Hacker News: Jskewel

New comment by Jskewel in "How Europe is killing makers and micro-entrepreneurs"

Jskewel — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 14:12:54 +0000

PPWR is an EU catastrophe.

Firstly for the reasons outlined in the article: it essentially makes being a micro/small business in the EU impossible, if your market is other EU countries.

Secondly because it validates insidious populist views that the EU institution is useless and incompetent at a fundamental level.

The legislation is so ABSURDIST that the EU have actually asked companies to ignore the law that they just implemented. I can assure you it is difficult to ignore a law that comes with a €200000 fine for non-compliance.

New comment by Jskewel in "Aaron Swartz was prosecuted for scraping, while Meta does it without consequence"

Jskewel — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 22:17:54 +0000

"there is a very good chance this civilization will probably come to an end"

OK doomer

New comment by Jskewel in "Casio F-B100W-1A"

Jskewel — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 23:37:24 +0000

It's almost unbelievable that a step-tracker can have 2 years battery.

Is msnbot being used to train AI models?

Jskewel — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 14:54:53 +0000

(Summary: msnbot seems to be downloading my website for training an AI model)

The msnbot was retired a decade ago for indexing the web, replaced by bingbot. You can tell bingbot not to train AI models by setting a meta tag eg .

A month ago I started using this tag for bingbot. After this the defunct msnbot starting hitting my website HARD. I've verified the source IP addresses, and they are genuine.

The pattern of pages being indexed is clearly for AI. Search engines and AI indexers slurp my content in different ways. msnbot appears to be taking the data in a way that AI indexers do.

I can't find any information about this, or any reason why msnbot has been reactivated in 2026.

I'm hoping some people can help!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49320686

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by Jskewel in "Someone is running mass vulnerability scans, spoofing AI bots like ClaudeBot"

Jskewel — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 11:14:41 +0000

With Cloudflare you can set a rule to block traffic that identifies as Googlebot but is not a "verified bot", ie is not from the proper IP range.

New comment by Jskewel in "Someone is running mass vulnerability scans, spoofing AI bots like ClaudeBot"

Jskewel — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 11:06:08 +0000

I'm happy to unblock China from accessing my website, once China does something about the millions of daily hack attempts originating from that country.

New comment by Jskewel in "Someone is running mass vulnerability scans, spoofing AI bots like ClaudeBot"

Jskewel — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 10:59:30 +0000

For those suggesting fail2ban as a solution, that's dinosaur software from the palaeolithic. If you have a website of any size then the number of bots will overwhelm the block list in days with their millions of unique IPs.

New comment by Jskewel in "Someone is running mass vulnerability scans, spoofing AI bots like ClaudeBot"

Jskewel — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 10:46:37 +0000

Cloudflare analytics is great, but you need to filter by edge status code 200 to see the actual real traffic that was allowed through their firewall.