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.
Meaning it wastes time and power such that it gets expensive on a large scale? Or does it mine crypto?
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.
–
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 isn’t hypocrisy. The git repo said this was “a bit like a nuclear response”, and like any nuclear response, I believe they expect everyone to suffer.
Not hypocrisy by the author, but by every reader who cheers this while hating on cryptocurrency.
IME most of these people can’t tell the difference between a cryptocurrency, a blockchain, and a public ledger, but have very strong opinions about anyway.
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.
That’s not proof of work, though.
git is performing hashes to generate identifiers for versions of files so it can tell when they changed. It’s like moving rocks to build a house.
Proof of work is moving rocks from one pile to another and back again, for the only purpose of taking up your time all day.
okay, git using the same algorithm may have been a bad example. let’s go with video games then. the energy usage for the fraction of a second it takes for the anubis challenge-response dance to complete, even on phones, is literally nothing compared to playing minecraft for a minute.
if you’re mining, you do billions of cycles of sha256 calculations a second for hours every day. anubis does maybe 1000, once, if you’re unlucky. the method of “verification” is the wrong thing to be upset at, especially since it can be changed
Oh, god, yes. Video games waste vast amounts of energy while producing nothing of value. For sufficient definitions of “value,” of course. Is entertainment valuable? Is art? Does fiction really provide any true value?
POW’s only product is proving that you did some task. The fact that it’s energy expensive and produces nothing of value except the verifiable fact that the work was done, is the difference.
Using the video game example: the difference is the energy burned by the GPU while you were playing and enjoying yourself; cycles were burned, but in addition to doing the rendering there was additional value - for you - in entertainment. POW is like leaving your game running in demo mode with the monitor off. It’s doing the same work, only there’s no product.
This point is important to me. Cryptocurrencies aren’t inherently bad, IMO; there are cryptocurrencies based on Proof of Stake, which have less environmental impact than your video game. And there’s BOINC, where work is being done, but the results of the work are valuable scientific calculations - it’s not just moving rocks from one pile to another and back again.
Proof of work is just that, proof that it did work. What work it’s doing isn’t defined by that definition. Git doesn’t ask for proof, but it does do work. Presumably the proof part isn’t the thing you have an issue with. I agree it sucks that this isn’t being used to do something constructive, but as long as it’s kept to a minimum in user time scales, it shouldn’t be a big deal.
Crypto currencies are an issue because they do the work continuously, 24/7. This is a one-time operation per view (I assume per view and not once ever), which with human input times isn’t going to be much. AI garbage does consume massive amounts of power though, so damaging those is beneficial.
I’m not sure where you’re going with the git simile. Git isn’t performing any proof of work, at all. By definition, Proof of Work is that “one party (the prover) proves to others (the verifiers) that a certain amount of a specific computational effort has been expended.” The amount of computational power used to generate hashes for git is utterly irrelevant to its function. It doesn’t care how many cycles are used to generate a hash; therefore it’s in no way proof of work.
This solution is designed to cost scrapers money; it does this by causing them to burn extra electricity. Unless it’s at scale, unless it costs them, unless it has an impact, it’s not going to deter them. And if it does impact them, then it’s also impacting the environment. It’s like having a door-to-door salesman come to your door and intentionally making them wait while their car is running, and there cackling because you made them burn some extra gas, which cost than some pennies and also dumped extra carbon monoxide into the atmosphere.
Compare this to endlessh. It also wastes hacker’s time, but only because it just responds very slowly with and endless stream of header characters. It’s making them wait, only they’re not running their car while they’re waiting. It doesn’t require the caller to perform an expensive computation which, in the end, is harmful to more than just the scraper.
Let me make sure I understand you: AI is bad because it uses energy, so the solution is to make them use even more energy? And this benefits the environment how?
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.
No.