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The problem is that website owners want to have their cake and eat it too. They want to make data public but not so public that it can be copied. It's the same
by throwaway48476 2y ago
The problem is that website owners want to have their cake and eat it too. They want to make data public but not so public that it can be copied. It's the same problem as DRM which doesn't work. It's an inherent contradiction.
Web devs also bloat the hell out of sites with MB of Javascript and overcomplicated design. It would be far cheaper to just have a static site and use CDN.
- imiric 2y agoCAPTCHAs can protect public resources as well. But the main problem here is about preventing generated spam content, not scraping. This can be mitigated by placing CAPTCHAs only on pages with signup/login and comment forms.
- throwaway48476 2y ago>This can be mitigated by placing CAPTCHAs only on signup/login and comment forms. If only... Algorithmic turing test is a more interesting problem. https://xkcd.com/810/ https://xkcd.com/810/ Traditional captcha solving ability has already been surpassed by the bots which is now why there's so many new and creative different CAPTCHAs. Until someone trains a model to solve them that is.
- imiric 2y agoIt's a never-ending arms race. CAPTCHA services are improving just as the attackers are. Just because they're not 100% accurate or effective doesn't mean they're worthless. They're just the first line of defense.
- pixl97 2y agoJust don't forget the scale doesn't stop at zero. They can be less than worthless and cost you actual humans visiting your site.
- kamray23 2y agoThat'd be a nice way of looking at it, if serving content was cheap. It is not. I want to put my CV online, but I'm not willing to shill out tens of thousands every year to have it scraped for gigabytes per day. Doesn't happen, you say? Didn't before, definitely. Now there's so many scrapers building data sets that I've certainly had to block entire ranges of IPs due to repeated wasting of money. It's like the classic "little lambda thing" that someone posts on HN and finds a $2 million invoice in their inbox a couple weeks later. Except instead of going viral your achievements get mulched by AI.
- throwaway48476 2y agoGigabytes? How big is your CV? >lambda thing I never understood why anyone thought this was ever a good idea. QoS is a natural rate limit for non critical resources.
- probably_wrong 2y agoI have a personal website (including my CV in PDF), blog, and self-hosted email. A story I posted once made the HN frontpage and my e-mail is in my profile, meaning my content is read by more bots than humans. My monthly hosting costs are ca. $10 a month. Therefore I'm really curious: if hosting your CV requires "tens of thousands every year", what does your setup looks like?
- afiori 2y agoI imagine it is something about bandwidth costs