In this case, because there's a vastly more efficient economic path for the adversaries (cloning).
replyThey're not trying to engage in an arms race, they're trying to channel a racing river into its natural course.
It’s more economical at a compute level, but not at the developer level. The moment you start customizing your crawler to use protocol X for site Y your scale story collapses.
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reply> It’s more economical at a compute level, but not at the developer level.
replyDevelopers and compute are interchangeable now.
Who's proompting the machine to do it differently without a developer there to ask the right questions?
replyYou can have a high level prompt of: make our crawling cheaper and more reliable to run.
replyIt's a good point, but in practice it depends on how easy those customizations are to implement / maintain, and how much money and effort you save. At some point the compute cost can disrupt even the nicest scale story.
replyI think the path forward is that websites offer one path for humans, and another for scrapers. But the huge catch is the path for scrapers must be _genuinely_ and _reliably_ the more economical and scalable path (either through something like PoW arms races, or through fear of litigation). Otherwise they will continue to ignore instructions and intrude on the human path.
Why aren't we litigating against scrapers, anyway? DDoS is a felony.
replyLargely because they're residential botnets in places like Brazil (a real example from one of my sites that was crawled to near-destruction). Someone could probably do something about this, but it's out of reach for individual site owners.
replyIf you block Brazil, they'll find an alternative, maybe then you can sue them.
replyBut they operate from neither. You can at most sue the one renting them IP addresses. Which will do basically nothing.
reply(Also, blocking a whole country is likely not what you do, but you probably know that).
Why do you think you can only use the one who's renting them IP addresses?
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