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by coldbrewed 21 days ago
CDN security SWE here. I have functionally zero interest in what individual people do in terms of automation. I automated my gym's class signup forum during COVID so I get the validity of the use case. You want to work around the mitigations to do the same? Go with my blessings.

The killer is that everything that works for individuals trying to get through the day and make the web a bit smoother is immediately used by industrial crawlers strip mining the Internet, and you can't block one without blocking the other. A future where the web is only accessible via device attestation is extremely dystopian but so is an Internet where every drop of content goes into an LLM training set.

Things like this is why all of the worthwhile content is going to drain into balkanized spaces, and we're all the poorer for it.

1 comments

It’s not that dystopian if you are given the choice to trade your attestation for more valuable service. We have been paying for the web by letting advertisers correlate our behaviors together for a couple decades now.
The concern is that attestation turns into another mechanism to monitor and control people; see how age verification turns into surveillance.