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This has become a concern for the Arch Linux wiki which now makes you pass a proof-of-work challenge to read it. Which my anti-fingerprinting browser fails at e
by whoopdedo 1y ago
This has become a concern for the Arch Linux wiki which now makes you pass a proof-of-work challenge to read it. Which my anti-fingerprinting browser fails at every time. Putting a burden on human readers that will be only a minor temporary annoyance for the bots. Think about it, the T in CAPTCHA stands for "Turing". What is the design goal of AI? To create machines that can pass a Turing test.
I fear the end state of this game is the death of the anonymous internet.
- PaulDavisThe1st 1y agoThe point of (correctly done) proof-of-work is not to require Turing-level impersonation. It is to create a cost to a trawler that is going to hit thousands or more of your pages, and almost no cost to a human user. Problem is, as you've discovered, it can have the cost that anti-fingerprinting browsers can't do the required work.
- whoopdedo 1y agoThese are AI bots. Computational capacity is not a limiting factor. I'd argue that my desktop consumer PC is less capable of efficiently solving a PoW than a multi-GPU cluster in a data center. Even if, as you say, crawlers will hit the PoW thousands of times more, the only way to make it a barrier is if the cost is higher than the profit to be gained. Otherwise it's merely an expense to be passed on to the customer.
- PaulDavisThe1st 1y agoAnubis accomplishes this, AFAIU.