It's like an arms race. Or a game of whack-a-mole.
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- Thread starter Levina
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Some have already been calling this an AI arms race, which it is. And like @puterfixer says, I completely agree AI is driven by greed, and the analogy to viruses and diseases is perfect.
And while these greedy oligarchs rake in their billions, I can't even buy an inexpensive Raspberry Pi anymore, and there is no way I could have afforded to build my current desktop computer (from Dec 2024) since the greedy datacenters hoarded the memory and SSDs. The 64GB of memory I bought for $209 USD is now listed for $1,477.49. The SSD and video card are now nearly double the cost.
Think of how these bots have all cost us billable hours, or valuable hours out of our lives, as we constantly play whack-a-mole trying to fight them off, only to have them mutate to get around our protections.
AI needs desperately to be reigned in. But greed rules at the expense of us all. Tech bros and those that enable them don't even seem to have a problem with homo sapiens going the way of the Dodo. As long as they win the fight for AI dominance, all's fair. It's insane.
Sam Altman, boss of OpenAI, recently stated that private computers should not have RAM in his opinion - it would be be better in his own company.
Sam Altman: All the RAM Should Belong to Me, So I Can Charge People to Use It
Classic Sam!
gizmodo.com
These companies and their bosses are a plague, even worse than the crypto-bros a couple of years ago.
It is whackamole yes - @Waterfall, I have to add that a small proportion of the bots, once stopped by the honeypot, switched to using fake mobiles. So I also have a custom rule for fake mobiles, and the bots can't solve that. I know my bots now! (Famous last words .....) The massive group that solves challenges, does one thing only - never carries a referer, never migrates from desktop. The smaller group of Linux (the ones that can't solve challenges, tries various things like a referer or switching to a fake mobile browser, but as they can't solve challenges they are stopped.
Even if I didn't stop them, it's still quite a small group so it's more for the sake of it.
But yes - the work we put into our forums and they are parasites. Their argument, I assume, is that it's a public forum.
Even if I didn't stop them, it's still quite a small group so it's more for the sake of it.
But yes - the work we put into our forums and they are parasites. Their argument, I assume, is that it's a public forum.
It's a much larger discussion that belongs elsewhere, but it's gone from a curiosity phase to alarming rather quickly. I'm actually developing a series of articles that will publish in an online magazine. A winter project for me. Having already done a deep dive into it as part of the research, it is indeed alarming where the tech world has headed. It will cost all of us dearly.
For our part here, we have no choice but to waste precious hours out of our lives with the sole tasks of keeping our forums alive. I'm thankful to those in this thread who have spent hours of their own developing methods to bring some sanity back into our lives, and sharing their findings so we can adapt them to our own unique situations. Fighting these bots in 2026 isn't a sideline anymore, it's a necessity. My current rules seem to be working OK for now. In my case, we're not catching everything (which we know is impossible), but we keep the worst of it at bay, and our sites are no longer going down because of the hoards of unwanted bot traffic.
