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253 points akyuu | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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BinaryIgor ◴[] No.45945045[source]
I wonder why is it that we get an increase in these automated scrapers and attacks as of late (some few years); is there better (open-source?) technology that allows it? Is it because hosting infrastructure is cheaper also for the attackers? Both? Something else?

Maybe the long-term solution for such attacks is to hide most of the internet behind some kind of Proof of Work system/network, so that mostly humans get to access to our websites, not machines.

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rkagerer ◴[] No.45945584[source]
long-term solution

How about a reputation system?

Attached to IP address is easiest to grok, but wouldn't work well since addresses lack affinity. OK, so we introduce an identifier that's persistent, and maybe a user can even port it between devices. Now it's bad for privacy. How about a way a client could prove their reputation is above some threshold without leaking any identifying information? And a decentralized way for the rest of the internet to influence their reputation (like when my server feels you're hammering it)?

Do anti-DDoS intermediaries like Cloudflare basically catalog a spectrum of reputation at the ASN level (pushing anti-abuse onus to ISP's)?

This is basically what happened to email/SMTP, for better or worse :-S.

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1. gmuslera ◴[] No.45945797[source]
It's ironic to use reputation system for this.

20+ years ago there were mail blacklists that basically blocked residential IP blocks as there should not be servers trying to send normal mail from there. Now you must try the opposite, blacklist blocks where only servers and not end users can come from, as there is potentially bad behaved scrapers in all major clouds and server hosting platforms.

But then there are residential proxies that pay end users to route requests from misbehaved companies, so that door is also a bad mitigation

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2. rkagerer ◴[] No.45946258[source]
It's interesting that along another axis, the inertia of the internet moved from a decentralized structure back toward something that resembles mainframes. I don't think those axes are orthogonal.