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by matt_heimer 620 days ago
That's up to the site owner.

For example I configured my osdev wiki (mediawiki based) so that the history and other special pages get the Cloudflare test but just viewing a page doesn't trigger it. OpenAI and other bots were generating way too much traffic to pages they don't need.

Blame the bots that are DDOS'ing sites for the captchas.
1 comments
BlueTemplar 620 days ago
Wait a minute, DDoSing is illegal, how come OpenAI et al. haven't gotten sued to the ground yet ??
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ruune 619 days ago
Not a lawyer, I'm guessing here. I'd assume the intention matters a lot. Scrape bots don't intend to cause trouble, they intend to get your data (for free). Same way as when some famous person tells people on Twitter to visit a website or when some poor blog gets the hug of death from HN. The intention wasn't to bring down the site.

Aside from that: is DDosing actually illegal (under US law)?

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BlueTemplar 619 days ago
Right. Pretty sure it's illegal under EU law(s), and people were already condemned for it (but yes, in case ill intent was proven) - why wouldn't it be illegal under US law - it's basically akin to vandalism ?

(In other news, the Internet Archive got DDoSed today :(

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