Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel?

lock.cmpxchg8b.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 968 posts

Re: Why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel?

#321

Post by marcus_holmes »

overfeed wrote: post #298
cakealert wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This arms race will have a terminus. The bots will eventually be indistinguishable from humans. Some already are.

> The bots will eventually be indistinguishable from humans Not until they get issued government IDs they won't! Extrapolating from current trends, some form of online ID attestation (likely based on government-issued ID[1]) will become normal in the next decade, and naturally, this will be included in the anti-bot arsenal. It will be up to the site operator to trust identities signed by the Russian government. 1. De…

How does this work, though?

We can't just have "send me a picture of your ID" because that is pointlessly easy to spoof - just copy someone else's ID.

So there must be some verification that you, the person at the keyboard, is the same person as that ID identifies. The UK is rapidly finding out that that is extremely difficult to do reliably. Video doesn't really work reliably on all cases, and still images are too easily spoofed. It's not really surprising, though, because identifying humans reliably is hard even for humans.

If we do it at the network level - like assigning a government-issued network connection to a specific individual, so the system knows that any traffic from a given IP address belongs to that specific individual. There are obvious problems with this model, not least that IP addresses were never designed for this, and spoofing an IP becomes identity theft.

We also do need bot access for things, so there must be some method of granting access to bots.

I think that to make this work, we'd need to re-architect the internet from the ground up. To get there, I don't think we can start from here.

Re: Why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel?

#322

Post by seba_dos1 »

tptacek wrote: post #279
johnklos wrote: post #244

This is a usually technical crowd, so I can't help but wonder if many people genuinely don't get it, or if they are just feigning a lack of understanding to be dismissive of Anubis. Sure, the people who make the AI scraper bots are going to figure out how to actually do the work. The point is that they hadn't, and this worked for quite a while. As the botmakers circumvent, new methods of proof-of-notbot will be made…

Respectfully, I think it's you missing the point here. None of this is to say you shouldn't use Anubis, but Tavis Ormandy is offering a computer science critique of how it purports to function. You don't have to care about computer science in this instance! But you can't dismiss it because it's computer science. Consider: An adaptive password hash like bcrypt or Argon2 uses a work function to apply asymmetric costs t…

> The term of art for these systems is "content protection", which is what I think Anubis actually wants to be, but really isn't (yet?).

No, that's missing the point. Anubis is effectively a DDoS protection system, all the talking about AI bots comes from the fact that the latest wave of DDoS attacks was initiated by AI scrapers, whether intentionally or not.

If these bots would clone git repos instead of unleashing the hordes of dumbest bots on Earth pretending to be thousands and thousands of users browsing through git blame web UI, there would be no need for Anubis.

Re: Why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel?

#323

Post by st3fan »

Havoc wrote: post #240
xphos wrote: post #222

Yeah the PoW is minor for botters but annoying people. I think the only positive is if enough people see anime girls on there screens there might actually be political pressure to make laws against rampent bot crawling

> PoW is minor for botters But still enough to prevent a billion request DDoS These sites have been search engine scrapped forever. It’s not about blocking bots entirely just about this new wave of fuck you I don’t care if your host goes down quasi malicious scrappers

"But still enough to prevent a billion request DDoS" - don't you just do the PoW once to get a cookie and then you can browse freely?

Re: Why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel?

#324

Post by tern »

overfeed wrote: post #298
cakealert wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This arms race will have a terminus. The bots will eventually be indistinguishable from humans. Some already are.

> The bots will eventually be indistinguishable from humans Not until they get issued government IDs they won't! Extrapolating from current trends, some form of online ID attestation (likely based on government-issued ID[1]) will become normal in the next decade, and naturally, this will be included in the anti-bot arsenal. It will be up to the site operator to trust identities signed by the Russian government. 1. De…

Eyeball company play is to be a general identity provider, which is an obvious move for anyone who tries to fill this gap. You can already connect your passport in the World app.

https://world.org/blog/announcements/new-world-id-passport-c...

Re: Why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel?

#325

Post by cwmoore »

neumann wrote: post #285
cakealert wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This arms race will have a terminus. The bots will eventually be indistinguishable from humans. Some already are.

It will be hard to tune them to be just the right level of ignorant and slow as us though!

Soon enough there will be competing Unicode characters that can remove exclamation points.

Re: Why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel?

#327

Post by seba_dos1 »

st3fan wrote: post #323
Havoc wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> PoW is minor for botters But still enough to prevent a billion request DDoS These sites have been search engine scrapped forever. It’s not about blocking bots entirely just about this new wave of fuck you I don’t care if your host goes down quasi malicious scrappers

"But still enough to prevent a billion request DDoS" - don't you just do the PoW once to get a cookie and then you can browse freely?

Yes, but a single bot is not a concern. It's the first "D" in DDoS that makes it hard to handle

(and these bots tend to be very, very dumb - which often happens to make them more effective at DDoSing the server, as they're taking the worst and the most expensive ways to scrape content that's openly available more efficiently elsewhere)

Re: Why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel?

#328

Post by xenotux »

overfeed wrote: post #298
cakealert wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This arms race will have a terminus. The bots will eventually be indistinguishable from humans. Some already are.

> The bots will eventually be indistinguishable from humans Not until they get issued government IDs they won't! Extrapolating from current trends, some form of online ID attestation (likely based on government-issued ID[1]) will become normal in the next decade, and naturally, this will be included in the anti-bot arsenal. It will be up to the site operator to trust identities signed by the Russian government. 1. De…

Eh? With the "anonymous" models that we're pushing for right now, nothing stops you from handing over your verification token (or the control of your browser) to a robot for a fee. The token issued by the verifier just says "yep, that's an adult human", not "this is John Doe, living at 123 Main St, Somewhere, USA". If it's burned, you can get a new one.

If we move to a model where the token is permanently tied to your identity, there might be an incentive for you not to risk your token being added to a blocklist. But there's no shortage of people who need a bit of extra cash and for whom it's not a bad trade. So there will be a nearly-endless supply of "burner" tokens for use by trolls, scammers, evil crawlers, etc.

Re: Why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel?

#329

Post by Hizonner »

fengshui99 wrote: post #303
doublerabbit wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

[flagged]

I interrogated my innermost self, and it says it doesn't give a damn about those people's feels. And furthermore your little dig at the end there says that you live in a bubble full of intensely repulsive individuals.

The cutesiness is still annoying, though.

Re: Why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel?

#330

Post by throwaway1777 »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #321
overfeed wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The bots will eventually be indistinguishable from humans Not until they get issued government IDs they won't! Extrapolating from current trends, some form of online ID attestation (likely based on government-issued ID[1]) will become normal in the next decade, and naturally, this will be included in the anti-bot arsenal. It will be up to the site operator to trust identities signed by the Russian government. 1. De…

How does this work, though? We can't just have "send me a picture of your ID" because that is pointlessly easy to spoof - just copy someone else's ID. So there must be some verification that you, the person at the keyboard, is the same person as that ID identifies. The UK is rapidly finding out that that is extremely difficult to do reliably. Video doesn't really work reliably on all cases, and still images are too e…

I doesn’t require a ground up rework. The easiest idea is real people can get an official online id at some site like login.gov and website operators verify people using that api. Some countries already have this kind of thing from what I understand. The tech bros want to implement this on the blockchain but the government could also do it.
Post reply on HN