Thank you for the reminder. I donated 👍

“Those who control the present, control the past and those who control the past control the future.”

George Orwell, 1984

Omg yes how do I throw money at you.

Plate it on a canapé spoon and you have a sick appetizer, bro.

Thanks for reading and commenting!

Welcome to bot detection. It’s a cat and mouse game, an ever changing battle where each side makes moves and counter moves. You can see this with the creation of captcha-less challenges.

But to say captcha are useless because bots can pass them is somewhat similar to saying your antivirus is useless because certain malware and ransomware can bypass it.

Yes, the industry is well aware of this. We do behavioral detection on both sessions and IPs. This is fairly basic.

Thank you for reading and considering the information.

That’s very kind of you. Thank you for the kind words. 🍻

I get why you’re frustrated and you have every right to be. I’m going to preface what I’m going to say next by saying I work in this industry. I’m not at Cloudflare but I am at a company that provides bot protection. I analyze and block bots for a living. Again, your frustrations are warranted.

• Even if a site doesn’t have sensitive information, it likely serves a captcha because of the amount of bots that do make requests that are scraping related. The volume of these requests can effectively DDoS them. If they’re selling something, it can disrupt sales. So they lose money on sales and eat the load costs.

• With more and more username and password leaks, credential stuffing is getting to be a bigger issue than anyone actually realizes. There aren’t really good ways of pinpointing you vs someone that has somehow stolen your credentials. Bots are increasingly more and more sophisticated. Meaning, we see bots using aged sessions which is more in line with human behavior. Most of the companies implementing captcha on login segments do so to try and protect your data and financials.

• The rise in unique, privacy based browsers is great and it’s also hard to keep up with. It’s been more than six months, but I’ve fingerprinted Pale Moon and, if I recall correctly, it has just enough red flags to be hard to discern between a human and a poorly configured bot.

Ok, enough apologetics. This is a cat and mouse game that the rest of us are being drug into. Sometimes I feel like this is a made up problem. Ultimately, I think this type of thing should be legislated. And before the bot bros jump in and say it’s their right to scrape and take data it’s not. Terms of use are plainly stated by these sites. They consider it stealing.

Thank you for coming to my Tedx Talk on bots.

Edit: I just want to say that allowing any user agent with “Pale Moon” or “Goanna” isn’t the answer. It’s trivially easy to spoof a user agent which is why I worked on fingerprinting it. Changing Pale Moon’s user agent to Firefox is likely to cause you problems too. The fork they are using has different fingerprints than an up to date Firefox browser.

We all can see Russia from our house now. 🫠

I appreciate the sane, well thought out responses here from you. I spent yesterday evening reflecting on your points and, ultimately, I can say your ideas on how we should organize is more than likely the way we should be approaching this.

Are you aware of any groups trying to do what you’ve suggested with subscriptions and/or Black Friday? I want to be more involved in some capacity but I’m not seeing anyone organizing like this.

Uncalled for, don’t be like that, you know that’s not what I said at all

I should not have directed that to you. Your response was not naysaying in the way I pointed out in my post. I’m frustrated but that’s not a reason to be rude. I’m truly sorry.

So you agree the expected outcome of this particular venture is to not have any tangible impact. Are you concerned at all about people seeing that it had no impact, and as a result feeling deterred from future involvement?

I’m not sure I implied that but it’s not what I think about today’s protest. I believe people coming together is powerful. It’s about sending a message.

Are you concerned at all about people seeing that it had no impact, and as a result feeling deterred from future involvement?

At the end of the day, I’m more concerned with people not doing anything.

Over the past 20 years, I’ve read so many similar sentiments on social media that “X won’t work.” At this point, I just want people to try. I desperately want people to try. I want people to get involved. My biggest concern is that people won’t do anything because no one is coming up with the idea.

I just think this sounds like an idea that some privileged person came up with, assuming that everyone is out there being irresponsible with their money every day.

I see where you’re coming from with this point. I think there are a spectrum of people from various economic backgrounds that aren’t super rich that can contribute. All I’m saying is that if someone acts today it could be their first step towards long term changes on their part. I wasn’t well off when I made the change seven years ago but I’m glad I didn’t give into the notion that my change wasn’t meaningful.

Again, I’m sorry for the harsh rhetoric towards you with my last response.

Just a few days ago it was reported that the top 10% of earners are currently responsible for half of all spending. “Spending” isn’t leverage we have.

In a world where “line must go up infinitely”, the idea of people coming together to make that line go another direction is power. But sitting behind a keyboard and telling people to continue being small and helpless is not what we continue to need from the community.

There are a lot of people who have never participated in something like this, but these moments are our chance to get people involved. I love that you have an idea for subscriptions and only buying necessities. I need you to say “Yes, this is a good start, and now let’s take the next step together. I have some ideas.”

Every dollar we give to these people is another dollar that is used against us. I’m not ok with that. Inequality is at an all time high and only getting worse.

Lastly, you’ll have to forgive me for taking QZ, a website owned by a Private Equity Firm, with a grain of salt. “Rich people are now powering the economy” reads like rich people propaganda.

I have seen several threads now on this subject here in Lemmy recently and the number of people who are against it is disappointing. Years ago my wife and I decided to let our Prime membership lapse and to no longer buy from Amazon. I mentioned this on Reddit and the responses were similar to what I’m seeing on here now in regards to this boycott.

“That’s not going to do anything”

However, in the past seven years, instead of buying from Amazon, we have sought out small businesses and put money into local businesses when we can. That’s money Amazon does not have from us. Think about what the average American spends on goods from Amazon each year. If more people did this instead of naysaying then the economic impact would be much better.

So to those of you wanting to participate tomorrow, I applaud you. Be the change you want to see in the world. Money is all these greedy parasites know and if we can collectively stand up, one small step at a time, then the impact will be huge.

To the naysayers, either you’re a bot or have nothing to contribute to the cause because I don’t see any organizing from you. Find a positive way to contribute or shut the fuck up.

I’m consistently proud of Lemmy because of comments like this. It might sound weird, but clearly pizza is great in a multitude of ways. Not everything needs an edgelord’s hot take.

I’m a blade runner. 😁

I don’t think it’s a bad idea but it’s largely dependent on the crawler. I can’t speak for AI based crawlers, but typical scraping targets specific elements on a page or grabbing the whole page and parsing it for what you’re looking for. In both instances, your content is already scrapped and added to the pile. Overall, I have to wonder how long “poisoning the water well” is going to work. You can take me with a grain of salt, though; I work on detecting bots for a living.

I just farted.