21–30 of 125 posts
Why not make this contribute to something greater, like scientific grid computing, or a charitable bitcoin donation? Instead we're just burning a few watts to slow down crawlers.
I don't mind captchas to protect forms and such, but given that so many sites want captchas solved for the first GET request, I really wonder how much more CO2 this is going to produce. And when I see "invisible mode", I'd really like to ask the authors if they think their work is a net-positive for the world.
I agree I hate the CF captcha popups, but I think this is a result of AI scraping. GET requests can be expensive on dynamic sites with infinite paths — like a git host.
I like this. Allows for reasonable bots like IA without the mindless wasteful AI scrappers.
Why not make this contribute to something greater, like scientific grid computing, or a charitable bitcoin donation? Instead we're just burning a few watts to slow down crawlers.
What does proof-of-work mean here and what makes it easy for humans and hard for bots?
Think of crawlers: a crawler typically makes hundreds or thousands of requests per second. The owners of the crawler then sell this data for X$, or gain X$ profit. Proof of work adds a very small cost to each individual request, increasing the cost of crawling to a number higher than X. Because actual humans make very few requests, we don’t notice the increase in cost.
This captcha still lets all traffic through. Except now you waste the battery of honest users.
Even HN proponents of the idea don't use it on their own sites.
What does proof-of-work mean here and what makes it easy for humans and hard for bots?
It's equally easy for both. But people using broswers only do it a few times, while bots need to do it many times. A second for a human every X pages is not much, but it's a death-knell for the general practice of bots (and they can't store the cookies because you can rate-limit them that way). Imagine scrapping thousands of page, but with a X>1 second wait for each. There wouldn't be a need to use such solution if c…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Think of crawlers: a crawler typically makes hundreds or thousands of requests per second. The owners of the crawler then sell this data for X$, or gain X$ profit. Proof of work adds a very small cost to each individual request, increasing the cost of crawling to a number higher than X. Because actual humans make very few requests, we don’t notice the increase in cost.
When you use a captcha, you presumably want to defeat someone curling your CreatePost endpoint, not just make it more annoying to do it at only botnet scale. This captcha still lets all traffic through. Except now you waste the battery of honest users. Even HN proponents of the idea don't use it on their own sites.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's equally easy for both. But people using broswers only do it a few times, while bots need to do it many times. A second for a human every X pages is not much, but it's a death-knell for the general practice of bots (and they can't store the cookies because you can rate-limit them that way). Imagine scrapping thousands of page, but with a X>1 second wait for each. There wouldn't be a need to use such solution if c…
So is the solution to stymying bots to just add a page load delay of a second or two? Enough that people won't care, but it doesn't scale for bots?