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The bot situation on the internet is worse than you could imagine
https://web.archive.org/web/20260329052632/https://gladeart.com/blog/the-bot-situation-on-the-internet-is-actually-worse-than-you-could-imagine-heres-why https://web.archive.org/web/20260329052632/https://gladeart....
- Unical-A 7mo ago[flagged]
- Aurornis 7mo agoThis recently registered account has been spamming links to their app in HN comments. They tried to post a Show HN as their first post after registering. Now they’ve tried to spam links to it in two comments (one dead) in this comment section. I don’t think the comments are bot-written, but it’s ironic that when I first clicked on this comment section 2 out of 3 comments (including the showdead one) were from someone trying to spam their app. Even may of the newly registered human accounts are starting to feel like spam bots.
- Retr0id 7mo agoMaybe my imagination is just too accurate but this didn't tell me anything I didn't expect to hear. > Here is a massive log file for some activity in the Data Export tar pit: A bit of a privacy faux pas, no? Some visitors may be legitimate.
- Unical-A 7mo ago[dead]
- sieabahlpark 7mo ago[dead]
- AndrewKemendo 7mo agoThe final Eternal September
- NooneAtAll3 7mo ago> Before it was enabled, it was getting several hundred-thousand requests each day. As soon as Anubis became active in there, it decreased to about 11 requests after 24 hours I love experimental data like this. So much better than gut reaction that was spammed when anubis was just introduced
- salomonk_mur 7mo agoI'm surprised at the effectiveness of simple PoW to stop practically all activity. I'll implement Anubis at low difficulty for all my projects and leave a decent llms.txt referenced in my sitemap and robots.txt so LLMs can still get relevant data for my site while.keeping bad bots out. I'm getting thousands of requests from China that have really increased costs, glad it seems the fix is rather easy.
- gruez 7mo ago>I'm surprised at the effectiveness of simple PoW to stop practically all activity. It's even dumber than that, because by default anubis whitelists the curl user agent. curl -H "User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/146.0.0.0 Safari/537.36" "https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/diff/?id=v7.0-rc5&id2=v7.0-rc4&dt=2" <!doctype html><html lang="en"><head><title>Making sure you're not a bot!</title><link rel="stylesheet" vs curl "https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/diff/?id=v7.0-rc5&id2=v7.0-rc4&dt=2" <!DOCTYPE html> <html lang='en'> <head> <title>kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git - Linux kernel source tree</title>
- functionmouse 7mo agoshhhh don't tell the bots !
- marginalia_nu 7mo agoAnubis' white lists and block rules are configurable though. The defaults are a bit silly.
- xena 7mo agoThe default is to allow non-Mozilla user agents so that existing (good) automation continues to work and so that people stopped threatening to burn my house down. Lovely people in the privacy community.
- 7mo ago
- charonn0 7mo agoHugged to death? https://web.archive.org/web/20260329052632/https://gladeart.com/blog/the-bot-situation-on-the-internet-is-actually-worse-than-you-could-imagine-heres-why https://web.archive.org/web/20260329052632/https://gladeart....
- dzogchen 7mo ago> we tend to take anti-bot measures very seriously Should have have maybe prioritized differently...
- wolvoleo 7mo agoThanks! I was wondering if there was an actual site behind it of if it was just a joke.
- cptcobalt 7mo agohonestly this should be updated to the main link, the Anubis at difficulty 8 is astonishingly hostile
- dang 7mo agoAdded above. Thanks!
- lifeisstillgood 7mo agoThis is why I see (well managed) government digital IDs as sensible moves. Apart from DDOS attacks, if bots have to “prove” who they are on each request it seems like a win-win. I may be missing something of course
- gruez 7mo ago/s?
- carlosjobim 7mo agoYou may be missing that it's easy and free for website owners to fix the problem. But it's hacker news after all. If somebody is bothered by a leaf falling on them on their walk to the corner store, the suggested solution here will be to have a full communist revolution.
- nba456_ 7mo agoIt is absolutely not free or easy to stop bots.
- carlosjobim 7mo agoMillions upon millions of people use Cloudflare to stop bots for free, and there are other alternatives as well. It's incredibly easy. So no, there's just as much need for government intervention, as there is a need for the government to stop leaves from falling on you when you're walking to the corner store.
