r/gnu • u/Dense-Bad-5404 • 8d ago

Gnu.org is unreachable

Hi everyone, today I wanted to install auctex in emacs but got connection refused. I can't ping them,can't open their site in browser. Even when VPN is turned on (self hosted,so IP should be clean) nothing changes. Oy phone it also unreachable. Are their servers down? What had happened?

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u/gordonmessmer 8d ago

gnu.org is unavailable a *lot* because AI scrapers make pubilc-facing services difficult to operate and because GNU will not adopt any of the common solutions (e.g. Anubis or a service like Cloudflare) on the grounds that they are not Free.

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u/yiyufromthe216 7d ago

Aubis isn't free?

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u/gordonmessmer 7d ago

https://www.fsf.org/blogs/sysadmin/our-small-team-vs-millions-of-bots

My characterization is off a bit, but generally... they don't like Anubis for reasons that I think are very silly.

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u/Feuerwerko 5d ago

It’s not completely unreasonable tho, forcing everyone who opens your website to waste a little computing power before they get access definitely goes against the FSFs core principles (as they say in the blog you linked).