I just started using this myself, seems pretty great so far!
Clearly doesn’t stop all AI crawlers, but a significantly large chunk of them.
I just started using this myself, seems pretty great so far!
Clearly doesn’t stop all AI crawlers, but a significantly large chunk of them.
Yes, Anubis uses proof of work, like some cryptocurrencies do as well, to slow down/mitigate mass scale crawling by making them do expensive computation.
https://lemmy.world/post/27101209 has a great article attached to it about this.
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Edit: Just to be clear, this doesn’t mine any cryptos, just uses same idea for slowing down the requests.
And, yet, the same people here lauding this for intentionally burning energy will turn around and spew vitriol at cryptocurrencies which are reviled for doing exactly the same thing.
Proof of work contributes to global warming. The only functional, IRL, difference between this and crypto mining is that this doesn’t generate digital currency.
There are a very few POW systems that do good, like BOINC, which is a POW system that awards points for work done; the work is science, protein analysis, SETI searches, that sort of thing. The work itself is valuable and needs doing; they found a way to make the POW constructive. But just causing a visitor to use more electricity to “stick it” to crawlers is not ethically better than crypto mining.
Just be aware of the hypocrisy.
This is a stopgap while we try to find a new way to stop the DDOS happening right now. It might even be adapted to do useful work, if need be.
Hook into BOINC, or something? That’s an idea.
Sucks for people who have scripts disabled, or are using browsers without JS support, though.
It does, and I’m sure everyone will welcome a solution that lets them open things back up for those users without the abusers crippling them. It’s a matter of finding one.
the functional difference is that this does it once. you could just as well accuse git of being a major contributor to global warming.
hash algorithms are useful. running billions of them to make monopoly money is not.
Which party of git performs proof-of-work? Specifically, intentionally inefficient algorithms whose output is thrown away?
the hashing part? it’s the same algo as here.