You need to properly detect that they’re bots first and then they’ll just figure out how to spoof that. Then you’re back to square one.
Abstractly, POW doesn’t need to determine if you’re a bot or not. To make a request, as a human or bot, you need to pay in cpu-time. The hope is that the cost is not so high that a human notices very much but for a bot trying to hoover up data as fast as possible, the aggregate cost is high.
I think the more horrifying aspect is that they’ll just build ever bigger datacenters to crunch POW tests faster and the carbon cost will skyrocket even more.
Exactly. Imagine needing to pay a penny for every request. Not a huge deal for someone who only makes one or two requests per year. But if you’re running a bot farm and making tens of millions of requests per day, you’ll quickly find that your operating costs have skyrocketed. That’s basically the idea behind Anubis; Make someone pay in CPU time, so the legit users don’t really notice but bots quickly eat up all of their servers’ CPU.
aquovie@lemmy.cafe 6 days ago
You need to properly detect that they’re bots first and then they’ll just figure out how to spoof that. Then you’re back to square one.
Abstractly, POW doesn’t need to determine if you’re a bot or not. To make a request, as a human or bot, you need to pay in cpu-time. The hope is that the cost is not so high that a human notices very much but for a bot trying to hoover up data as fast as possible, the aggregate cost is high.
I think the more horrifying aspect is that they’ll just build ever bigger datacenters to crunch POW tests faster and the carbon cost will skyrocket even more.
mic_check_one_two@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 days ago
Exactly. Imagine needing to pay a penny for every request. Not a huge deal for someone who only makes one or two requests per year. But if you’re running a bot farm and making tens of millions of requests per day, you’ll quickly find that your operating costs have skyrocketed. That’s basically the idea behind Anubis; Make someone pay in CPU time, so the legit users don’t really notice but bots quickly eat up all of their servers’ CPU.
nialv7@lemmy.world 6 days ago
Oh I haven’t even considered the carbon aspect. Anubis is an even worse idea than I previously thought…
Auth@lemmy.world 6 days ago
Trap users in the maze as well :)