This is very exciting. Here is the APK I downloaded. And the associated discussion.
It even already seems to support stylus input which is very exciting seeing as there has been talk of porting RNote to Android.
This is very exciting. Here is the APK I downloaded. And the associated discussion.
It even already seems to support stylus input which is very exciting seeing as there has been talk of porting RNote to Android.
Yeah, tarpits. Or, even just intentionally fractionally lagging the connection, or putting a delay on the response to some mime types. Delays don’t consume nearly as much processing as PoW. Personally, I like tar pits that trickle out content like a really slow server. Hidden URLs that users are not likely to click on. These are about the least energy-demanding solutions that have a chance of fooling bots; a true, no-response tarpit would use less energy, but is easily detected by bots and terminated.
Proof of work is just a terrible idea, once you’ve accepted that PoW is bad for the environment, which it demonstrably is.
Tar pits rely on crawlers being dumb. That isn’t necessarily the case with a lot of stuff on the internet. It isn’t uncommon for a not to render a page and then only process the visible stuff.
Also I’ve yet to see any evidence that Arubis is any worse for the environment than any basic computer function.
Tarpits suck. Not worth the implementation or overhead. Instead the better strat is to pretend the server is down with a 503 code or that the url is onvalid with a 404 code so the bots stop clinging to your content.
Also we already have non-PoW captchas that dont require javascript. See: go-away for these implemwntations
Good luck detecting bots…
There is negligible server overhead for a tarpit. It can be merely a script that listens on a socket and never replies, or it can reply with markov-generated html with a few characters a second, taking minutes to load a full page. This has almost no overhead. Implementation is adding a link to your page headers and running the script. It’s not exactly rocket science.
Which part of that is overhead, or difficult?
None of those things work well is the problem. It doesn’t stop the bots from hammering you site. Crawlers will just timeout and move on.
I run a service that gets attacked by AI bots, and while PoW isn’t the only way to do things, none of your suggestions work at all.