I just started using this myself, seems pretty great so far!

Clearly doesn’t stop all AI crawlers, but a significantly large chunk of them.

  • randomblock1
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    257 days ago

    Why Sha256? Literally every processor has a crypto accelerator and will easily pass. And datacenter servers have beefy server CPUs. This is only effective against no-JS scrapers.

    • poVoq
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      7 days ago

      It requires a bunch of browser features that non-user browsers don’t have, and the proof-of-work part is like the least relevant piece in this that only gets invoked once a week or so to generate a unique cookie.

      I sometimes have the feeling that as soon as some crypto-currency related features are mentioned people shut off part of their brain. Either because they hate crypto-currencies or because crypto-currency scammers have trained them to only look at some technical implementation details and fail to see the larger picture that they are being scammed.

        • Drew
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          46 days ago

          If your browser doesn’t have a Mozilla user agent (I.e. like chrome or Firefox) it will pass directly. Most AI crawlers use these user agents to pretend to be human users

          • @swelter_spark@reddthat.com
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            16 days ago

            What I’m thinking about is more that in Linux, it’s common to access URLs directly from the terminal for various purposes, instead of using a browser.

            • Drew
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              16 days ago

              If you’re talking about something like curl, that also uses its own User agent unless asked to impersonate some other UA. If not, then maybe I can’t help.