- rekabis 7mo agoIf you want “papers, please” every time you back out of your driveway or go beyond your government-assigned oblast, then your suggestion is the digital version of the physical authoritarian nightmare that was imposed by totalitarianist regimes throughout history. People have a right to complete anonymity, and should be able to go across the majority of the Internet just as they can go across most of the country. That’s what you are missing. Don’t get me wrong, I am also in favour of a single government ID, but in terms of combatting identity fraud, accessing public resources like single-payer healthcare, and making it easier for a person to prove their identity to authorities or employers. It should not be used as a pass card for fundamental rights that normally would have zero government involvement.
- RobRivera 7mo agoYea it's pretty bad
- JeanMarcS 7mo agoI'm getting this patern a lot on Prestashop websites, where thousand, to not say hundreds of thousand, of request are coming from bots not announcing themselves in the User-agent, and coming from different IP's Very annoying. And you can't filter them because they look like legitimate trafic. On a page with differents options (such as color, size, etc...) they'll try all the combinaisons, eating all the ressources.
- rekabis 7mo agoTaking a 2024 report on bot loads on the Internet is like taking a 1950s Car & Driver article for modern vehicle stats. That’s how fast the landscape is changing. And remember: while the report might have been released in 2024, it takes time to conduct research and publish. A good chunk of its data was likely from 2023 and earlier.
- xeyownt 7mo agoNot sure what they are doing, but they don't seem to do it well.
- vondur 7mo agoOk. So I get a page saying it’s verifying I’m not a bot with some kink of measurements per second and I don’t get through. Is that the point?
- neomantra 7mo agoShe's definitely a bot with some kink!
- gostsamo 7mo agoI don't know if they have issue with my ff+ubo, but it is almost a minute that anubis is blocking me. screw them.
- Frank-Landry 7mo agoThis sounds like something a bot would say.
- pinkmuffinere 7mo agoI’ve been sitting on this page for two minutes and it’s still not sure whether I’m a bot lol. What did I do in a past life to deserve this :(
- mxmlnkn 7mo agoAfter 2 minutes at 150 kHashes on mobile, I finally see the first pixel of the progress bar filling up. Seems like it will take hours or a day to finish. Some estimate would have been nice.
- raincole 7mo agoAt this point I wonder if you can post a crypto miner page on HN and people will fall for it.
- dheera 7mo agoI don't get this kHash thing. Do we have captchas mining bitcoin in a distributed fashion for free now?
- throw10920 7mo agoThe page says > Anubis uses a Proof-of-Work scheme in the vein of Hashcash And if you look up Hashcash on Wikipedia you get https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash which explains how Hashcash works in a fairly straightforward manner (unlike most math pages).
- dheera 7mo agoOh fun so now we're effectively draining users' phone and laptop batteries now just to prove that they have batteries and somehow that's a proxy for them being human
- throw10920 7mo agoGiven that you're clearly completely ignorant of everything in the anti-spam space, you should probably do some research before making uninformed comments like this.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- LeoPanthera 7mo agoIs Anubus being set to difficulty 8 on this page supposed to be a joke? I gave up after about 20 seconds.
- xiconfjs 7mo agoI waited a minute until my phone got hot.
- lucb1e 7mo agoI think that must be the point they're trying to make, yes It also drives home that Anubis needs a time estimate for sites that don't use Anubis as a "can you run javascript" wall but as an actual proof of work mechanism that it purports to be its main mechanism It shows a difficulty of "8" with "794 kilohashes per second", but what does that mean? I understand the 8 must be exponential (not literally that 8 hashes are expected to find 1 solution on average), but even as a power of 2, 2^8=256 I happen to know by heart, so thousands of hashes per second would then find an answer in a fraction of a second. Or if it's 8 bytes instead of bits, then you expect to find a solution after like 8 million hashes, which at ~800k is about ten seconds. There is no way to figure out how long the expected wait is even if you understand all the text on the page (which most people wouldn't) and know some shortcuts to do the mental math (how many people know small powers of 2 by heart)
- but_noah 7mo agoThe core problem isn't Proof-of-Work itself — it's difficulty calibration. PoW for page protection (every page load) is fundamentally different from PoW for form submission (one-time action). Anubis at difficulty 8 is asking browsers to find 8 leading zero bytes — that's billions of hashes on average. For form spam protection, a ~200ms solve time in a WebWorker is enough to make bot operations uneconomical at scale (10,000 forms = 10,000 unique computations) while being invisible to humans. That's difficulty 2-3 depending on device. For protecting every page view like Anubis does, the cost-benefit math is different and much harder to get right, because you're taxing every visitor on every request — not just on submit.
