glad we're at the stage of our cyberpunk hell-timeline that we have corporate botnets DDoSing the free software communities that they rely on, leading to an arms race between the biggest companies in the world and a virtual anime person developing a proof-of-work proxy with an anime girl mascot that's now deployed by the united nations
Botnet Part 2: The Web is Broken

I guess you have all heard about the growing problem of AI companies trying to aggressively collect whatever data they can get their hands on to train their models. This has caused an explosive surge in web crawlers relentlessly hitting servers big and small. But who runs these crawlers? Turns out — it could be you!

Jan Wildeboer's Blog
ive seen a few people complain that this will increase power usage and therefore cause global warming or whatever. not to worry - the fediverse is already much more inefficient than any competent pow checker. in the process of replying to me complaining about it, you've used more power than you did the one time you sat through the challenge page. sorrgy
@mia I mean, multiply by the number of page visitors and number of visits and stuff
@natty well
multiply by the number of replies i got on my psot