ImHereToVote 8 days ago

Easy. Just make a small fragment shader to produce a token in your client. No bot is going to waste GPU resources to compile your shader.

  • kelsey978126 8 days ago

    Why do people even think this? Bots almost always just use headful instrumented browsers now. if a human sitting at a keyboard can load the content, so can a bot.

    • simpaticoder 8 days ago

      Security measures never prevent all abuse. They raise the cost of abuse above an acceptable threshold. Many things work like this. Cleaning doesn't eliminate dirt, it dilutes the dirt below an acceptable threshold. Same for "repairing" and "defects", and some other pairs of things that escape me atm.

      • abofh 8 days ago

        That's the same argument as CAPTCHA's - as far as I know there are no bots protesting them making their lives harder, but as a human - my life is much harder than it needs to be because things need me to prove I'm a human.

        Clean for data ingestion usually means complicated for data creation - optimizing for the advertisers has material cash value downstream, but customers are upstream, and making it harder is material too.

    • ImHereToVote 8 days ago

      We are talking about Curl bots here. How is what you are saying relevant?

      • cAtte_ 8 days ago

        no, nyanpasu64's comment extended the discussion to general bot detection

  • gruez 8 days ago

    Can't they use a software renderer like swiftshader? You don't need to pass in an actual gpu through virtio or whatever.

    • ImHereToVote 8 days ago

      Maybe you can call a WebGL extension that isn't supported. Or better yet have a couple of overdraws of quads. Their bot will handle it, but it will throttle their CPU like gangbusters.

      • gruez 8 days ago

        Sounds like a PoW system with extra steps?

  • bdhcuidbebe 6 days ago

    You are just guessing, please stop. Also, you’re wrong. All serious scraping is using browsers today.

  • zffr 8 days ago

    Can't a bot just collect a few real tokens and then send those instead of trying to run the shader?