Post #2576090
2026-03-18 07:21 UTC
> By spoofing the fingerprint, developers can make their automated tools impersonate real users more convincingly, thereby bypassing bot detections.
Many OSS projects and personal web servers have bot detection because they would otherwise drown under (AI) scrappers and other bots traffic. Hosting or bandwidth cost is often unsustainable without bot protection.
If you don't want to kill these projects, honor robots.txt by default, use throttling, don't try to circumvent bot blocks. Look if there's a purpose built API available to bots. If they don't want to offert such API, go find something else to do.
Replies (2)
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@ghodawalaaman@programming.dev 2026-03-18 07:54
well if a person decide to use this attack small OSS projects server then we are failed as humanity. I shared this article to fight against big tech surveillance if people use it to damage FOSS project I highly discourage that behavior.
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@LytiaNP@lemmy.today 2026-03-18 07:26
Most open source projects just hit everything with a PoW captcha instead of trying to guess if a user is real or not, so trying to spoof enough to look like a real user won't change all that much anymore.