- huflungdung 7mo ago[dead]
- raincole 7mo agoI don't get what it is or whether it's a satire or not. If a webstie takes so long to verify me I'll bounce. That's it.
- sltkr 7mo agoLooks like Anubis is also blocking robots.txt which seems to defeat the point of having robots.txt in the first place.
- sltkr 7mo agoUpdate: looks like this has been fixed now.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- VladVladikoff 7mo ago>How can you protect your sites from these bots? JA4 fingerprinting works decently for the residential proxies.
- Rasbora 7mo agoTLS fingerprinting is not sufficient to stop residential proxies, the proxy acts as a transparent pass-through at the TLS layer making it trivial to use something like curl_cffi to mimic a real browser TLS fingerprint. However residential proxies do have a weakness, since they need to maintain 2 separate TCP conenctions you can exploit RTT differences between layers 3 and 7 to detect if the connection to your server is being terminated somewhere along the path. Solutions exist that can reliably detect and block residential proxies, for example: https://layer3intel.com/tripwire https://layer3intel.com/tripwire
- VladVladikoff 7mo agoCool link thanks for sharing. Too bad it is so expensive. Maybe I’ll find a way to DIY.
- ricardobeat 7mo agoI cannot get past the bot check (190kH/s), is it mining crypto on my laptop?
- plandis 7mo agoAt first glance this seems like a crypto miner. Maybe I’m a bot, I gave up waiting before the progress bar was even 1% done.
- qwertyforce 7mo agonoticed that firefox gives 2x kHashes/s more than chrome (1000 vs 500)
- dmix 7mo agoAs soon as I see that anime bot thing which this website is using I close the tab. More annoying than Cloudflare.
- cullenking 7mo agoWe started building out a set of spam/fraud/bot management tooling. If you have any decent infrastructure in place already, this is a pretty manageable task with a mismash of techniques. ASN based blocking (ip lookup databases can be self hosted and contain ASN) for the obvious ones like alibaba etc, subnet blocking for the less obvious (see pattern, block subnet, alleviates but doesn't solve problems). If you have a logging stack, you can easily find crawler/bot patterns, then flag candidate IP subnets for blocking. It's definitely whackamole though. We are experimenting with blocking based on risk databases, which run between $2k and $10k a year depending on provider. These map IP ranges to booleans like is_vpn, is_tor, etc, and also contain ASN information. Slightly suspicious crawling behavior or keyword flagging combined with a hit in that DB, and you have a high confidence block. All this stuff is now easy to homeroll with claude. Before it would have been a major PITA.
- ColinWright 7mo agoQuote: > "The idea is that at individual scales the additional load is ignorable, ..." Three minutes, one pixel of progress bar, 2 CPUs at 100%, load average 4.3 ... The site is not protected by Anubis, it's blocked by it. Closed.
- timshell 7mo agoMy grad school research was on computational models of human/machine cognition, and I'm now commercializing it as a 'proof-of-human API' for bot detection, spam reduction, and identity verification. One of the mistakes people assume is that AI capability means humanness. If you know exactly where to look, you can start to identify differences between improving frontier models and human cognition. One concrete example from a forthcoming blog post of mine: [begin] In fact, CAPTCHAs can still be effective if you know where to look. We ran 75 trials -- 388 total attempts -- benchmarking three frontier AI agents against reCAPTCHA v2 image challenges. We looked across two categories: static, where each image grid is an individual target, and cross-tile challenges, where an object spans multiple tiles. On static challenges, the agents performed respectably. Claude Sonnet 4.5 solved 47%. Gemini 2.5 Pro: 56%. GPT-5: 23%. On cross-tile challenges: Claude scored 0%. Gemini: 2%. GPT-5: 1%. In contrast, humans find cross-tile challenges easier than static ones. If you spot one tile that matches the target, your visual system follows the object into adjacent tiles automatically. Agents find them nearly impossible. They evaluate each tile independently, produce perfectly rectangular selections, and fail on partial occlusion and boundary-spanning objects. They process the grid as nine separate classification problems. Humans process it as one scene. The challenges hardest for humans -- ambiguous static grids where the target is small or unclear -- are easiest for agents. The challenges easiest for humans -- follow the object across tiles -- are hardest for agents. The difficulty curves are inverted. Not because agents are dumb, but because the two systems solve the problem with fundamentally different architectures. Faking an output means producing the right answer. Faking a process means reverse-engineering the computational dynamics of a biological brain and reproducing them in real time. The first problem can be reduced to a machine learning classifier. The second is an unsolved scientific problem. The standard objection is that any test can be defeated with sufficient incentive. But fraudsters weren't the ones who built the visual neural networks that defeated text CAPTCHAs -- researchers were. And they aren't solving quantum computing to undermine cryptography. The cost of spoofing an iris scan is an engineering problem. The cost of reproducing human cognition is a scientific one. These are not the same category of difficulty. [end]
- ctoth 7mo agoHow does your software work with blind people like me who use screen readers? Your key finding is that humans process the grid as one visual scene — but that's a finding about sighted cognition. Isn't this, like most things, a sensitivity specificity tradeoff? How many real humans should be blocked from your system to keep the bots out? What is the Blackstone ratio of accessibility?
