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I somewhat agree, but those can be good signals though, you just have to gather statistical data on them from known good users and combine with other signals. L
by zzzcpan 7y ago
I somewhat agree, but those can be good signals though, you just have to gather statistical data on them from known good users and combine with other signals. Like what are the chances for an agent to be used by a real person if it doesn't download images, lacks mouse movements and, for example, is coming from a datacenter? Obviously pretty low. The same way access patterns alone don't give you much, but are good against scrapers when combined with other signals.
And putting captchas or logins on anything you have to protect from bots also "protects" from real people, most of them simply leave and don't bother with those thing.
- heavyset_go 7y ago> Like what are the chances for an agent to be used by a real person if it doesn't download images, lacks mouse movements and, for example, is coming from a datacenter? Obviously pretty low. Congrats, you just identified a visually impaired user with a screen reader who uses a VPN through AWS/GCP/etc.
- zzzcpan 7y agoAnd your point is?
- bryanrasmussen 7y agothat depending on your sites purpose and where your servers are located / where your main customer base is you might be opening yourself to extremely negative public relations by blocking this person as a bot, or even legal repercussions.
- zzzcpan 7y agoThis is completely irrelevant to the conversation about technical solutions. My example is just about probabilities and how to use them for bot detection.
- gregoryl 7y agoIf that logic is extended, the true technical solution is to turn the site off entirely.
- zzzcpan 7y agoWhat exactly in that logic in any way leads to turning off the site entirely? It's literally the opposite: narrowing down the bots by calculating probability of them not being real people using multiple signals and like Bayesian inference or something like that, it's pretty much a primitive machine learning. I'm surprised there are so many trolling comments here.
- bryanrasmussen 7y agowell if that was the case then the parent comment pointing out you could have had a false positive certainly seems relevant, but you wanted to know what their point was. I thought their point was just that these false positives could create negative consequences for anyone implementing a bot preventing solution on their site.
- zzzcpan 7y agoIn the context of describing an idea to minimize false positives, pointing out a false positive in the given example is at best nitpicking, it's definitely not relevant.
- heavyset_go 7y agoThe ADA exists and for good reasons.