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The bot situation on the internet is worse than you could imagine

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Re: The bot situation on the internet is worse than you could imagine

#91

Post by lifeisstillgood »

rekabis wrote: post #32
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #11

This is why I see (well managed) government digital IDs as sensible moves. Apart from DDOS attacks, if bots have to “prove” who they are on each request it seems like a win-win. I may be missing something of course

If you want “papers, please” every time you back out of your driveway or go beyond your government-assigned oblast, then your suggestion is the digital version of the physical authoritarian nightmare that was imposed by totalitarianist regimes throughout history. People have a right to complete anonymity, and should be able to go across the majority of the Internet just as they can go across most of the country. That…

>>> People have a right to complete anonymity

Why? (Am not trolling. Genuinely interested)

I walk out my front door in the UK and I am not anonymous. Every transaction I make either identifies me through bank, railway or other id, or quite simply by my face standing in front of the coffee seller. My walk down the road is observed by neighbours and postmen.

Should my government arrest me without cause or trample on my free speech rights, I get that’s a problem but I am not sure why being anonymous helps. Having rights upheld by the courts helps, well trained police who respect the law helps.

I am honestly open to debate on this but I do find the “what if Hitler took over government where would we be” to be a problematic argument not a final answer.

Re: The bot situation on the internet is worse than you could imagine

#92

Post by lizknope »

> The IPs of these bots here actually do not come from datacenters or VPNs most of the time; the overwhelming majority come from residential and mobile networks.

So I started searching for what these residential proxy networks actually are.

https://datadome.co/bot-management-protection/how-proxy-prov...

Re: The bot situation on the internet is worse than you could imagine

#94

Post by uberman »

siva7 wrote: post #57

So the elephant in the room: How much of HN is bot generated? Those who know have every incentive not to share and those who don't have no way to figure it out. At this point i have to assume that every new account is a bot

I've thought about this a bit and I can't really see why someone would want to write AI content here other than to spam ads but they are handled quickly. Does anyone see AI content with a clear motivation or agenda here? There are very few rep based privileges right so that seems like an unlikely motivation as well.

Re: The bot situation on the internet is worse than you could imagine

#95

Post by prewett »

pinkmuffinere wrote: post #23

I’ve been sitting on this page for two minutes and it’s still not sure whether I’m a bot lol. What did I do in a past life to deserve this :(

The cynic in me thinks that they’re mining bitcoin on our phones… And after completing, it claimed the page was misconfigured.

Re: The bot situation on the internet is worse than you could imagine

#96

Post by Rasbora »

VladVladikoff wrote: post #41

>How can you protect your sites from these bots? JA4 fingerprinting works decently for the residential proxies.

TLS fingerprinting is not sufficient to stop residential proxies, the proxy acts as a transparent pass-through at the TLS layer making it trivial to use something like curl_cffi to mimic a real browser TLS fingerprint.

However residential proxies do have a weakness, since they need to maintain 2 separate TCP conenctions you can exploit RTT differences between layers 3 and 7 to detect if the connection to your server is being terminated somewhere along the path. Solutions exist that can reliably detect and block residential proxies, for example: https://layer3intel.com/tripwire

Re: The bot situation on the internet is worse than you could imagine

#97

Post by siva7 »

uberman wrote: post #94
siva7 wrote: post #57

So the elephant in the room: How much of HN is bot generated? Those who know have every incentive not to share and those who don't have no way to figure it out. At this point i have to assume that every new account is a bot

I've thought about this a bit and I can't really see why someone would want to write AI content here other than to spam ads but they are handled quickly. Does anyone see AI content with a clear motivation or agenda here? There are very few rep based privileges right so that seems like an unlikely motivation as well.

This is a venture capitalist driven community that attracts the sleaziest kind of spammers you could think of under the badge of growth hacking and networking. Besides this very obvious motivation to spam you have all kinds of nerds here eager to do it just because they can (on one of the most famous tech places where registration is made as easy as possible)

Re: The bot situation on the internet is worse than you could imagine

#98

Post by wolvoleo »

xboxnolifes wrote: post #79
wolvoleo wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's definitely more than enough to stop me as a human wanting to visit the site, so yeah. In that case a better solution would be to take the site down altogether.

Take down the site entirely because a couple humans get into a fit about it?

I'm just saying, making visitors wait at least a minute while making their device turn red hot is going to stop 99,9% of your visitors. So at that point what's the point in trying to serve the content?

Re: The bot situation on the internet is worse than you could imagine

#99

Post by Supermancho »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #91
rekabis wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want “papers, please” every time you back out of your driveway or go beyond your government-assigned oblast, then your suggestion is the digital version of the physical authoritarian nightmare that was imposed by totalitarianist regimes throughout history. People have a right to complete anonymity, and should be able to go across the majority of the Internet just as they can go across most of the country. That…

>>> People have a right to complete anonymity Why? (Am not trolling. Genuinely interested) I walk out my front door in the UK and I am not anonymous. Every transaction I make either identifies me through bank, railway or other id, or quite simply by my face standing in front of the coffee seller. My walk down the road is observed by neighbours and postmen. Should my government arrest me without cause or trample on my…

> Should my government arrest me without cause or trample on my free speech rights, I get that’s a problem but I am not sure why being anonymous helps. Having rights upheld by the courts helps, well trained police who respect the law helps.

You're suggesting the same government that would violate your rights would then help prevent it? I don't follow. Any power structure (tiered or not) was wiped away by authoritarians, historically. They will not be helping in the worst case. Ideological capture (corruption) has already started eroding at UK rights and that took a much less overt effort. America has had a robust 3-branch system (executive, legislative, judiciary) corrupted by a singular cult of personality. THAT was highly unlikely to happen, but here we are.

With this being said, I do predict that anonymity on the web is going to be phased out. It will result in all sorts of changes to cultural norms across western nations that largely will curtail rights. I dread it.

Shouldn't we try tracing IP addresses and fining organizations for letting the traffic through or originating the traffic first? Seems a lot simpler.

Re: The bot situation on the internet is worse than you could imagine

#100

Post by coryrc »

pinkmuffinere wrote: post #23

I’ve been sitting on this page for two minutes and it’s still not sure whether I’m a bot lol. What did I do in a past life to deserve this :(

On what page? https://gladeart.com/blog/the-bot-situation-on-the-internet-... loaded effectively instantly for me.
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