291–300 of 442 posts
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But then a bot need only copy a human's mouse movements and disable cookies and we're back to the status quo.
i'm sure no one at google thought about that
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But then a bot need only copy a human's mouse movements and disable cookies and we're back to the status quo.
Sure, for the bot. Captchas are pretty effective against bots, what's wrong with presenting the status quo to a bot? This is meant to improve things for the real people. I will appreciate not having to decipher some strange text.
Why would you care whether a user is a robot? Surely whether the actions of that user are desirable or not is determined solely by those actions and not whether the thing performing the actions is a human or a robot. It seems like a better idea to disallow bad actions than to disallow robots. There are also people farms who solve captchas (e.g. via porn sites who ask you to solve a captcha which they then input to an…
Why would you care whether a user is a robot? Surely whether the actions of that user are desirable or not is determined solely by those actions and not whether the thing performing the actions is a human or a robot. It seems like a better idea to disallow bad actions than to disallow robots. There are also people farms who solve captchas (e.g. via porn sites who ask you to solve a captcha which they then input to an…
Robots don't buy stuff. Their actions by definition are undesirable from the service provider's standpoint.
It seems plausible that as more sites adopt this kind of technology, automated web access (e.g. scraping) the web will become harder -- for whatever purpose, good or ill. This has long been an "arms race" between hiding and detection. I can hope that reasonable uses of automation still remain feasible.
You're welcome as long as you're respectful. Just use a bot with a clear User Agent, not "Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; CPU OS 7_1_2 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/537.51.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) CriOS/36.0.1985.57 Mobile/11D257 Safari/9537.53". And, don't forget to start by reading my /robots.txt. If you behave yourself and abide by the rules, why should I ban your bot? If for whatever reason I don't want to allow your bot in, you mi…
There is also the argument that when you make something available on the web you make it available to everybody.
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You are entitled. Has calling someone entitled ever been useful? For the last few years it's felt like nothing more than a petty "you're wrong" remark with bonus condensation built right in.
>Has calling someone entitled ever been useful? Not useful, and more over, it's ad hominem.
Claim: Turing was wrong about the Church-Turing Thesis because he was a homosexual -> ad hominem
Claim: Turing was immoral because he was a homosexual -> not ad hominem (although still not a good argument)
"If we can collect behavioural data from you, and it matches closely the behaviour of other humans, you are a human. Otherwise you're not a human." Does anyone else get that feeling from the description of what Google is doing? I've tripped their "we think you are a bot" detection filter and been presented with a captcha countless times while using complex search queries and searching for relatively obscure things, a…
"I have JS and cookies disabled" So imagine what bots often don't have. Adding JS interaction and cookies takes more effort on the part of the programmer writing a bot. So yeah, you'd look a lot more like a robot. How else would you quickly differentiate between human vs non-human based on a single request, or even a collection of requests over time? It's a game of stats at scale.
from splinter import Browser b = Browser() b.visit('http://google.com') b.fill('q', 'browser automation') btn = b.find_by_name('btnG') btn.click()
Not exactly 'more effort'...
"If we can collect behavioural data from you, and it matches closely the behaviour of other humans, you are a human. Otherwise you're not a human." Does anyone else get that feeling from the description of what Google is doing? I've tripped their "we think you are a bot" detection filter and been presented with a captcha countless times while using complex search queries and searching for relatively obscure things, a…
You sound like a robot.
Why would you care whether a user is a robot? Surely whether the actions of that user are desirable or not is determined solely by those actions and not whether the thing performing the actions is a human or a robot. It seems like a better idea to disallow bad actions than to disallow robots. There are also people farms who solve captchas (e.g. via porn sites who ask you to solve a captcha which they then input to an…
Robots don't buy stuff. Their actions by definition are undesirable from the service provider's standpoint.
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Yeah, good luck with that.
http://phantomjs.org/ makes this easy enough to do.