There are antibot measures that do not depend on JS or cookies, like asking the name of a Red fruit, and the server adding the IP to allowed.
Very easy to bypass for sure, but custom enough to protect you from the horde of generic bots =p
garylkz · 1h ago
From an end user perspective, the whole "proof that you are human" thing is nothing but hassle.
Back then the "select all boxes with traffic light or something" is already ambiguous enough, now they even started to generate AI images for that and to be honest, I can't even get it right like 40% of the time...
... And the actual bots are able to do that better than me. What an absurd time to live in.
kittikitti · 1h ago
As a side note, I prefer using the term GPT instead of LLM. OpenAI bullied everyone until they got to choose the language but they no longer control how people use the word GPT.
bheadmaster · 2h ago
Imagine if software was actually efficient enough that bots don't affect its functionality.
ciprian_craciun · 2h ago
Software performance, which translates into CPU/memory/disk resources, are only one aspect of the costs incurred by crawling bots, and fall under the unmetered / virtually infinite category. However, there are also the metered resources, that do translate (after a certain threshold) into monetary costs: network bandwidth.
Thus, regardless how well one optimizes his site delivery (static site, minimizing, CDN, caching, etc.) a stampede of bot crawling does in the end become a DDoS, which if it doesn't take down the infrastructure, it might leave a deep hole in one's budget.
For example, for one of the sites I manage, I get daily peaks of ~300 requests per second measured at the backend, for a site that already employs heavy caching (both client-side, CDN, and even server-side). This wasn't so a few months back, and the site didn't just jump in popularity.
al2o3cr · 5h ago
Can I legaly take a copyrighted book, read it, perhaps more than once
Keep cheerleading for the copyright-maximalists and you won't be able to "buy" a book, only rent it each time you want to read it
ciprian_craciun · 4h ago
I don't see how respecting one's rights (in this case one's copyright over his own works) leads to having revoked the right to buy books.
I agree that it is sad to see many online book stores moving from "selling" to "renting". But that is a completely different problem.
As a personal note, I know the pain of not being able to access scientific papers because they were behind paywalls, and I had to search for drafts to be able to read them. But that model was well in place circa 2010, thus it's and old tactic applied to a new field: books (and others).
Very easy to bypass for sure, but custom enough to protect you from the horde of generic bots =p
Back then the "select all boxes with traffic light or something" is already ambiguous enough, now they even started to generate AI images for that and to be honest, I can't even get it right like 40% of the time...
... And the actual bots are able to do that better than me. What an absurd time to live in.
Thus, regardless how well one optimizes his site delivery (static site, minimizing, CDN, caching, etc.) a stampede of bot crawling does in the end become a DDoS, which if it doesn't take down the infrastructure, it might leave a deep hole in one's budget.
For example, for one of the sites I manage, I get daily peaks of ~300 requests per second measured at the backend, for a site that already employs heavy caching (both client-side, CDN, and even server-side). This wasn't so a few months back, and the site didn't just jump in popularity.
I agree that it is sad to see many online book stores moving from "selling" to "renting". But that is a completely different problem.
As a personal note, I know the pain of not being able to access scientific papers because they were behind paywalls, and I had to search for drafts to be able to read them. But that model was well in place circa 2010, thus it's and old tactic applied to a new field: books (and others).