The web is like a shitty neighborhood now, with stalkers and unpleasant people coming up to you frequently to sell their shady stuff.
Still works for finding answers to technical questions but if I wasn’t working in tech, I would probably question why im using it in the first place. Is the entertainment value worth the cost?
As long as real users exist on the internet, marketing will follow. If centralized social media will be even more of a shithole than already is, then they will slowly target the decentralized. You won’t escape marketing.
Wonder what the engineering solution to this could look like…
Thinking something like a zero trust model being required for all web requests… Like the target address would need to receive a validated identity token from some third party but that token couldn’t contain identifying info about the requester. Likewise, the validating third party would need to verify the identity of the requester without having knowledge of the target address.
Then that raises more questions like who would we all be comfortable trusting as a verifier and what data would we use for that validation? The validation system and the data used to validate would need to be provided for free too to account for low income people so no subscription services or hardware MFA keys. Also who counts as an identity to be validated?
What do enforcement mechanisms look like if this does get built? Are the validators entirely passive or do they actively participate in the process? Like do we have rate limits imposed by the validation engine or do we just leave that to the target address/organization to impose themselves? What happens if someone is banned from a site? Does the site notify the validators to drop requests earlier in the lifetime of a request? Do individuals get a lower request quota than corporations? Would you have to form a company just to prototype a new tool/product?
If someone seriously wanted to work on this I’d jump on the opportunity to work with them. It sounds like a fascinating project.
The headline stat is a misinterpretation of the study which was done by Arkose Labs which “provides businesses with lasting bot prevention and account security by sapping the financial motivations of cybercriminals.”
That’s pretty vague but skimming it sounds like they prevent automated account creation and takeover. The stat comes from the companies they have access to (who need bot protection enough to pay for it), and 76% of activity on the login/account creation was malicious. That makes a lot more sense. All the various hacks and credential leaks result in bots banging in stolen credentials on high value sites.
Arkose does log-in protection for Roblox (and others but that’s the one I’m familiar with) where the user has to do something like rotate a picture before logging in.
I’m assuming they stopped the account from completing it…?
They could have let it continue to monitor it, in a honey-pot sort of way, to learn more about the bot, and it’s network.
But I was asking towards intent, not success. Why would people have bots create accounts and then do absolutely nothing with those accounts afterwards?
I mean, that commenter said the headline was a misinterpretation because it’s not 73% of web traffic, but only account creation attempts.
If the attempts are stopped, and the bot fails in creating an account, it isn’t able to post/comment/do whatever it needed to do, and isn’t contributing to “web traffic” as much as the other 27% of real people (or, well, uncaught bots).
You think these bots are streaming movies and music? 73% of Internet traffic is not bots. It’s all YouTube, Netflix, Insta, TikTok, Spotify, etc media consumption. 73% of login traffic may be bots, but it’s a teeny drop of global traffic.
I really hate the phrase “bots” because it gives the appearance that they’re all useless and malicious. I guarantee you they lumped in the following extremely valid uses of “bots”:
Automated personal scripts that many programmers use, these are technically bots. Hell, I use a “bot” to auto-clip digital Safeway coupons
Moderation bots on sites like Lemmy/Reddit
Archive efforts
Are AI chatbots bots? If they use a loose enough definition all this means is humans utilize fuck tons of automation over the Internet, both programmers and not.
TamperMonkey (I’ve been told to use ViolentMonkey instead as TamperMonkey isn’t open source) and the script here. Then you can run a script to periodically log into your account in a headless browser and click the button. Unfortunately there’s no coupon API so this is the best solution I could think of.
Because they’re used absolutely everywhere, and often back large portions of Internet infrastructure. I’m a backend developer and we have thousands of “bots” running at any given time to keep our systems going. They generate traffic equivalent to thousands of people and are maintained by a 3 person dev team. This is for a relatively small company. When I was at AWS the scale was much more unfathomable.
Tech journalism is fucking garbage. Its always trying to tell me what to think rather than present legit unbiased information. It seems to get worse every year as if these journalist have a hate on for the tech they write about
Not really, as with many others the headline is sensationalist. It’s missing the “… on login page attempts for sites that pay for and or use bot protection services.”
This idea is so poorly conceived. Imagine installing and maintaining something like this. How are those panels supposed to stay clean?The panels and the cover should both be built but they should not be the same thing. No current panels are engineered for this application so they would have to be custom made. Just getting the project to the point where the first panel could be installed would cost millions. We could get started now installing commercially available shade covers and ground mounted solar. Ground mounted solar is simple to clean, simple to maintain, and simple to replace.
I agree the idea looks like a great way to reclaim the space, reduce evaporation, and generate power I just think the money would be better spent on a plan the optimized for expenses and longevity instead of optimizing for novelty.
I guess I missed it but how are these panels any different than typical ground based PV panels? Looks like, based on the rendering, they they are on some kind of rigid scaffolding over the canal. Not sure how that is different from typical installs?
For sure cleaning them is a problem, don’t have an answer to that. Hope that that is accounted for in the proposal.
Well they’re part of a larger grid. Any clean energy on the grid will be cheaper than dirty, so will be sold to offset dirty even if Arizona was 100% clean.
