Have you ever seen a "This site uses cookies, accept / reject"? This has a name, it's called CONSENT.

I'll repeat: there's something called CONSENT. I.e. the ability (and the right) for someone to CONSENT.

Could one fight a non-consensual relationship, AI crawlers DDosing the hell out of the whole Web, by pushing non-consensual relationships, injection of third-party JS code programmed to solve cryptographic challenges without prior consent of the user?

Because this is precisely my point when I criticize Cloudflare, Anubis, Google Recaptcha and whatever other "Proof-of-work anti-bot solution" out there.

NONE of the mentioned solutions ask for user consent before proceeding with the challenge (e.g. "this site needs to check your browser through heavy computation, proceed / leave"). The "challenge" starts as soon as the page is accessed, as in, zero clicks required for them to start using the CPU (thus, my apologies, I called these things simply as "malware", I should've called these things "zero-click attack").

To make things worse, the "challenge" can accommodate itself across multiple CPU cores by using JS SharedWorkers, thus effectively getting to using 100% of the CPU, regardless of any other parallel uses of CPU (e.g. other tabs opened at the background, or other software doing jobs). Using a 100% of CPU for a couple seconds, potentially minutes depending on the current difficulty level, WILL increase temp. Laptops are particularly sensitive to CPU temp due to lack of proper cooling, so it can easily get to 90C, which is a dangerous temp.

And I'm unable to know beforehand if a website injects "anti-bot challenge" when I stumble upon a link on social media.

My only PC is an Acer ES1-572, it got an Intel i5-7200U; if you look it up, you'll realize it's a decade-old laptop. I'm fucking unemployed so I can't afford a new laptop. And if my laptop dies upon being literally fried by a long session of "checking your browser", neither the webmasters nor the owners of the anti-bot solutions are going to give me reparation for the damage they indirectly inflicted onto my personal device. It's, thus, on me. And still I'm the evil one? REALLY?!

But, hey, don't worry! If you didn't read this part, I'll repeat it again: I'm CLOSING every website that uses one of these tools. Differently from the non-consented push of a third-party JS, I AM NOT FORCING my way into websites. If you're a webmaster, you just need to put something like "Cookie monster!" in your document.title and my userscript will auto close your website and I'll never visit it anymore. Unless you're going to buy me another laptop, you stay with your sacred website while I stay with my good ol' laptop.

Oh, and there's the irony: those whirling machines at hyperscale data centers are designed for heavy computations such as those involved in PoW cryptographic challenges, and the AI techbros got "infinite money cheat" to spin up new ones... Techbros are likely laughing at the naivete of Anubis; Cloudflare, a corp with an AI suite of their own (another sweet irony; fight AI crawlers by feeding your content directly to another AI corp) are laughing at all the power and content being handed freely to them (sometimes webmasters are even paying for Cloudflare to be given content for their AI suite!). Meanwhile, me, an unemployed Brazilian, am compelled to avoid the so-called "modern web" if I don't want my only old laptop to unwittingly become a dead weight... and I'm even accused of working for AI companies!

!privacy@lemmy.ml