On Sat, 31 May 2025, Stephen Farrell wrote:
I think your preferences are fine,
From your last statement about html and email, I suspect you might
not, really:-)
Hm, let me see if I can try again.
I can wave my hands and imagine that we use a different hosting provider
that doesn't pop up so many CAPTCHAs or use JS, but isn't as good at
keeping bots out, so the hosting is more expensive. I don't think that
would be a good use of our money -- the current scheme works pretty well
for most people and it works OK if not great if you turn off JS and limit
cookies. That's what I mean about preferences, each of us can do what we
want but we can't expect everyone else adjust to those preferences.
Similarly, I send most of my mail in unformatted UTF-8 (such as this one)
and I use a quaint mail program that works better with unformatted text
than with HTML. But I get mail that's only in HTML, and some annoying
stuff where the text version just says "get a better mail program", and
I'm not thrilled but I deal with it.
I hear that web sites everywhere are being hammered by bots. On my own
small system I see a bunch of SEO bots like petalbot, increasing amounts
of AI scraping from Claude and OpenAI, and a lot of stuff that I can't
really tell except that the URLs suggest it's looking for security holes.
It would be nice if network operators could push back and stop accepting
traffic from places that allow abusive scraping, but I have yet to see
much beyond complaining and firewall-ish stuff like we have.
R's,
John
