Comment by saghm
13 hours ago
> Are you confident you are not viewing too many pages on HN? What if many other people are also trying to read this thread?
I think it's pretty disingenuous to compare viewing a couple of pages once a day with running scripting tools against over 400 websites.
> I think this line of reasoning doesn't make any sense. The internet is not an inherently safe network regardless of what we wish for; we can't wish away the bad activity, and it's only going to increase. The activity that helps prevent the bad activity from working is a net positive.
Oh good, no one has ever claimed "it's for your own good" when doing something selfish without consent.
We can quantify the impact of the scripting tools pretty easily - 1.5k requests per day! I just went on Reddit and viewed a few posts, and it caused about 500 HTTP requests in DevTools. Luckily HN is not that bloated, but I just don't see the number of requests as meaningful even if it was orders of magnitude higher.
As the OP said, they don't do anything when the server isn't vulnerable, and serving a 404 page is incredibly cheap.