tallytarik

It feels worse because its written output is fucking insane, and has progressively been getting worse to this point.

This article is somewhat misleading.

The court only ruled that "OpenAI" is descriptive. It did not rule that it can never be registered.

A descriptive trademark can still be registered with evidence that the mark has become distinctive through use -- that is, that "OpenAI" is known to the general public to refer to their company, rather than simply describing a type of AI.

It appears OpenAI have already made that submission separately:

> The Board of Appeal also stated that, once the contested decision has become final, the proceedings will resume for the purposes of examining the applicant’s alternative claim based on Article 7(3) of Regulation 2017/1001, relating to distinctive character acquired through use.

This sort of rejection is quite common. You can overcome the objection by submitting evidence that your mark has acquired distinctiveness through use. So there will be plenty of trademarks that seem generic/descriptive that have gone through that process.

edit: I originally thought that’s what was being rejected here. It’s not. The court only ruled that “OpenAI” is descriptive. Separately, OpenAI have also submitted evidence of acquired distinctiveness, which will be decided in due course by the trademark office.

Phrasing like “Honestly?” and “It’s not just [x], it’s [y]” multiple times

Every list is a set of 3, and most lists have a bolded intro phrase, one even has the famous slopperific emojis

Yes this is clearly verbatim output from an LLM.

But it's perfect HN bait, really. The title is spicy enough that folks will comment without reading the article (more so than usual), and so it survives a bit longer before being flagged as slop.

It’s entirely written by an LLM.

Much of the internet still does not support IPv6, so most providers will give you an IPv4 address. In fact only a few providers even support IPv6 at all.

Even with IPv6 it's not a huge problem. With a few samples we can know that a provider is operating in a given /64 or /48 or even /32 space, and can assign a confidence level that the range is used for VPNs.

There are plenty of VPN and proxy detection services, either as a service (API) or downloadable database, which are surprisingly comprehensive. Disclaimer: I’ve run one since 2017. Years on, our primary data source is literally holding dozens of subscriptions to every commercial provider we can find, and enumerating the exit node IP addresses they use.

There are also other methods, like using zmap/zgrab to probe for servers that respond to VPN software handshakes, which can in theory be run against the entire IP space. (this also highlights non-commercial VPNs which are not generally the target of our detection, so we use this sparingly)

It will never cover every VPN or proxy in existence, but it gets pretty close.

Most of these providers are in fact open about the fact that these locations are “virtual”, so it’s misleading to say they don’t match where they claim to be.

There is however an interesting question about how VPNs should be considered from a geolocation perspective.

Should they record where the exit server is located, or the country claimed by the VPN (even if this is a “virtual” location)? In my view there is useful information in where the user wanted to be located in the latter case, which you lose if you only ever report the location of servers.

(disclaimer: I run a competing service. we currently provide the VPN reported locations because the majority of our customers expect it to work that way, as well as clearly flagging them as VPNs)