- siva7 7mo agoSo the elephant in the room: How much of HN is bot generated? Those who know have every incentive not to share and those who don't have no way to figure it out. At this point i have to assume that every new account is a bot
- Retr0id 7mo ago> Those who know have every incentive not to share Why do you say that?
- Trufa 7mo agoI felt a vibe change, some are obvious and some not, but it does feel different, the main change i've seen is in downvotes, I don't say very controversial things and have had many things very quickly downvoted, and then slowly upvoted, I think hn was very slow to downvote in the past (except obvious trolls/spam). So for me the main worry is not even the comments, but the invisible bias generated by voting.
- julianlam 7mo agoI've noticed that too. I thought I was just posting particularly bad takes.
- MeetingsBrowser 7mo agoThe article is about automated web scraping, not bots writing content.
- siva7 7mo agoThe commenters here don't care what the article is about when they can't access the article and the much more concerning question not about web scraping is.
- uberman 7mo agoI've thought about this a bit and I can't really see why someone would want to write AI content here other than to spam ads but they are handled quickly. Does anyone see AI content with a clear motivation or agenda here? There are very few rep based privileges right so that seems like an unlikely motivation as well.
- aplomb1026 7mo ago[dead]
- jwr 7mo agoAn interesting and sad aspect of the war on bots and scraping that is being waged is that we are hurting ourselves in the process, too. Many tasks I'm trying to get my AI assistant to do cannot be done quickly, because sites defensively prohibit access to their content. I'm not scraping: it's my agent trying to fetch a page or two to perform a task for me (such as check pricing or availability). We need a better solution.
- bee_rider 7mo agoYou aren’t scraping for the sake of training a model, but scraping the prices and availability is still scraping, right? I think some of the folks running sites would rather have you go to the site and view the items “suggested based on your shopping history” (I consider these ads, the vendors might disagree), etc. I’m more sympathetic to the people running sites than the LLM training scrapers, but these are two parties in a many-party game and neither one is perfectly aligned with users.
- jwr 7mo ago> scraping the prices and availability is still scraping Web browsing is scraping, too. I am not doing anything that I myself wouldn't do, it would just take me longer. I'm not mass-scraping, training new models, etc etc. I'm just using a helper tool to do some work for me. If you prevent that, you are effectively saying: humans have to perform the manual labor of clicking and browsing through our site, they are not allowed to be helped in any way. I don't think this is the right answer.
- johneth 7mo agoI would assume most sites that block access to your AI assistant do so because they want to show a human ads, i.e. not run at a loss. Seems reasonable.
- oasisbob 7mo agoKnew it was getting bad, but Meta's facebookexternalhit bot changed their behavior recently. In addition to pulling responses with huge amplification (40x, at least, for posting a single Facebook post to an empty audience), it's sending us traffic with fbclids in the mix. No idea why. They're also sending tons of masked traffic from their ASN (and EC2), with a fully deceptive UserAgent. The weirdest part though is that it's scraping mobile-app APIs associated with the site in high volume. We see a ton of other AI-training focused crawlers do this, but was surprised to see the sudden change in behavior on facebookexternalhit ... happened in the last week or so. Everyone is nuts these days. Got DoSed by Amazonbot this month too. They refuse to tell me what happened, citing the competitive environment.
- dspillett 7mo ago> it's sending us traffic with fbclids in the mix. No idea why. The click IDs are likely to make the traffic look more like a human who has clicked a link rather than a bot? That way it gets past simple filters that explicitly let such requests in before bothering to check that the source address of the request seems to be a DC rather than a residential IP. > citing the competitive environment All the companies are competing to be the biggest inconvenience to everyone else while scraping as much stuff as they can.
