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Why do CAPTCHAs even exist for standard websites (as opposed to account creation, etc)? Wouldn't something like rate limiting or proof of work achieve the same
by stegosaurus 11y ago
Why do CAPTCHAs even exist for standard websites (as opposed to account creation, etc)?
Wouldn't something like rate limiting or proof of work achieve the same result? If you're simply allowing someone to browse, you don't actually care whether a user is real or not. You care about stopping automated comments/spam.
Is this just another tentacle of the advertising industry?
- nodja 11y agoIt's explained in the article. On the other hand, anonymity is also something that provides value to online attackers. Based on data across the CloudFlare network, 94% of requests that we see across the Tor network are per se malicious. That doesn’t mean they are visiting controversial content, but instead that they are automated requests designed to harm our customers. A large percentage of the comment spam, vulnerability scanning, ad click fraud, content scraping, and login scanning comes via the Tor network. To give you some sense, based on data from Project Honey Pot, 18% of global email spam, or approximately 6.5 trillion unwanted messages per year, begin with an automated bot harvesting email addresses via the Tor network. Rate limiting would block legitimate users, and pow doesn't impede the malicious uses of tor.
- stegosaurus 11y agoThat doesn't answer my question, though. All of those are reasons to suspect Tor exit nodes, but not reasons to place CAPTCHAs on standard article pages on a site. The only vaguely reasonable one I can see there is 'ad click fraud', and I think that fundamentally restricting the usefulness of a site for advertising purposes is awful.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]