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Similar for me. From the 732745 login attempts last month, 52% were from China, followed by US with 13%. Here is a graph: https://i.imgur.com/YPAuTXO.png https:

Similar for me. From the 732745 login attempts last month, 52% were from China, followed by US with 13%. Here is a graph: https://i.imgur.com/YPAuTXO.png https://i.imgur.com/YPAuTXO.png The sheer volume of bot traffic surprised me at first, especially since my website has zero human visitors as far as I can tell, but the numbers are consistent month after month. Nevertheless, my $1/month VPS can handle the traffic without a problem, so I see no need to ban or rate limit any IPs, especially since I hate captchas with a passion.

speedplane 7y ago
> my $1/month VPS can handle the traffic without a problem, so I see no need to ban or rate limit any IPs, especially since I hate captchas with a passion. I run a company that routinely scrapes government run, public domain websites. Sadly, many of these sites come with captchas. We can easily bypass these captchas by paying roughly $1.50/1000 captchas, but when scraping millions of pages a month, these costs become significant. As far as I can tell, adding a captcha to a site does nothing to prevent bots, it just alters the economics of any business that relies on the data. I understand that bots can potentially slow down servers and cause disruptions for human users, but for the handful of government agencies that actually talk to us, we happily restrict scraping to certain hours of the day or limit overall traffic to a reasonable level. I would go further and happily give the money we're spending on solving captchas back to the government so they can upgrade their servers and make the system better for everyone. For those that are conducting nefarious activities, captchas likely do nothing. For individuals, they are annoying. For legitimate scraping companies, they are a needless expense. Captchas are pretty obsolete.
- therein 7y ago
  > adding a captcha to a site does nothing to prevent bots, it just alters the economics of any business that relies on the data Definitely agreed. Recently I have been working on a side-project that makes use of bypassing/placating reCaptcha and it has been trivial and not so costly. If it is accounts you're creating, it simply puts a "reasonable" price on account creation. If it is about scraped content, once again, does the same. However these costs already existed in terms of compute resources and time anyway. Captchas hardly made it any harder.
mwyah 7y ago
Cool chart but... why are the countries not labelled?
- johndough 7y ago
  Oops, I changed the y-scale from absolute values to percentage, but forgot to also update the y-position of the country labels, so they are way off-screen (pyplot does not support bar labels, so they have to be drawn by hand). Should be fixed now: https://i.imgur.com/YPAuTXO.png https://i.imgur.com/YPAuTXO.png
southerndrift 7y ago
Where do you get a $1/month VPS?
- johndough 7y ago
  A few years ago, I found a promotional offer on lowendbox.com for chicagovps.net, but currently there are none that cheap. However, keep in mind that low price often comes at a cost. For example, cloudatcost had a cheap VPS with a onetime payment for life (yeah, I know, too good to be true), but then retroactively invented a maintenance fee. Also several days of downtime were not uncommon.

speedplane 7y ago

> my $1/month VPS can handle the traffic without a problem, so I see no need to ban or rate limit any IPs, especially since I hate captchas with a passion. I run a company that routinely scrapes government run, public domain websites. Sadly, many of these sites come with captchas. We can easily bypass these captchas by paying roughly $1.50/1000 captchas, but when scraping millions of pages a month, these costs become significant. As far as I can tell, adding a captcha to a site does nothing to prevent bots, it just alters the economics of any business that relies on the data. I understand that bots can potentially slow down servers and cause disruptions for human users, but for the handful of government agencies that actually talk to us, we happily restrict scraping to certain hours of the day or limit overall traffic to a reasonable level. I would go further and happily give the money we're spending on solving captchas back to the government so they can upgrade their servers and make the system better for everyone. For those that are conducting nefarious activities, captchas likely do nothing. For individuals, they are annoying. For legitimate scraping companies, they are a needless expense. Captchas are pretty obsolete.

therein 7y ago
> adding a captcha to a site does nothing to prevent bots, it just alters the economics of any business that relies on the data Definitely agreed. Recently I have been working on a side-project that makes use of bypassing/placating reCaptcha and it has been trivial and not so costly. If it is accounts you're creating, it simply puts a "reasonable" price on account creation. If it is about scraped content, once again, does the same. However these costs already existed in terms of compute resources and time anyway. Captchas hardly made it any harder.

mwyah 7y ago

Cool chart but... why are the countries not labelled?

johndough 7y ago
Oops, I changed the y-scale from absolute values to percentage, but forgot to also update the y-position of the country labels, so they are way off-screen (pyplot does not support bar labels, so they have to be drawn by hand). Should be fixed now: https://i.imgur.com/YPAuTXO.png https://i.imgur.com/YPAuTXO.png

southerndrift 7y ago

Where do you get a $1/month VPS?

johndough 7y ago
A few years ago, I found a promotional offer on lowendbox.com for chicagovps.net, but currently there are none that cheap. However, keep in mind that low price often comes at a cost. For example, cloudatcost had a cheap VPS with a onetime payment for life (yeah, I know, too good to be true), but then retroactively invented a maintenance fee. Also several days of downtime were not uncommon.