• @[email protected]
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    4 days ago

    Non paywalled link https://archive.is/VcoE1

    It basically boils down to making the browser do some cpu heavy calculations before allowing access. This is no problem for a single user, but for a bot farm this would increase the amount of compute power they need 100x or more.

    • Mubelotix
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      764 days ago

      Exactly. It’s called proof-of-work and was originally invented to reduce spam emails but was later used by Bitcoin to control its growth speed

      • JackbyDev
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        83 days ago

        It’s funby that older captchas could be viewed as proof of work algorithms now because image recognition is so good. (From using captchas.)

        • Mubelotix
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          3 days ago

          Interesting stance. I have bought many tens of thousand of captcha soves for legitimate reasons, and I have now completely lost faith in them

        • @[email protected]
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          2 days ago

          That’s actually a good idea. A very simple “click the frog” captcha might be solvable by an AI but it would work as a way to make it more expensive for crawlers without wasting compute resources (energy!) on the user or slowing down old devices to a crawl. So in some ways it could be a better alternative to Anubis.

    • exu
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      123 days ago

      It inherently blocks a lot of the simpler bots by requiring JavaScript as well.