Yes, we know, its purpose is to guide the bots, not forcibly block them.
That said, one of the biggest websites in the world not respecting it is definitely a noteworthy story. Hopefully another one of the biggest websites in the world (formerly known as Twitter) eventually respects it as well instead of not even disclosing itself via a user agent and pretending to be Safari running on iOS.
> Amazonbot is used to improve our products and services. This helps us provide more accurate information to customers and may be used to train Amazon AI models.
Even in the past there has been a bunch of nonsense "rules" that made other countries choose between trading with Cuba or the US, but not both.
To name one, if a ship docks into Cuba without filing paperwork requesting to do so from the US, it cannot dock into any of the US ports within 180 days of leaving the Cuban territory.
To name another one, if some product is made somewhere else, but contains >10% of US-made parts or materials somewhere in its supply chain, then as far as the US government is concerned it might as well have been 100% made in the US and therefore cannot be exported to Cuba. Otherwise, the company that sold it to Cuba risks being banned from operating in the US.
So the US is and has been pretty much tilting the scale against any other country in the world trading with Cuba, using its own purchasing power as a bargaining chip.
As for solar panels, they do not solve your inability to move cars around. They do reduce your need for fuel, but when you're 100% out of fuel, no car can move around and no amount of solar panels is ever going to fix that.
This is like asking people to rate this plate of bugs while serving them chicken. Even if tastes great, of course some people who will have a visceral reaction against it.
The US is undermining its own (and everyone else's) economy just fine, no imaginary assistance from China necessary.
The role of the US was always to purchase cheap Chinese hardware, slap some modestly better software on top of it and the rest of the world happily would pay for that as a whole package. But with the US increasingly becoming isolationist, the rest of the world is starting to wonder why do we need the US as a middleman at all, so the US had to invent a whole new reason for the rest of the world to rely on it: AI.
Of course, the problem with this idea is that while everyone was perfectly happy with the previous arrangement, nobody else in the world gives a shit about AI. It's scary, it takes the coolest things we used to enjoy doing and turns into mush, it destroys our local culture by making us all rely on English, everything bad (like layoffs) gets blamed on AI and so on and so on. And when you combine that with the rest of the stupid foreign policy decisions, many would find joy in witnessing the US economy crumble to the ground. Pointing the blame to China instead of to your own reflection in the mirror is just an easier pill to swallow.
This is spot on. The US under MAGA are actively dismantling their once leading position in IT as well as defence. I guess it is hard to see as a US citizen but from outside this is clear as glass.
Trivialise it all you want, but the world is vastly different from what it was at the beginning of 2025 and I don't think you or anyone else can deny that in any way.
What happens next remains to be written, but so far this new order seems to be leaning heavily towards China and to a lesser extent the EU. Not because of anything those two have or have not done, but because of what has up-until-that-point been widely considered to be world's number one superpower losing its damn mind. I don't even have to come up with a list of examples to prove my point, we both have pretty much the same list in our minds already.
Instead, I'll just quote the President of the United States from a little over 24h ago:
> I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody.
AI is just another in a series of slaps to everyone's faces by the US. If it has some legitimate long-term use (which according to me is still an open question, although to many others it is not), thank god the US does not have as significant of a moat as necessary to fully control it, as the crux of it is easily replicable (albeit expensive).
USA is not becoming isolationist. Venezuela, Cuba, Iran, threats to Greenland and Canada are not isolationists. They are the opposite of it - interventionist to the max.
> The role of the US was always to purchase cheap Chinese hardware, slap some modestly better software on top of it and the rest of the world happily would pay for that as a whole package
Curious where Intel, AMD, Nvidia, etc are in your "cheap Chinese hardware"?
And by "role", do you mean doing the majority of the R&D behind the modern hardware we all use?
That's just Chinese hardware with extra steps. If you don't believe me, feel free to look up the list of CEOs that are in China right now as a part of the US delegation.
As for the R&D part, Huawei is still pretty much indistinguishable from any other phone. I could buy one right now if I wanted to. It has shittier software though.
Aren't you choosing to ignore something very specific specified in that article? Why do you make it seem that article implies it's their overall policy?
> A few months ago we stopped referring to robots.txt files on U.S. government and military web sites for both crawling and displaying web pages (though we respond to removal requests sent to info@archive.org).
> Aren't you choosing to ignore something very specific specified in that article?
Of course not, did you ignore the lines right after? “As we have moved towards broader access it has not caused problems, which we take as a good sign. We are now looking to do this more broadly.”
The announcement is from 9 years ago. I already mentioned they ignored the robots.txt for my own blog.
> Internet Archive Switzerland joins a growing group of mission-aligned organizations, alongside Internet Archive, Internet Archive Canada, and Internet Archive Europe. Together, these independent libraries strengthen a shared vision: building a distributed, resilient digital library for the world.
I was interested in the others, but https://www.internetarchive.eu is a horrible corporate-looking site with a hero image, a boast about AI, a carousel of news that won't scroll with doing its slow scroll animation, a huge "meet the team" section with mugshots and boring profiles, social media links, a newsletter signup form, and nothing to say where the actual archive is.
Reading what little information they have there, they aren't a public facing or public serving organization. They seem to provide their services to institutions only:
"working with dozens of European libraries and government agencies to build web collections, Internet Archive Europe prioritized collaboration with cultural heritage organizations to safeguard our collective history."
They do exist and involved in archiving. Someone reached out to our amateur radio club and offered to archive any documents we might have. They even asked to archive the video recording of one of our monthly meetings.
20/50 states don't allow mobile gambling, so Texas is only one of those 40%. Some of those 20 states (9 to be exact) do allow sports betting, but only physically, not online.
That said, this means very little when a different type of gambling ("prediction markets") is somehow allowed everywhere because of the corruption of the current administration, with the son of the president being a "senior advisor" to both Kalshi and Polymarket, completely circumventing state-wide bans.
That said, one of the biggest websites in the world not respecting it is definitely a noteworthy story. Hopefully another one of the biggest websites in the world (formerly known as Twitter) eventually respects it as well instead of not even disclosing itself via a user agent and pretending to be Safari running on iOS.
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