- oasisbob 7mo ago> The click IDs are likely to make the traffic look more like a human who has clicked a link rather than a bot? It's certainly possible. However, the traffic is still coming from Facebook's network with a FB proxy PTR record in DNS. Seems much more likely to fool your typical site owner than a bad actor.
- dspillett 7mo ago> Seems much more likely to fool your typical site owner than a bad actor. Sorry, I wasn't clear. That is exactly what I think they would be doing. While it won't fool blocks that check source first it will fool those who allow requests with those IDs through because they can't afford to block their content appearing on the distraction media sites.
- abujazar 7mo agoWhat a great way to not get any traffic at all.
- rz2k 7mo agoOn my computer, with Firefox it uses 14 CPU cores, consumes an extra 35 Watts, and the progress bar barely moves. Is this site mining cryptocurrency? On Safari or Orion it is merely extremely slow to load. I definitely wouldn't use any of this on a site that you don't want delisted for cryptojacking.
- m3kw9 7mo agoEmploy constant faceID can deter it
- ctoth 7mo agoPlease drink verification can.
- mcv 7mo agoWorse than I could imagine? I imagine that bots might destroy the internet. Not just the internet as we know it; I mean make the internet completely unusable to any human being.
- garganzol 7mo agoEverybody says that bots put websites down, while marketing oriented folks start practicing AO (agent optimization) - to make their offerings even more available and penetrating. Good luck banning yourself from the future.
- simonw 7mo ago> These bots are almost certainly scraping data for AI training; normal bad actors don't have funding for millions of unique IPs thrown at a page. They probably belong to several different companies. Perhaps they sell their scraped data to AI companies, or they are AI companies themselves. We can't tell, but we can guess since there aren't all that many large AI corporations out there. Is the theory here that OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, xAI, Qwen, Z.ai etc are all either running bad scrapers via domestic proxies in Indonesia, or are buying data from companies that run those scrapers? I want to know for sure. Who is paying for this activity? What does the marketplace for scraped data look like?
- ghywertelling 7mo agohttps://parallel.ai/ https://parallel.ai/ I bet lot of companies want to provide search results to AI agents.
- oasisbob 7mo agoI want more data too. The root sources of the traffic from residential proxies gets murky very quickly. It's easy to follow the chain partway for some traffic, eg "Why are we receiving all this traffic from Digital Ocean? ... oh, it's their hero client Firecrawl, using a deceptive UserAgent" ... but it still leaves the obvious question about who the Firecrawl client is. Res proxy traffic is insane these days. There is also plenty of grey-market snowshoe IPs available for the right price, from a handful of ASNs. I regularly see unified crawling missions by unknown agents using 1000+ "clean" IP addresses an hour.
- marginalia_nu 7mo agoI agree it's a more than a bit handwavy. The common consensus seems to be that AI companies are driving this, but it's really hard to conclusively prove who or what is behind the attacks. Weird part #1 is that the traffic isn't for the most part shaped like crawler traffic. It's incredibly bursty, and heavily redundant, missing even the most obvious low hanging fruit optimizations. Could be someone is using residential proxies to wrap AI agents' web traffic, but even so, there's a lot of pieces that don't really make sense, like why the traffic pattern is like being hit by a shotgun. It isn't just one request, but anywhere between 40 and 100 redundant requests. A popular theory is that this is because of sloppy coding, AI companies are too rich to care, but then again that doesn't really add up. This isn't just a minor inefficiency, if it is "just" bad coding, they stand to gain monumental efficiency improvements by fixing the issues, in the sense of getting the data much faster, a clear competitive edge. Really weird. My unsubstantiated guess is the residential proxy/botnet is very unreliable, and that's why they fire so many request. Makes sense if it's sold as a service.
- siruwastaken 7mo ago[dead]
- alexspring 7mo agoYou can build some great anti-bot mechanisms with simple https://github.com/abrahamjuliot/creepjs https://github.com/abrahamjuliot/creepjs logic. A normal user will often appear 31% or lower 'like headless score', mobile is a bit different. You'll still have trouble against sophisticated infra: https://x.com/_alexspring/status/2037968450753335617 https://x.com/_alexspring/status/2037968450753335617
- bob1029 7mo ago> safari can't open the page What is the point of these anti bot measures if organic HN traffic can nuke your site regardless? If this is about protecting information from being acquired by undesirable parties, then this site is currently operating in the most ideal way possible. The information will eventually be ripped out. You cannot defeat an army with direct access to TSMC's wafer start budget and Microsoft's cloud infrastructure. I would find a different hill to die on. This is exactly like the cookie banners. No one is winning anything here. Publishing information to the public internet is a binary decision. If you need to control access, you do what Netflix and countless others have done. You can't have it both ways.
