UCyborg wrote on Yesterday, 08:02:

More and more websites run a miner on your computer (euphemistically called "bot checks") before they let you in, even more so if you use non-mainstream web browser.

Someone posted about https://git.devuan.org/, it ran for over 7 min on my computer in Pale Moon, making computer temporarily run out of RAM.

This goes on and the only sane reaction would be mass exodus from the internet.

Teh Internet is dead and has been for quite a while now, if its not crypto miners itll be AI slop content and bots talking to each other.

So I heard, but it's gotten more noticeable even for me who only visits small amount of websites. Can't even lookup useful info on stackoverflow.com without getting a god damn Cloudflare check in my face.

UCyborg wrote on Yesterday, 08:24:

So I heard, but it's gotten more noticeable even for me who only visits small amount of websites. Can't even lookup useful info on stackoverflow.com without getting a god damn Cloudflare check in my face.

The Cloudflare thing is recent and due to massive DDOS attacks on their data centers and services, its not really working but they persist with it to make it look like they are trying to solve the problem.

Cloudflare being a backbone provider is in a difficult spot.

That's the cost of "free" services...

Grzyb wrote on Yesterday, 08:47:

That's the cost of "free" services...

Couldflare isn't free.

was hoping this would be about the UK parliament requiring face scanning for social media platforms, but no it's complaining about passive AI scraper checks that don't require you to solve a puzzle (which Vogons itself needs some day, like go-away or anubis). 0/10

it's funny when commercial sites refuse to take my money on the grounds that I am 'a bot'

Trashbytes wrote on Yesterday, 08:54:

Grzyb wrote on Yesterday, 08:47:

That's the cost of "free" services...

Couldflare isn't free.

I mean the site behind Cloudflare - from user's perspective, it's free.
And if you don't pay for using that site, don't expect its owner to care about you.

The only way to fix the internet would be by turning users into customers - ie. paywalling everything.

leileilol wrote on Yesterday, 08:56:

was hoping this would be about the UK parliament requiring face scanning for social media platforms, but no it's complaining about passive AI scraper checks that don't require you to solve a puzzle (which Vogons itself needs some day, like go-away or anubis). 0/10

So waiting 7 minutes for the goddamn website to open is normal to you!? That's 7 minutes of heavy strain on the computer and exhausting most, well of its RAM really. 0/10

Pale Moon-related issue
https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis/issues/299

Not as bad on Edge, but still a long time...

And even without this, it's still pretty bad with all the tracking, misinformation, fake news etc.

The Internet gets worse every time it becomes less exclusive, and all of this stuff is vainly attempting to mitigate that reality.

Cloudflare checking doesn't seem to work on older browsers, so you can't access the site at all.

bakemono wrote on Yesterday, 08:59:

it's funny when commercial sites refuse to take my money on the grounds that I am 'a bot'

Digikey is constantly giving me the bot check popup (the one where you have to hold a button down).

I get "only" 39 seconds on Pale Moon.

It's true that we're now inescapably in an era of the internet where everything is actively user-hostile in a myriad little ways, whether it's the spammers, scammers, and efforts towards AI sloppification of everything, or the various counter-attempts to circumvent and mitigate those things. But I have to wonder about Pale Moon lately. I've been a happy user for over a decade, but it seems like it's been dropping the ball dealing with the ongoing bloatware updates for a lot of sites - from github to archive.org's book reader, and I guess this thing is no exception.

Still hesitant to migrate, since it's a tall order trying to find an alternative browser that's privacy-oriented, doesn't shove AI into every feature, doesn't have a dumbed-down UI geared towards your grandma browsing FB, and still maintains compatibility with the latest web tech (even if 99% of the latter is bloat that no one asked for in the first place). But if I'm going to be dealing with anti-user practices on the web no matter what, I'd rather not have to fight my browser too on top of it.

VileR wrote on Yesterday, 19:16:

I get "only" 39 seconds on Pale Moon.

I also haven't bought a serious new performant computer in the last 15 years, so that's also a factor. I simply don't do anything interesting that would badly require more horsepower. It's ridiculous when you think about it, requiring new hardware just to solve captchas on modern internet.

Pale Moon certainly has its issues, some stemming from crap Mozilla haven't cleaned up back in the day. Of course, the worst thing is the sites programmed so badly and convoluted prone to breakage in non-Chromium that they're pretty much impossible to debug. And no one cares because Chromium stomaches all the slop and other browsers may as well not exist.

Very few browsers these day do not initiate connections user didn't ask for. And browsers claiming privacy and such nonsense often still inherit crap either Google or Mozilla put in.

VileR wrote on Yesterday, 19:16:

But if I'm going to be dealing with anti-user practices on the web no matter what, I'd rather not have to fight my browser too on top of it.

I feel ya. I mostly get by visiting bare minimum of sites. I have no use for 99,99% of the internet.

Still run Windows though...

I help to run a large website that frequently gets DDOSed by large botnets. The Cloudflare “under attack mode” that presents a CPU churn “challenge” on every pageload from a new IP address is an absolute Godsend and works every time. We keep it turned off as much as possible, but when we do have to turn it on it is absolutely necessary to keep the site online.

A lot of these things are low quality / high malice people making things difficult for the rest of us.

I've seen Cloudflare come under attack a few times, they have gotten much better at mitigating it and actively fighting back at the botnets doing the DDOS, they seem to be one of the few providers throwing what they can at the problem.

I suspect they are fighting a losing battle here however, they wont be stopping the botnets without other providers joining in on a coordinated pushback, I feel that the only way to truly stop a huge botnet attacks is to become a botnet yourself and attack the attackers, a reverse DDOS in a sense but on a scale even the botnets cannot match.

As someone that has servers on the net, this anti-bock check is a very legitimate need that is growing. A very high percentage of the traffic I am seeing are bots. The bots are coming in a distributed network, where various networks under their control are making round-robin requests over each network per the logs I have reviewed. The stats I have collected show unique networks numbering in the 1000s. It's very hard to distinguish bots from real people(*). The bot activity is growing, there could be multiple players involved. If this keeps growing, it will essentially become a 24/7 DDoS for small sites -- at least to being available for legitimate, real people use.

The culprit? It's likely from companies, world-wide, trying to seed their LLM. It wasn't like this more than a year ago. These are certainly not like the classic search engine bots. They are similar to what search engines do, but these are clearly people that are evading the normal rules of activity, and common filtering schemes, and engaging in scraping-like activity.

I have not deployed an anti-bot checker but I am seriously considering it. The alternative is to make the sites require an account login to do anything at all. It's not fair that I am spending money so that LLM companies can seed their systems with useless content, in the most stupid way possible, just scraping everything and never asking permission.

As far as the internet dying, yes, I think it is starting to die. But it isn't our fault (the little people that have not much choice). We don't have much choice left other than to throw up expensive client javascript, or other strange things that confuse the heck out of most applications, or go full exclusive.

I agree with the sentiment here actually. If the small web hosts don't take action to make themselves free of bots, they'll just give up, and I think the old way of the internet will go away. The internet will mostly be chatbots left of the largest tech companies conveying any information that exists, and a few bloated applications that are a pretend sorry example of what things were before the internet, and that is dystopian.

(*) There is a recent article saying there is malware out there probably existing in the millions, that seems to be for allowing entities to do this scrapping of the web and avoid the filters.