My guess is that producing solar panels uses tons of fossil fuels. And they’re pretty much used up after 10-20 years and needs to be replaced and the old ones ends up in a landfill.
It takes energy to produce them, sure, but it’s way less than even just the production needs for coal or natural gas. Not to mention that’s a one time carbon cost (per lifespan which is close to 30 years these days) vs ongoing emissions. And additionally, as the energy mix where the panels are produced cleans up, the carbon footprint of the panels go down as well! Is it the perfect solution? No, but there is no silver bullet to get off fossil fuels. Solar is just one part of that transition and it is exciting to see more groups exploring the solar/shade synergy (there’s some cool shaded farming solar experiments going on that also make use of the solar panel’s shadow for additional benefits!)
You only need a certain amount of power. (In fact, you can’t generate more power than is needed, or you cause massive issues.) If this adds extra energy generation but doesn’t add demand, generation somewhere else will be taken offline. This will be whatever is cheapest, and green energy is nearly free after construction, so it’ll be dirty energy that isn’t running anymore.
Arizona and the entire South West don’t have a drought problem. They have an aridification problem. While this canal project is a good move in general and we should have been doing it years ago, there is no solving the over-population of a desert. One look at Colorado River basin and its reservoirs is enough to know there is nothing we can do to fix it.
Yeah… but sometimes you’ve gotta accept that a band-aid is all you can do. While this doesn’t fix the underlying problems, if it works it’ll provide more water and low carbon energy, which is better than nothing.
Because entrenched, and exceptionally wealthy interests. Reading about how about in CA there are tons of Colorado River fed foreign owned farms growing alfalfa to export to the middle east is the definition of capitalist success…the profit of a commodity has been made the most efficient; acquired cheaply for something otherwise impossible with international arbitrage as the medium.
We should probably update the dictionary so the word ‘greed’ is synonymous to dumb, stupid, ect. Cuz it sure seems that greedy people just have a super low IQ.
Water scarcity causes societal collapse throughout the American Southwest. Well written book, interesting premise - just an all around enjoyable bit of fiction.
As someone who knows nothing about canals (or what they are even used for), anyone want to explain why they are used, why they are dumb, and what we should do instead?
Imagine a canal which is 3 feet wide at the minimum. It contains a constant volume of water. This canal ultimately waters farm land. By way of example, California has the imperial valley which contains these canal systems. They feed desert farm land. The problem is these canals are often:
open
in a hot dry desert
cheap
Water rights have perverted water usage. People take cheap water which was grandfathered in by old laws and agreements and they waste it to evaporation. If you think “well the water isn’t lost, just evaporated, right?” You’d be close, but slightly off the mark. The water is evaporated but it’s transported often hundreds or thousands of miles from its original source. We are basically bleeding rivers to feed a desert. And deserts might as well be an infinite sink for water.
We should not have farm land in deserts. But if we do, we should at least conserve the water we are using. Just because it’s cheap doesn’t mean it’s good (not that you’re implying that, just saying).
This guy has never been to the Phoenix area :P we even have rivers with no water, too! Bring the whole family, camp out and have imaginary marco / polo by the hill infested with scorpions, only a half-mile from the city dump! Bring your RV so you can feel like a complete moron with the other people who thought it was a great idea to buy a mini house on wheels that gets 6 miles to the gallon. And if you are early to rise, you can make Laughlin a day-trip to lose all your social security check by dusk, before sauntering back to the depression-rut of a life you have carved out for yourself. Because living in a desert with a large elderly population, just-barely-enough power during the summer even though there is a fucking nuclear power plant 20 miles out of town, and has been in a drought for my entire life while everyone waters their lawn 3 times a week, never felt so good!
Oh sorry I got mixed up with my “fuck off and stop moving here” speech. Give me 10 minutes.
An irrigation canal like this is a big ditch to move water from a river to near farm fields. Without the extra water taken from the river, there wouldn’t be enough water in the soil for crops to grow in the area.
Being a big ditch open to the sky, the hot sun and dry air make a bunch of the irrigation water evaporate before it even gets to the field. So we went to all the effort of taking water out of the river just to waste it humidifying the nearby air.
Why did we do it in the first place? Because it’s way easier and cheaper to dig a ditch than to lay a big pipe, and I don’t know if the US had any other water-delivery tech at the right scale when these were built.
There probably are, but Saudi Arabia owns a bunch of land in Arizona and decided it was the perfect place to grow alfalfa, a very water intensive crop. That said, some farming does make some sense even in the desert, since it is almost certainly cheaper to have local produce than to need to import everything from places that have an abundance of water, even if that means building canals to water them.
The US has lots of land that doesn’t require irrigation, but also lots of land that can grow crops if irrigated. Some of that land in California is some of the best farmland in the whole country, growing things that prefer California’s Mediterranean climate (similar to parts of Australia’s southwest coast).
We have the technology and have had it for a while. But we don’t have the laws and habits of dry countries so US water laws are a wasteful mess.
Evaporation. You lose a phenomenal amount of water moving it by canal over large distances in an arid climate. Ideally you’d enclose the whole system to reduce loss but sticking a roof over the top helps to some degree and is less complicated.
There are several companies working on solar covers for reservoirs. I agree, seems like a win win. Reduce evaporation and have a large, level, “field” for solar arrays.
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