It basically boils down to making the browser do some cpu heavy calculations before allowing access. This is no problem for a single user, but for a bot farm this would increase the amount of compute power they need 100x or more.
That’s actually a good idea. A very simple “click the frog” captcha might be solvable by an AI but it would work as a way to make it more expensive for crawlers without wasting compute resources (energy!) on the user or slowing down old devices to a crawl. So in some ways it could be a better alternative to Anubis.
Non paywalled link https://archive.is/VcoE1
It basically boils down to making the browser do some cpu heavy calculations before allowing access. This is no problem for a single user, but for a bot farm this would increase the amount of compute power they need 100x or more.
Exactly. It’s called proof-of-work and was originally invented to reduce spam emails but was later used by Bitcoin to control its growth speed
It’s funby that older captchas could be viewed as proof of work algorithms now because image recognition is so good. (From using captchas.)
Interesting stance. I have bought many tens of thousand of captcha for legitimate reasons, and I have now completely lost faith in them
That’s actually a good idea. A very simple “click the frog” captcha might be solvable by an AI but it would work as a way to make it more expensive for crawlers without wasting compute resources (energy!) on the user or slowing down old devices to a crawl. So in some ways it could be a better alternative to Anubis.
it wasn’t made for bitcoin originally? didn’t know that!
Originally called hashcash: http://hashcash.org/
you know it’s old when it doesn’t have ssl
TIL
It inherently blocks a lot of the simpler bots by requiring JavaScript as well.
Thank you for the link. Good read