this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2024
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Ditching CAPTCHA systems because they don't work any more is kind of obvious. I'm more interested on what to replace them with; as in, what to use to prevent access of bots to a given resource and/or functionality.
In some cases we could use human connections to do that for us; that's basically what db0's Fediseer does, by creating a chain of groups of users (instances) guaranteeing each other.
Proof of work. This won't stop all bots from getting into the system, but it will prevent large numbers of them from doing so.
Proof of work could be easily combined with this, if the wasted computational cost is deemed necessary/worthy. (At least it's wasted CPU cost, instead of wasted human time like captcha.)
Tor has already implemented proof of work to protect onion services and from everything I can tell it has definitely helped. It's a slight inconvenience for users but it becomes very expensive very quickly for bot farms.
Yeah proof of something (work, storage, etc) seems like the most promising direction... I think it's definitely going to raise global energy consumption further though which kind of sucks.
I don't think that raising global energy is necessarily a bad thing. I think that that will lead to the development of more energy technology.
Yeah kind of idiotic that the video kept saying that captchas are useless -- they're still preventing basic bots from filling forms. If you took them away, fraudsters wouldn't have to pay humans to solve them or use fancy bots any more, so bot traffic would increase
For the current state of the things I agree with you. In the future it's another can of worms - the barrier of entry of those fancy bots will likely get lower over time, so I expect us to see more fraudsters/spammers/advertisers using them.
I wonder if such a system could be designed to be privacy-preserving.
If using this system with individuals, privacy is a concern because it shows who knows who. And the system needs that info to get rid of bad faith actors spamming it.
However, if using it with groups of individuals, like instances, it would be considerably harder to know who knows who.