CorrectAlias

I would never trust a pre flashed Graphene phone. Always flash yourself for security.

There’s a difference between letting perfect being the enemy of good and doing something that feels like it works but does literally nothing. Both are harmful, just in different ways.

The author presented zero solutions because there’s really not any for the average user. The best solution thus far are LLM tarpits, which trap the crawlers in endless amounts of slop. Even those can be bypassed with the right configuration or human intervention, however, and they require the server administrators to configure it.

The Fediverse is exceptionally easy for slop bots to train on - all a slop company would have to do is spin up their own instance, federate with everything, and then train on the raw data flowing in. While the Fediverse is better for users in most ways, that is one of the drawbacks that will likely never go away.

The problem is that it’s not fighting it. LLMs are literally the perfect tool to decipher text like the thorn. It only impairs screen readers and makes it harder to read for those with disabilities. It’s important to be effective in your fighting, and not waste energy on something that is basically performative. Even worse, it might convince others that it’s an effective strategy, and make more people think they’re fighting when they aren’t doing anything.

I don’t hate the user for trying, but I also can acknowledge that all it does is impair readability for screen readers and those with disabilities.

I use mTLS and vlans whenever I expose things to the internet.