to obey. To my knowledge, the EU does not have the authority to do that.
The EU doesn't work like that. It's a union of sovereign states, not a central government.
Banning the member states from legislating something would require changes to the Treaties of the European Union. And that in turn would require unanimous consent from the member states.
The EU could legislate the matter on its own, which would override national laws. But it's not in the habit of doing narrow single-purpose laws, because that's not in the culture of the people who run the union. Instead, there would probably be a comprehensive law on internet blocking and censorship, which would be a very bad idea.
The way this works best is that you have a federal system that sets out what the member states can't do (e.g. block internet, censor speech, ex post facto laws, trade barriers) and then the central government exists only to enforce those constraints on the member states, who choose whether and how to do any of the things they are allowed to do.
Ask Hungarians at any point of the last 16 years. The problem is that 30% vote in a conman. 29% of people try to prevent that. Then 100% of people suffer for years.
It happened in Poland and in Hungary.
And even if that scenario doesn't play out exactly like that it always works this way to some degree.
People need enlightened remote central power to protect them from local petty tyrants.
It's the same thing as HOAs. If there aren't enough laws (with enforcement) in place, people tend to be exploited by "voluntarily" chosen local tyrants. At the level of home owners associacion, or at the level of national government.
Sort of, but not really. It's more that people get complacent/ignorant when it comes to matters of power (they shy away), so by choosing to let go (a selfish endeavor) - a power vacuum is created, which others seize the opportunity for their own interest. In other words, democracy is not self-sustaining, it requires constant participation by everyone in order to sustain. As soon as people opt out, you have a minority determining things for everyone, and so you're no longer truly a democracy.
> Seems obvious at this point there needs to be EU-level regulations against individual countries, such as Spain and Italy, implementing these absurd restrictions.
I don't think there is EU-level "regulation" in this specific thing. However there is something somewhat better: European Convention on Human Rights. It's just that challenging these kind of bans via that route is very slow (similar how slow it is to challenge the laws which go against the Constitution in the US via Supreme Court).
Yeah, if this is stopped, it'll be because of the European Charter of Fundamental Rights or the ECHR.
The Charter and the European Court of Justice is why we don't have blanket data retention in the EU but it took twelve years to strike down the Data Retention Directive (though it was killed off much faster in some national courts).
This. The chat control 2.0 law includes blocking orders. And Ursula von der Leyen tried to introduce internet censorship when she was still in German politics.
Tried? She already did EU-wide with the RT ban. Doesn't matter what your opinion on russian state media is, the censorship regime is now in place and it's easy to expand. (Not to mention the EU describes itself as democratic yet has the need to censor)
You’re forgetting the EU is composed of people elected and appointed by member countries. If you don’t like certain policies - contact your MEPs and express your views. Also go vote during your next election. It’s called a democracy for a reason.
You don't have "your MEP" in most EU countries. They don't care about you because their loyalty is to the party, not the voter. They need to be with good standing with the party to even get on the list.
There are so many indirections in that "democracy" that it's no longer a democracy at all. You don't get to vote on issues, you don't get to vote on people (they are just a proxy for a party). You just get to vote on 2-3 reasonable parties (if even that). There is nothing you can do in that system about a specific issue.
That's oversimplification. EU is composed of people vetted by lobbyist/old money groups, elected and approved by member countries. Their primary allegiance is not to the voter.
I would say the root problem is not someone seeking to prevent piracy but rather the fact that so many services are clustered behind the same proxy / CDN service (e.g. Cloudflare).
That in my view is what needs to be regulated and Cloudflare designated as a “gatekeeper” with all the responsibilities to go with that.
La Liga would never be able to secure blanket bans if people and services were more decentralised
I disagree, I think the bigger issue is blanket banning IPs because they can't decrypt the traffic.
This is the kind of manufacturing consent that would make some people be in favor of the government MITMing crypto so that they can verify that I'm not doing something naughty.
Both are problems. In Spain we have laws that are supposed to give us reasonable access to internet websites, and no one should be able to block large swaths of the internet in order to block access to few websites, supposedly at least. Clearly this been compromised, and the judges themselves seems to go against the law, but I'm hopeful it'd be restored one day.
> La Liga would never be able to secure blanket bans if people and services were more decentralised
They technically haven't either. According to "ban-supporters", La Liga first reached out to Cloudflare asking them to shut down the pirate stream websites using Cloudflare. After Cloudflare rejected that, La Liga went to judges that approved forcing ISPs to ban specific IPs (related to the services) which happened to be Cloudflare IPs that other services uses too.
End result is the same, it fucking sucks sometimes when shit unexplicitly breaks before you remember there is a football game, but at least I think that's a bit more accurate to what's practically happening :)
Google Photos does the same thing, aggressively prompting the user endlessly until they give in. A solution to that is disabling the malicious application and installing Google's Gallery app instead, that possesses no ransomware capability from what I've last heard of it. Make no mistake: Google and Microsoft know very well this behaviour will lead to people subscribing to services they have, for the most part, no use for. It is therefore explicitly by design, deceiving tech-illiterate people threatening to delete files they never meant to upload.
You can log out from Google Photos on Android and it will stop prompting you (tap the icon upper right).
This is useful if you wish to maintain access to the editing tools (Google Gallery and most third party galleries I've tried lack simple things like adding text on a photo, and they often can't edit videos at all).
If you don't care about those tools then disabling Google Photos is indeed the best!
my wife had here google account storage full because photos does auto backup and even after i deleted the photos from google photos. Auto backup kicked in and re-added them.
Also, there is no good way to download all photos and videos for backup. they have to be manually selected. the ui is super frustating. and since the storage is shared with email, emails are blocked due to this
