Bot countermeasures impact on the quality of life on the web

There’s no substitute for 401 Auth Required with a resource description of “Please enter any username or password to proceed”. Automated scrapers would be legally liable under US criminal hacking statutes if they started attempting random credentials at random sites, even if one claimed that an AI interpreted the message to indicate it was permissible; meanwhile, human beings can simply follow the directions to be authorized access without vulnerability under any common sense interpretation by a judge.

There are antibot measures that do not depend on JS or cookies, like asking the name of a Red fruit, and the server adding the IP to allowed.<p>Very easy to bypass for sure, but custom enough to protect you from the horde of generic bots =p

As a side note, I prefer using the term GPT instead of LLM. OpenAI bullied everyone until they got to choose the language but they no longer control how people use the word GPT.

From an end user perspective, the whole &quot;proof that you are human&quot; thing is nothing but hassle.<p>Back then the &quot;select all boxes with traffic light or something&quot; is already ambiguous enough, now they even started to generate AI images for that and to be honest, I can&#x27;t even get it right like 40% of the time...<p>... And the actual bots are able to do that better than me. What an absurd time to live in.

Imagine if software was actually efficient enough that bots don&#x27;t affect its functionality.

<p><pre><code> Can I legaly take a copyrighted book, read it, perhaps more than once </code></pre> Keep cheerleading for the copyright-maximalists and you won&#x27;t be able to &quot;buy&quot; a book, only rent it each time you want to read it