I am so tired of convincing websites I'm human.

@ricci
Almost all these “are you human” checks are hosted by CloudFlare. We had a DDOS attack a while back and contacted CloudFlare out of curiosity to see what they could do to help. They offered us a plan for a minimum of $5,000 a month.

@ricci Have a word with yourself; if you aren't convinced the site has something you want, why convince them you're human at all?

@sjcooke66 yeah that's the implication

@ricci Yeah, read that, but you posed the question sooo.......

@ricci My experience with captchas became a lot better once I started automating them, which is perhaps peak irony.

@ricci It already did convince you. That's why you clicked.

@ricci Give it a few months and websites will began asking if you are an AI instead...

Actually... What I would really like is if a website asked me this:

@ricci I just close the tab SO MUCH these days.

@ricci

This is the forkiverse brother.
It's worth all our whiles.

@elb same

@ricci AI is abusing free websites as fast as your electric bill will allow it

For sure, @ricci.

While I can definitely see how site operators are in a bind (a world of badly behaved web scraping bots, made far worse by parasitic training of #genAI; more useless traffic means more cost to the site operator and worse site performance for real users)

the current workaround, of putting more and more of the web in #CloudFlare hands; of insulting the real human visitors; of punishing legitimate #VPN users; of making the site worse for humans because of the bad behaviour of bots, is no solution.

More and more often, I treat automated “prove you're a human” insults as a fuck-you gate and just close the tab.

@ricci

I don’t want to defend that practice. I can illustrate a challenge. Yesterday my website got 24 spam newsletter signups. Likely LLMs.

@ricci If Mail’s send button did this as much as websites, spam would be a non-issue.

#spam #captcha #email #humor #couldWork

@ricci

It's especially ridiculous coming from a machine representing a corporation.

@alice

@berkeley @ricci

Isn't that what got us shitcoin?