> What a coincidence that "identity verification" became a hot topic recently. Crying “Conspiracy” in reply to a career Chicken Little is comedic. I’ve been ra

> What a coincidence that "identity verification" became a hot topic recently. Crying “Conspiracy” in reply to a career Chicken Little is comedic. I’ve been raising warnings about identity verification looming on the horizon for perhaps fifteen years now; thanks to DejaNews for that early realization, I suppose. > Don't even try to solve this nonexistent "problem", because that will only drive us further into authoritarian technocracy. I would celebrate and tell all my friends if someone on this thread, on any thread, would explain how we solve this without bankrupting non-business site operators and without a third-party authority. Anubis is a band-aid at best, yet no better solution — not even an idea — is presented alongside your objections. > You put stuff on the public Internet, expect it to be read by everyone. My hobbyist forum can barely stay online eight hours a day due to crawler traffic. Someone scraped the entire site by spawning one request per page with no fork limit last year. It was down for a solid week after that, and now has very severe limits in place. I don’t know how they can afford to stay running, but certainly “static only” isn’t going to solve the CPU and bandwidth costs incurred by incompetent and redundant AI crawlers. So, by making their site public in today’s infested internet, their content is no longer accessible. > Don't like that? Put it behind a login. As I noted above, one solution is payment — since free credentials registration is not an obstacle to AI bots, after all. For some reason people don’t like to charge money for hobbyist content if they can avoid it. I recognize why and am trying my best to discover a non-monetary solution on their behalf. > I suspect the ones pushing this are the ones running these "crawlers" themselves, much like Cloudflare hosts providers of DDoS services. I do not, have not, and will not run crawlers or AI agents, trainers, or other such shit at any time in the past thirty years and will continue to abstain from the entire category, which should be quite easy as I’m a retired sysop now attending full-time accounting school and giving a finger to the entire industry to pursue work that benefits humanity. Same reason I bother telling HN “the anonymity sky is falling” every so often: I’d much prefer it if we didn’t have to sacrifice anonymity online to defeat scraper bots. > No, no, no, hell fucking no!! Please find a way to turn your vehemence and passion into a productive contribution, before it’s too late for all of us. As presented, your argument is neither supported nor persuasive, and your hostility only gives opponents of anonymity more arrows in their quiver to shoot at us.