I mean…they’re technically correct, but morally off the mark on this one.
@c0dec0dec0de @natanbc @thephd I honestly think "yes", it seems to be pretty strongly implying that [any undesired computation on your hardware is malware].
Obviously we should do nothing about the other vastly more problematic malware (botnets, LLMs, and yolo CI-like automations), but a privacy-preserving and vastly less annoying¹ user-side malware is unacceptable. Allowing blatantly malicious botnets to run rampant is simply the cost of also serving humans without user-side calculations.
¹: compared to requiring logins, or handing all your *and their* data over to cloudflare and google or whoever for ddos protection or captchas.
@bakuninboys @c0dec0dec0de @natanbc @thephd it's a defensible, consistent stance, yeah.
though I do think it's odd that they don't label the botnet traffic as similarly "undesirable computation" imposed on their hardware. they should probably not be running that computation.
@bakuninboys @c0dec0dec0de @natanbc @thephd largely true, yeah. but they're edging into "the only ethical option is to shut down our servers, so we stop violating the rules we expect others to follow (run no undesired computation)" territory with such a hard-line approach.
but they probably won't do that, because it's not a hard line that you never cross. it's a tradeoff. the DDoS is not "undesired computation" because running it is necessary to serve their real audience (humans).
and the same claim can be made for anubis. users can reject the cost trivially: disable javascript, and leave sites where it's required. otherwise it's not undesired, it's necessary to serve the audience (them).
extreme stances often devolve into ridiculous conclusions like that. it doesn't mean they're *directionally* wrong, but it does tend to mean that they can't be perfect, and once you accept that you can discuss where you draw the line to actually do something useful.
@aud @cadey @karolherbst @thephd @dotstdy oh my god they are aligning their argument with “cryptography is also malware”
Literally their argument is “making my cpu do expensive things in exchange for what I want evil” aka “PBKDF2 and Argon are malware”
I’m screaming
@zkat @aud @cadey @karolherbst @thephd @dotstdy Anubis tends to be fine and fairly considerate not to bother humans in my experience but I've seen other PoW CAPTCHAs (Friendly Captcha) just make websites completely unusable on my phone.
Multiple minutes to complete the challenge. Challenge is reset when you switch tab or background the browser. Challenge is repeated when you load the page again.
@astraleureka @thephd @dotstdy @karolherbst @cadey the FSF is a pathetic parody of itself
It’s as if the NYT got bought out by the Onion
@karolherbst @Lunaphied @astraleureka @thephd @zkat @dotstdy With the following caveats:
I'm working on an implementation for the paid version that has a bank of every single method you can to cause a browser to request files from a server and presents the client 8 of them and if n pass the client gets through