If bots aren't a problem why are all of these companies spending money to prevent bots?
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm Josh Reynolds Chief Technology Officer | SPITwSPOTS On Tue, Jul 1, 2025, 10:22 PM Constantine A. Murenin <[email protected]> wrote: > But the bots are not a problem if you're doing proper caching and > throttling. > > I mean, if your site has more bots than actual users, maybe you're > doing it wrong. > > If what looks like a static page requires a captcha, you're doing > something wrong. > > If it takes you $1 to generate a page, so you have to make sure all > your visitors waste $1 of their time to view it, you're doing > something wrong. > > Yes, captchas are a symptom, but it's a symptom of incompetence, not of > bots. > > Bots don't cause captchas, poor engineering does. > > Bots aren't a problem, captchas are. > > C. > > On Tue, 1 Jul 2025 at 21:16, Josh Reynolds <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > The problem is the bots. > > > > The captchas are just a symptom. > > > > Josh Reynolds > > Chief Technology Officer | SPITwSPOTS > > > > On Tue, Jul 1, 2025, 9:04 PM Constantine A. Murenin via NANOG < > [email protected]> wrote: > >> > >> On Tue, 1 Jul 2025 at 09:15, Brandon Butterworth via NANOG > >> <[email protected]> wrote: > >> > > >> > On 01/07/2025 15:05:16, "Johannes Müller Aguilar via NANOG" > >> > <[email protected]> wrote: > >> > >For about a month, users behind IP addresses we announce have been > prompted to solve captchas when accessing Cloudflare-proxied sites. > >> > > >> > I've seen that increase and now regularly get it on home > >> > broadband services, others have reported this too. I suspect > >> > many are getting it and assumed this is the new normal. > >> > >> I'm seeing this on StackOverflow / StackExchange on my home broadband > as well. > >> > >> Having to wait half a minute to glance at a search result completely > >> ruins the use-case for said result. If your time is worth $120/h, > >> that's a $1 for each StackOverflow visit just to open the page, > >> obviously it's cheaper to use AI at that point, so, no idea what > >> they're thinking killing their own market. > >> > >> I wish Google Search would let people blacklist StackOverflow as long > >> as they're a Cloudflare user; or, heck, anything with these captchas. > >> It's effectively just search spam with all those captchas. > >> > >> But the "best" part about the security industry, is that because I do > >> close the window in less than a second, Cloudflare probably reports my > >> visit attempt as saving StackOverflow from yet another bot! "Look how > >> many bots we've saved you from!" > >> > >> I'd like to see the metrics from Cloudflare and the other captcha > >> vendors on how they justify wasting billions of dollars in lost > >> productivity. It probably costs way-way-way-way less than $0.01 to > >> serve a page for which the legitimate users must now waste $1 in lost > >> income. There's probably a 10000x amplification factor for real users > >> wasting resources compared to how much resources are saved from the > >> most basic bots that can't get through, bravo! All for what? > >> > >> Did anyone think of the environment, how much computing resources are > >> wasted by everyone proving that they're not a bot? > >> > >> C. > >> _______________________________________________ > >> NANOG mailing list > >> > https://lists.nanog.org/archives/list/[email protected]/message/ROWRSJDJKROFAH54DJ3ATVMTG4JTQGFL/ > _______________________________________________ NANOG mailing list https://lists.nanog.org/archives/list/[email protected]/message/T5KQUGFVE3H3UEYQ7CEII3Q3WQEWYCI7/
