[HN Gopher] Bot countermeasures impact on the quality of life on...
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Bot countermeasures impact on the quality of life on the web
Author : ciprian_craciun
Score : 13 points
Date : 2025-05-10 15:40 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (notes.volution.ro)
(TXT) w3m dump (notes.volution.ro)
| al2o3cr wrote:
| Can I legaly take a copyrighted book, read it, perhaps more than
| once
|
| Keep cheerleading for the copyright-maximalists and you won't be
| able to "buy" a book, only rent it each time you want to read it
| ciprian_craciun wrote:
| I don't see how respecting one's rights (in this case one's
| copyright over his own works) leads to having revoked the right
| to buy books.
|
| I agree that it is sad to see many online book stores moving
| from "selling" to "renting". But that is a completely different
| problem.
|
| As a personal note, I know the pain of not being able to access
| scientific papers because they were behind paywalls, and I had
| to search for drafts to be able to read them. But that model
| was well in place circa 2010, thus it's and old tactic applied
| to a new field: books (and others).
| bheadmaster wrote:
| Imagine if software was actually efficient enough that bots don't
| affect its functionality.
| ciprian_craciun wrote:
| Software performance, which translates into CPU/memory/disk
| resources, are only one aspect of the costs incurred by
| crawling bots, and fall under the unmetered / virtually
| infinite category. However, there are also the metered
| resources, that do translate (after a certain threshold) into
| monetary costs: network bandwidth.
|
| Thus, regardless how well one optimizes his site delivery
| (static site, minimizing, CDN, caching, etc.) a stampede of bot
| crawling does in the end become a DDoS, which if it doesn't
| take down the infrastructure, it might leave a deep hole in
| one's budget.
|
| For example, for one of the sites I manage, I get daily peaks
| of ~300 requests per second measured at the backend, for a site
| that already employs heavy caching (both client-side, CDN, and
| even server-side). This wasn't so a few months back, and the
| site didn't just jump in popularity.
| kittikitti wrote:
| As a side note, I prefer using the term GPT instead of LLM.
| OpenAI bullied everyone until they got to choose the language but
| they no longer control how people use the word GPT.
| wolfspaw wrote:
| There are antibot measures that do not depend on JS or cookies,
| like asking the name of a Red fruit, and the server adding the IP
| to allowed.
|
| Very easy to bypass for sure, but custom enough to protect you
| from the horde of generic bots =p
| garylkz wrote:
| From an end user perspective, the whole "proof that you are
| human" thing is nothing but hassle.
|
| Back then the "select all boxes with traffic light or something"
| is already ambiguous enough, now they even started to generate AI
| images for that and to be honest, I can't even get it right like
| 40% of the time...
|
| ... And the actual bots are able to do that better than me. What
| an absurd time to live in.
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