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- Posts
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- 1389
- Joined
- 4 yr. ago
From the Anubis project:
The idea is that genuine people sending emails will have to do a small math problem that is expensive to compute,
"Expensive" in computing means "energy intensive," but if you still challenge that, the same document later says
This is also how Bitcoin's consensus algorithm works.
Which is exactly what I said in my first comment.
The design document states
Anubis uses a proof-of-work challenge to ensure that clients are using a modern browser and are able to calculate SHA-256 checksums.
This is the energy-wasting part of the algorithm. Furthermore,
the server can independently prove the token is valid.
The only purpose of the expensive calculation is so the server can verify that the client burned energy; the work done is useless outside of proving the client performed a certain amount of energy consuming work, and in particular there are other, more efficient ways of generating verifiable hashes which are not used because the whole point is to make the client incur a cost, in the form of electricity use, to generate the token.
At this point I can't tell if you honestly don't understand how proof of work functions, are defensive of the project because you have some special interest, or are just trolling.
Regardless, anyone considering using Anubis should be aware that the project has the same PoW design as Bitcoin, and if you believe cryptocurrencies are bad for the environment, then you want you start away from Anubis and sites that use it.
Also note that the project is a revenue generator for the authors (check the bottom of the github page), so you might see some astro turfing.
Sourcehut also supports Mercurial, so you also have an option to the herd mentality.
Sourcehut also has zero, or almost zero, JavaScript in the interface, so it doesn't suck
Sourcehut is also componentized, so you can mix and match the pieces you want or need:
- VCS hosting
- masking list management
- issue management
- build server
- man server
Sourcehut is by far the best hosted VCS option at the moment. The Mercurial support alone puts it miles ahead of the others, which are all hobbled by tight coupling to git.
So, you're basically running the KDE infrastructure, just not using the KDE WM? Have you done a ps and counted the number of KDE services that are running, just to run KDE Connect?
Here are the (KDE) dependencies on the Arch KDE Connect package:
kcmutils kconfig kcoreaddons kcrash kdbusaddons kdeclarative kguiaddons ki18n kiconthemes kio kirigami kirigami-addons kitemmodels kjobwidgets knotifications kpeople kservice kstatusnotifieritem kwidgetsaddons kwindowsystem pulseaudio-qt qqc2-desktop-style qt6-base qt6-connectivity qt6-declarative qt6-multimedia qt6-waylandWhen you run KDE Connect, you're running most of the KDE Desktop and Qt; you're just not using it.
Have you ever tried running it headless? I have; it doesn't work.
Yeah, tarpits. Or, even just intentionally fractionally lagging the connection, or putting a delay on the response to some mime types. Delays don't consume nearly as much processing as PoW. Personally, I like tar pits that trickle out content like a really slow server. Hidden URLs that users are not likely to click on. These are about the least energy-demanding solutions that have a chance of fooling bots; a true, no-response tarpit would use less energy, but is easily detected by bots and terminated.
Proof of work is just a terrible idea, once you've accepted that PoW is bad for the environment, which it demonstrably is.
Everything computer does use power. The issue is the same very valid criticism of (most) crypto currencies: the design objectives are only to use power. That's the very definition of "proof of work." You usually don't care what the work is, only that it was done. An appropriate metaphor is: for "reasons", I want to know that you moved a pile of rocks from one place to another, and back again. I have some way of proving this - a video camera watching you, a proof of a factorization that I can easily verify, something - and in return, I give you something: monopoly money, or access to a web site. But moving the rocks is literally just a way I can be certain that you've burned a number of calories.
I don't even care if you go get a
GPUtractor and move the rocks with that. You've still burned the calories, by burning oil. The rocks being moved has no value, except that I've rewarded you for burning the calories.That's proof of work. Whether the reward is fake internet points, some invented digital currency, or access to web content, you're still being rewarded for making your CPU burn calories to calculate a result that has no intrinsic informational value in itself.
The cost is at scale. For a single person, say it's a fraction of a watt. Negligible. But for scrapers, all of those fractions add up to real electricity bill impacts. However - and this is the crux - it's always at scale, even without scrapers, because every visitor is contributing to the PoW total, global cost of that one website's use of this software. The cost isn't being noticeable by individuals, but it is being incurred; it's unavoidable, by design.
If there's no cost in the aggregate of 10,000 individual browsers performing this PoW, then it's not going to cost scrapers, either. The cost has to be significant enough to deter bots; and if it's enough to be too expensive for bots, it's equally significant for the global aggregate; it's just spread out across a lot of people.
But the electricity is still being used, and heat is still being generated, and it's yet another straw on the environmental camel's back.
It's intentionally wasteful, and a such, it's a terrible design.
Except Lower Decks did very well, both critically and with audiences. But it was still canceled.
I honestly believe there's no real competency at the top anymore, or else the metrics they're using to evaluate "success" are so deeply obfuscated they're opaque to the general public.
Oh. I thought it has always been for what it's used for today: drugs.
Are China Parties like Tupperware Parties, where friends get together and one shills a pyramid scheme? That's what CP is, right?
Yup. Same in the States.
People are fundamentally selfish; sometimes, that selfishness extends to their family, and rarely, to their immediate community. But rarely will people vote for something that has a direct negative impact on their own interests but which benefits the majority. Smart, educated, dumb, ignorant; the tendency is toward selfishness.
