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A company that relies on a bot that accesses others' resources to make money and at the same time relies on reCAPTCHA to frustrate other bots from accessing it
by wendsday 14y ago
A company that relies on a bot that accesses others' resources to make money and at the same time relies on reCAPTCHA to frustrate other bots from accessing it own resources.
It may be easy to do today, but, going forward, how do we determine which bots are "good" and which ones are "bad"?
Clearly, simply being a "bot" does not imply "bad" intent. If it did then we should all be blocking search engine bots.
Yet this is what reCAPTCHA does: it blocks not based on intent, but based on the characteristic of being a "bot".
- akincisor 14y agoIt's easy. One bot reads a text file and only accesses the resources outlined in the file. The other maliciously tries to eat up resources without restraint. Good - Bad.
- wendsday 14y agoLike I said, it's relatively easy today. But how about going forward? There will be lots more bots and lots more usages. Things might not be so simple. For example, some sites might exclude all search engine bots except a chosen few despite the fact they all honor robots.txt and behave essentially the same. (BTW, if by "text file" you mean robots.txt, isn't that an exclusion list? You seem to be saying it's an inclusion list.)