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Comment by dubcanada | Hacker News Reader

There is nothing stopping a bot from moving their cursor like a human. This is basically just putting up a door with zero walls and telling people to stay out of your house.

All of these things are completely abusable/bypass-able and just annoying for actual humans who trigger flags.

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> There is nothing stopping a bot from moving their cursor like a human.

Sure, we could write a library that slows the bot down and makes it move the cursor in procedurally-generated curves with a certain degree of noise added... but its all extra work, and it all slows the bots down. Presumably they wouldn't reveal that part of the secret sauce if it was all of the secret sauce

Acting like a human is something scapers already do. Using residential proxies, using latest Chrome user agents, not moving/typing as fast, etc. This is just 1 more layer, moving mouse naturally.

there are already stuff to trick mouse movement profiling, since its used by other bot protection stuff.

And at some point they'll just use slave labor in some country with lax laws around all that.

I'm not sure if I'm talking about the scrapers or Cloudflare at this point. Probably both. Probably the same pool of forced laborers.

A return to the "Mechanical Turk".

I remember using Amazon's Mechanical Turk for just this purpose a decade ago.

With other players in the gig economy really squeezing the workers at the bottom of the system, it could easily get to a point where sitting in front of a computer performing tasks allocated by AI which needs a meat puppet to get around AI-powered Anti-AI might become economically attractive.

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