Guest Access Restricted

[Dallas]

Over the past few days I have noticed a massive amount of guests online here on Fotozones. Considering that the website is not very active anymore I can only deduce that these guests are actually bots that are crawling the website for nefarious purposes (i.e. using it to feed AI engines). 

 

I am personally against AI and the way it is being used in the creative industries, so I am taking a stand against the unfettered theft of online IP wherever I can. We have over half a million posts on FZ, much of them containing images uploaded here, as well as nearly 2 decades worth of posts about photography and related things. 

 

So, as of today I am restricting access to the content on FZ to registered users only. I will make a change to the login page explaining this policy in due course. 

[Walter Rowe]

Glad to hear this.

[Dallas]

Thanks Walter. 

 

I have hit a bit of a snag in this regard. For some reason the password reset button isn't working so if a member can't login I will have to reset their password manually. I can't get support from IPS because our support license is lapsed and I am not going to pay them $200 for the privilege of fixing their own coding mistakes. 

 

I do realise that this website is a big resource for actual photographers and it might be inconvenient to have to sign in to access it, but for now I want to keep the AI bots away. In a week or so I might re-open to guest browsing, but I expect that they will simply come back and steal everything if I do that. 

 

I have also changed the login method to use email addresses instead of passwords as that is a more secure method of logging in. 

[Dallas]

And it turns out that the reason the lost password and account creation wasn't working is because of (surprise!) Google's Invisible reCaptcha not working. Man I detest that company... 

[anabasis]

Thanks for doing this Dallas.  

 

Jeremy

[Dallas]

I did an Adobe update this afternoon and they popped up a box with a message about their AI with a link to this page. Makes for interesting reading and confirms my suspicions about what was going on with all those "guests" being online. 

 

https://www.adobe.com/ai/overview/firefly/gen-ai-commitments.html