Various and Sundry, 6/5/26

What interesting tidbits of thought do I have for you today? Let’s find out together! Bots now make up more than half of Internet traffic: Internet provider Cloudflare says more than 57% of the traffic to the sites it hosts are bots (i.e., automated computer requests) rather than actual humans, who make up the other 43%. My feeling about this is less surprise than wonder that it’s taken this long; bot traffic was already a scourge more than a decade ago. That percentage is unlikely to go down, ever, as “agentic AI” is being pushed by tech companies, so a bot can go out onto the Internet and find information and bring it back so that you don’t ever have to leave the cozy bosom, of, say, Google. How will this sort of thing work about for people who actually have sites (waves) when the vast majority of traffic is comprised of bots, who don’t read ads and don’t want things? The article rather optimistically suggests that a change might happen where bots are charged for access to web sites…