Education and intelligence influences empathy, and can impart greater long-term thinking, but it doesn't guarantee it. As stupid as we may believe Bezos and Musk to be, they're clearly educated, and act selfishly, like the majority of the 1%.
On Linux, you have to be running Gnome or KDE. There is a headless option called mconnect, but (a) it's essentially unmaintained, (b) it's written in Vala, a niche¹ language, (c) either KDE Connect or mconnect can't maintain an association - leaving the LAN and returning always forces a re-authentication.
It's promising, and nice when it works, but the supported linux daemons are - sadly - tightly coupled to two DEs, making it useless for headless and the large number of people running neither KDE or Gnome.
Device Connect, OTOH, works flawlessly, remembers device authorization, and the Linux server is completely headless. It uses standard tooling for desktop integration tasks, like opening links. It lacks many of KDE connect's features, such as using the phone as a touchpad and media control (the latter would be easy to support through MPRIS2, but media control could also be a separate app; it's kitchen-sinking, so I understand leaving it out).
postfix someone wrote another headless (and, hopefully, KDE services-less) connect server, called konnect. It's Python, but that's still better than Vala.
Look again at the first cell. They're even more fucked up.
Thanks for the platform. This last watch-through was different; I hasn't binged an entire season before, and I came away with a lot of thoughts; your comment uncorked the bottle.
It's also an extremely efficient alg.
Not if it's an effective proof-of-work anti-scraping mechanism. The point of these are to make it prohibitively expensive for scrapers to harvest data.
A mire energy efficient way to do this is with lags and tar pits, which do not cause CPU cycles to be wasted.
Any mechanism - any - that uses proof-of-work is by definition wasting CPU cycles. If there's a useful waste product, like boinc, where the work that's proved to be done is science, then the POW isn't pure waste energy. There are certainly more efficient ways of generating fingerprints than PoW; Google and Facebook are peerless at fingerprinting without any PoW at all. The value of these
fingerprint coinstokens is entirely incidental to the real purpose: to cost the scraper CPU cycles, cost them energy, and make scraping less profitable.Anubis is all of the execution cost of cryptocurrency, without the financial flavoring.
TNG did start getting gritty, and DS9 was really dark. I think DS9 was really just a ST re-imagining of Bab5, with a lot of current-event context for plot. I can -- personally -- accept some of that; it doesn't have to be all rainbows and unicorns, but when it becomes canon that Star Fleet is fundamentally corrupt, and that the Federation isn't a more enlightened organization of planets and that it's not possible to have a functioning, effective, benevolent
UNUFP... that is depressing. It's not a future worth fighting for; it's just today, with high tech. Human society can't advance, can't progress, can't improve. TNG -- even with the dark edges -- was fundamentally a step forward, even past TOS, which was (as my friend puts it) "the US Navy... in spaaaace". TOS was set in an interstitial period, where the Federation was still growing. Hell, it was the theme of an entire movie, with Kirk as the "old school hawk, who learns to forgive." Picard's command was far more pacifist than Kirk's, and I think they were generally supposed to be representative. TOS is getting there, TNG had almost gotten there, and then everything after just falls apart and it turns out peace doesn't work, and it's only because theCIASection 31 is assasinating enemies of state that there's any stability.I have a really hard time reconciling Section 31 with the Vulcan philosophy TOS's Spock came to represent as the series progressed.
TOS was schlocky. I just finished binging season 1 again, and maybe the biggest take-away from this time was that the show could have been titled "Time Trek." So. Much. Time travel -- virtual, real, and essentially. But I saw someone made a meme about Kirk's overacting and my first thought was, "it's amazing what you have to do to make TV interesting when you don't have CGI." ST TOS episodes were an hour long. I read that one story about why Jeffrey Hunter was replaced was because, at the time, TV was basically broadcast theater, and Hunter thought it was beneath him; he wanted to be a movie star. Everything was schlocky, because there was no CGI and all of the actors were theater actors. That's just how TV was in the 60's, especially if it was fantasy (or sci-fi). The actors were doing heavy lifting with the limited FX available.
Do you understand how Proof-of-Work works? Perhaps you can give me an ELI5 that shows that it does not use the client's CPU to perform calculations for only the purpose of proving that the client's CPU performed the calculations?
It still uses Proof-of-Work, in which the coal being burned is only to prove that you burned the coal.
Is that where Section 31 comes from? Kurtzman?
Ah, yes, well. Many people see the root of all evil not in money, but in organized religion, and that's sometimes hard to emotionally separate from the (perceived) irrationality of capital-R religion. So, yeah: in friend groups, I can see debates about religion that veer into proselytizing, although -- again -- people generally don't preach to the already-converted except in sectarian wars, which in the US have subsided as religious communities have solidified against the greater threat of atheism.
I grant, in any case, that even atheism can have strong advocates who try to convert people. I do think that it depends on who you are: being an athiest, I've never had an athiest pressure me about my religious beliefs, and have only been prosthelytized to by Christians... but that's to be expected, right?
There is negligible server overhead for a tarpit. It can be merely a script that listens on a socket and never replies, or it can reply with markov-generated html with a few characters a second, taking minutes to load a full page. This has almost no overhead. Implementation is adding a link to your page headers and running the script. It's not exactly rocket science.
Which part of that is overhead, or difficult?