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0 pointsjerf11mo ago0 comments

Any plan that starts with "Step one: Apply the tool that almost perfectly distinguishes human traffic from non-human traffic" is doomed to failure. That's whatever the engineering equivalent of "begging the question" is, where the solution to the problem is that we assume that we have the solution to the problem.

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zokier11mo ago

Identity verification is not that far fetched these days. For europeans you got eIDAS and related tech, some other places have similar stuff, for rest of world you can do video based id checks. There are plenty of providers that handle this, it's pretty commonplace stuff.

guerrilla11mo ago

This is a terrible idea. Consider how that will be abused as soon as a government who hates you comes in to power.

jerfOP11mo ago

That does not generically 100% solve the problem of "is this person a human". That ties things to an identity, but the verification that an identity is actually that human is not solved. Stolen identities, forged identities, faked identities, all still problems, and as soon as the full force of the black market capitalist market in such things is turned on that world, it'll still be a big problem.

Also video-based ID checks have a shelf-life measured in single-digit years now, if indeed the plural is even appropriate. The tricks for verifying that you're not looking at real-time faked face replacement won't hold up for much longer.

Don't forget what we're talking about, either. We're talking about accessing Wikimedia over HTTP, not briefing some official on top-secret information. How does "video interviews" solve "a highly distributed network of hacked machines is crawling my website using everyone's local identity"?

johnnyanmac11mo ago

>That does not generically 100% solve the problem of "is this person a human".

you don't need 100% generic problem solvling. a "good enough solution" will block out 90% of low effort bad actors, and that's a huge relief by itself. That 9% will take some steps and be combatted, and that last 1% will never truly be held at bay.

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