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I couldn't care less about the art, but the user-agent discrimination is far worse. Implying that anyone not using an "officially sanctioned" browser is an AI bot is such a devious scheme that I don't think even Google themselves would've come up with it.

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I think you've got the logic backwards. It defaults to assuming that user agents that have "Mozilla" in them might be bots. Uncommon browsers don't get challenged. It wouldn't make sense for bad faith bots to use uncommon, easy to block user agents.

All real browsers have Mozilla in the user agent string.

The point is to allow bots that play nice and don't claim to be real browsers, as those can be identified in logs and blocked or rate limited fairly. But bad faith bots can be undistinguishable from browsers, so everyone else gets a PoW challenge to make their endeavour slower and expensive.

At least that's the spirit, of course someone will eventually just use random strings as user agents, but then again this is all a tragedy of the commons anyway.

Interesting. I guess I'll have to write an extensions to make open source websites usable again. I feel like at some point this will be "fixed" though.

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