SerotoninSwells

I did the same thing. I just want a product or service that doesn’t leverage AI. Mozilla’s resources are better spent improving the web.

Nah Albuquerque, fam.

Thanks for sharing this graph. Please forgive my pessimism regarding the subject. I know a lot of progress is being made in the area of renewables and sometimes it still feels dire. Hopefully we can hasten that downward trend with coal.

NYT also uses a third party bot identification and mitigation service.

Are you referring to email verification on sign up? If so, it’s unfortunately easily overcome by bad actors. Depending on how the platform handles it, one email can be used over and over again to verify accounts or there are many services out there that provide an endless amount of quick and easy emails. The automation of this has already been solved too. For the first scenario, limits on how many times an email is used for account verification is useful. For the second scenario, we really start the cat and mouse game. You can block sign up from accounts using spam email domains. There are lists out there that can help. If someone is really persistent, they may have a trove of legitimate email addresses they can use. Then you have to start considering where the sign ups are coming from, the IP, it’s reputation, the behaviors, and hopefully it’s fingerprints from the device. You could serve a captcha but most are trivial to bypass with code straight from GitHub or captcha passing services. Overall, this is not an easy problem to solve. I know a lot of conversation on Lemmy is being had regarding this topic. It’s going to take all of us together to help solve the problem.

Well done. I for one appreciate the effort you’re putting into making this a better place by keeping the bots out. Any thoughts on what can be done to keep bots from signing up to begin with or is the plan to continuously purge inactive accounts? I know from experience that a lot of these bad actors are going to pivot and redouble their efforts. This is unfortunately a cat and mouse game that will continually need to be addressed. But, again, thank you for your work on this!

There isn’t. This article is laughable because there is an astronomical amount of bot traffic that masquerades as legitimate human traffic. Things like puppeteer extra stealth and residential proxies have made it easier to hide a bots presence on the web. Also, the tracking they allude to via fingerprinting would very much be the same whether it’s a human solving a captcha or a seamless process where your browser solves one.

Ah yes, from Twitter to Shitter.