- tromp 7mo ago> let webWorkerURL = `${options.basePrefix}/.within.website/x/cmd/anubis/static/js/worker/sha256-${workerMethod}.mjs?cacheBuster=${options.version}`; It looks like it's computing sha256 hashes. Such an ASIC friendly PoW has the downside that someone with ASICs would be able to either overwhelm the site or drive up the difficulty so high that CPUs can never get through.
- lizknope 7mo ago> The IPs of these bots here actually do not come from datacenters or VPNs most of the time; the overwhelming majority come from residential and mobile networks. So I started searching for what these residential proxy networks actually are. https://datadome.co/bot-management-protection/how-proxy-providers-get-residential-proxies/ https://datadome.co/bot-management-protection/how-proxy-prov...
- lm411 7mo agoAI companies and notably AI scrapers are a cancer that is destroying what's left of the WWW. I was hit with a pretty substantial botnet "distributed scraping" attack yesterday. - About 400,000 different IP addresses over about 3 hours - Mostly residential IP addresses - Valid and unique user agents and referrers - Each IP address would make only a few requests with a long delay in between requests It would hit the server hard until the server became slow to respond, then it would back off for about 30 seconds, then hit hard again. I was able to block most of the requests with a combination of user agent and referrer patterns, though some legit users may be blocked. The attack was annoying, but, the even bigger problem is that the data on this website is under license - we have to pay for it, and it's not cheap. We are able to pay for it (barely) with advertising revenue and some subscriptions. If everyone is getting this data from their "agent" and scrapers, that means no advertising revenue, and soon enough no more website to scrape, jobs lost, nowhere for scrapers to scrape for the data, nowhere for legit users to get the data for free, etc.
- wiseowise 7mo agoDon’t worry, man, once AGI is here you’ll get your allowance (or whatever the hyperscalers plan is).
- righthand 7mo agoYou’ll enjoy painting or some other art even if you aren’t interested in the arts. That’s what I’ve seen written about it.
- collingreen 7mo agoOr they'll let you starve to death which is way way easier and way faster for "them"
- righthand 7mo agoWell yeah, art will be valueless in a flooded market. Starving is implied, “starving artist”.
- goodmythical 7mo agoLooks like they've gone ahead and implemented the easiest fool-proof method of preventing scraping as the site is currently not loading across mutliple devices. Not even a 404, just not available at all.
- qcautomation 7mo ago[dead]
- Bombthecat 7mo agoI very very very much doubt that lol I know / we know lol
- nubinetwork 7mo agoThe user agents in that screenshot are fake, nobody would be running Chrome 106 on windows 10... run a php script on every page that checks for valid combinations and 400 the rest.
- chrsw 7mo agoI'm willing to wait a while for pages to load if it's an effective means of taking back the web from the bots.
- arjie 7mo agoMy blog gets this degree of scraping too. I have some 5 million requests over the same period as they say they got 7 million over and I barely noticed before I put Cloudflare in front to cache and now I don’t notice at all. I have the Cloudflare AI stuff turned off and mostly use it through the tunnel so I don’t have to expose my local IP. Is this actually a problem? Most of my requests claim to be Amazonbot but someone showed me they weren’t and I’ve forgotten how.
- throwawaypath 7mo agoSo many Anbuis comments here. There are various Anubis bypass extensions available. I haven't seen Anubis prompts in years.
- neurostimulant 7mo ago> The IPs of these bots here actually do not come from datacenters or VPNs most of the time; the overwhelming majority come from residential and mobile networks. Asian and Indonesian countries are where nearly all of them reside. It's really awful as an indonesian, my indonesian isp regularly got blocked by HN as well :(
- hnarn 7mo ago> NOTE: Use a VPN on these pages if you don't want your IP shown in the logs, but it won't be significant amongst the millions of others anyways Is this supposed to be a joke? Is the author expecting users to travel back in time and use a VPN so their IP is scrubbed from logs that will get published at any time, because that's something the author just obviously has the right to do? > The EDPB explicitly identifies IP addresses as being personal data due to their ability to identify individual data subjects.[1] Dickhead. [1]: https://techgdpr.com/blog/is-an-ip-address-considered-personal-data/ https://techgdpr.com/blog/is-an-ip-address-considered-person...