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The idea itself has merit, even if the implementation is questionable. Giving bots a cryptographic identity would allow good bots to meaningfully have skin in
by marginalia_nu 1y ago
The idea itself has merit, even if the implementation is questionable.
Giving bots a cryptographic identity would allow good bots to meaningfully
have skin in the game and crawl with their reputation at stake. It's not
a complete solution, but could be part of one. Though you can likely get
the good parts from HTTP request signing alone, Cloudflare's additions to that
seem fairly extraneous.
I honestly don't know what is a good solution. The status quo is certainly
completely untenable. If we keep going like we are now, there won't be a web
left to protect in a few years. It's worth keeping in mind that there's an
opportunity cost, and even a bad solution may be preferrable to no solution at all.
... I say operating an independent web crawler.
- fruitworks 1y agoI think the solution is some sort of PoW gateway like people are setting up now. Or a micropayments system where each page request costs a fraction of a penny. You could combine that with some sort of IPFS/Bittorrent like system where you allow others to rehost your static content, indexed by the merkle hash of the content. That would allow users to donate bandwidth. I really don't like the idea that you can get out of this by surveiling user agents more or distinguishing between "good" and "bad" bots which is a massive social problem.
- verdverm 1y agoNobody wants proof of work, leave the block chain inspired nonsense to the crypto children
- marginalia_nu 1y agoThis is the original use-case for proof of work though. The idea of using proof of work to hinder spam dates back to 1997[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash