Comment by matheusmoreira
3 years ago
The mindset of sacrificing computing freedom for user convenience and corporation profitability. We should be absolutely uncompromising on this one value. The alternative is the destruction of everything the word "hacker" ever stood for.
> nothing but an endless digital mall to browse
Funny, that's essentially what the web feels like to me in 2023. Escaping it is the number one reason why I visit HN nearly every day. It's like the only sane website left. I don't even open the links posted here anymore, websites are just unbearable these days even with uBlock Origin turned up to the max. I just assume whatever's important enough will be directly quoted in the comments.
The "static web" you and the commenter below mentioned? I actually kind of want it.
Dude, my struggle is to be able to operate a non-profit service free of charge with no ads, and the aim is to help users find a way out of exactly the aforementioned digital mall and onto the free and independent, mostly static web.
This is harder every day dude to all the bot traffic helping themselves to disproportionate usage of my service via a botnet that is all but indistinguishable from human traffic.
But yeah, must be the corporate profits I'm hoarding...?
Why is it relevant whether the traffic is human or automated? The whole point of the internet is you can put a server out there and anyone anywhere can connect to it with any HTTP client.
To me it seems like the only people who care about that are those who want to sell our attention to the highest bidder via advertising. Wouldn't you be having the same difficulties if there were just as much traffic coming from humans?
I want to provide as many human beings as possible with value by distributing my processing power fairly between them. If I get DDoS:ed by a botnet, I won't provide anyone with anything other than optimistically an error page.
If I had infinite money and computing resources, this would be fine, but I'm just one guy with a not very power computer hosted on domestic broadband, and even though I give away compute freely, it just takes one bag of dicks with a botnet to use it all up for themselves, and without bot mitigation, I'm helpless to prevent it.
Oh and I actually do provide an API for free machine access, so it's not like they have to use headless browsers and go through the front door like this. But they still do.
Serves me right for trying to provide a useful service I guess?
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>Why is it relevant whether the traffic is human or automated?
because all traffic costs for the service provider, but the automated traffic can be run at thousands of users cheaper than it is to run one human user (who after all is bounded by time and cost of computation and bandwidth) whereas the automated is not bound by time, giving them the opportunity to DOS you - either on purpose or just accidentally.
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