I thought that at first too and I wasn’t gonna say anything but I was thinking to myself “bro is definitely writing some really shitty code”

Oversaturated?!? Maybe if you’re a plebian bootcamp passionless 0.1x-er who hasn’t even contributed to multiple open source projects or founded at least 3 startups. Maybe you should try internalizing all PhD-worthy algorithms from the last 30 years to reproduce them on the spot from memory like I did, or else do you really even care about the craft??? You need to understand this industry is full of math olympiad prodigy coder geniuses who work 80 hours a week like me so yeah it’s competitive. Nothing oversaturated about that

/s

Yeah, well-written stuff. I think Anubis will come and go. This beautifully demonstrates and, best of all, quantifies the negligence of Anubis.

It’s very interesting to try to think of what would work, even conceptually. Some sort of purely client-side captcha type of thing perhaps. I keep thinking about it in half-assed ways for minutes at a time.

Maybe something that scrambles the characters of the site according to some random “offset” of some sort, e.g maybe randomly selecting a modulus size and an offset to cycle them, or even just a good ol’ cipher. And the “captcha” consists of a slider that adjusts the offset. You as the viewer know it’s solved when the text becomes something sensical - so there’s no need for the client code to store a readable key that could be used to auto-undo the scrambling. You could maybe even have some values of the slider randomly chosen to produce English text if the scrapers got smart enough to check for legibility (not sure how to hide which slider positions would be these red herring ones though) - which could maybe be enough to trick the scraper into picking up junk text sometimes.

Yeah you’re right, I was using AI in the colloquial modern sense. My mistake. It actually drives me nuts when people do that. I should have said “without compute-heavy AI”.

Yeah, I do. I’m just grasping at straws. But you’re right, the only real solution, ironically, is to have non-open sites where you need accounts to view content. I wouldn’t mind seeing some private phpbb forums though.

The crawlers are likely not AI though, but yes OCR could be done effectively without AI anyways. This idea ultimately boils down to the same hope Anubis had of making the processing costs large enough to not be worth it.

I wasn’t being totally serious, but also, I do think that while accessibility concerns come from a good place, there is some practical limitation that must be accepted when building fringe and counter-cultural things. Like, my hidden rebel base can’t have a wheelchair accessible ramp at the entrance, because then my base isn’t hidden anymore. It sucks that some solutions can’t work for everyone, but if we just throw them out because it won’t work for 5% of people, we end up with nothing. I’d rather have a solution that works for 95% of people than no solution at all. I’m not saying that people who use screen readers are second-class citizens. If crawlers were vision-based then I might suggest matching text to background colors so that only screen readers work to understand the site. Because something that works for 5% of people is also better than no solution at all. We need to tolerate having imperfect first attempts and understand that more sophisticated infrastructure comes later.

But yes my image map idea is pretty much a joke nonetheless

Okay what about…what about uhhh… Static site builders that render the whole page out as an image map, making it visible for humans but useless for crawlers 🤔🤔🤔

https://homestarrunner.com/toons/backtoawebsite

“Lemme get that hit counter!”

I’m trying to take a progress over perfection approach to these things. My number one priority was to get off of Chrome and Firefox is pretty rough on mobile. I tried a few things and Brave was the one with the best experience, especially because of the ad blocking without needing to mess around with a bunch of plugins. I figure I can go deeper into that iceberg over time. What do you use?

Yeah same, I’m on Brave and Anubis is blocking me. Not hating on them for using Anubis though. It is unfortunate that it’s blocking me nonetheless.

(Inb4 I am told to commit sudoku for using Brave, yes I know the owner sucks)

Def check out neocities more, also melonking.net and his projects are pretty cool, particularly https://melonland.net/surf-club has a lot of good sites on it

I see what you’re saying. You’re not talking about “making sense” in an ethical or social well-being sense, you mean it’s literally confusing why the technology wouldn’t be used for all kinds of crimes, given that it already exists - irrespective of whether the technology should be used. Is that right? I think you’re getting downvoted because it kinda sounds like you’re saying this is all a good idea when you say it “makes sense”. Unfortunate English ambiguities. But you’re saying, like, sure it’s dystopian and creepy and wrong, but why wouldn’t the creepy dystopia use the tech for all cases then rather than just some? That’s a good question. I think because there is legitimately some understanding of the dangers of using these powerful tools willy-nilly. While people aren’t perfect angels, they also aren’t perfect devils either. Another factor is that there is some pressure to appear not to be overly heavy-handed with these tools - as we see in those chats, they knew it made them look bad for this to get out.

And the final most pessimistic factor is that this Flock company almost certainly charges per seat, so giving direct usernames and logins to every officer or even every department is probably absurdly expensive. Companies (in this case the police) will often try to limit their license seats to as few people as possible and then just funnel as much different people’s work through that one person’s license as they can.

It does make sense. Police are not perfect saint-like beings, and the government is not composed of perfect beings either. I’m not sure what kind of person you are, but I’m sure there are some things you enjoy and partake in which some other social group really despises. If you’re religious, it may be militant atheists who despise you going to church. If you’re not religious, it may be militant theists who despise you not going to church. The point is, there’s probably some social cultures out there that hate you for the things that you love. Those people may not be in charge right now, but they might be one day. Those people can end up in police departments, as developers for these camera companies, as administrators for the database that collects information on where you drive and when. Those people, being imperfect as they are, may not always resist the temptation to use this system in a way to track down and identify people like you for doing whatever it is that you love and they hate. Now you end up on a list for that.

There’s no denying that sophisticated surveillance technology does make it easier to catch criminals and does legitimately protect from the threats those criminals pose. But surveillance technology, by it’s very nature, cannot surveil only the criminals - it has to surveil everyone to find the criminals. And the notion of what is criminal may change. If your favorite hobby becomes criminalized, or if the government criminalizes your identity itself, these beautifully effective tools are suddenly turned against you.

There is a happy medium to be found between giving your society tools to enforce the will of constituents, vs. giving your society tools that be too easily abused. Given that this tool is already being abused, it probably isn’t worth the benefits.