Re:Playstation's secret weapon: a nearly all-automated factory
by AceJohnny2 on Monday July 06, 2020 @09:59PM
(#23754873)
Have an upvote for the story, but don't pretend it was "morally ambiguous". That was plain evil with one level of detachment, and helped enable spammers and scammers.
Re:Playstation's secret weapon: a nearly all-automated factory
by anoncake on Tuesday July 07, 2020 @09:21AM
(#23758921)
Not only scammers and spammers are restricted by CAPTCHAS. Helping bypass them would only be immoral if they were never used to prevent scraping or other illegitimate purposes.
Re:Playstation's secret weapon: a nearly all-automated factory
by vmception on Monday July 06, 2020 @10:19PM
(#23754998)
cryptocurrency needed faucets and it helped adoption
Re:Playstation's secret weapon: a nearly all-automated factory
by voltagex_ on Tuesday July 07, 2020 @01:40AM
(#23756066)
Cryptocurrency is the biggest backwards step for the climate since CFCs.
Re:Playstation's secret weapon: a nearly all-automated factory
by vmception on Tuesday July 07, 2020 @02:12PM
(#23762254)
Thats a huge misconception actually, the information you have is the amount of energy being used, but you don't have information on the source of the energy.
Would you be willing to accept or at least corroborate that cryptocurrency mining is one of the cleanest sectors and a boon for sustainability?
70-80% of that energy use is renewable energy or reducing pollution - specifically hydrocarbons. So existing energy is not being wasted or reallocated, and additional unclean energy is not being ramped up to facilitate mining, and previously wasted energy that was going into the atmosphere is now being used.
The educated discussion is to make sure it stays this way. As nation states are the only actors that could mine at a loss with inefficient ways.
It went from 0 captchas per day to 10000 captchas/day over the course of about a month with just word-of-mouth. Then the upstream service just quit paying me with no explanation. My accuracy rates were good. Maybe latency was high? I don’t know why they terminated it. But I struggled to keep the users while finding a replacement, and in the end I shut it down.
On the one hand, I’m bummed, because that thing could have mostly run itself and made a tidy profit for someone still pursuing a degree. On the other hand... maybe it was for the best: 90% of captcha solving work is paid for by spammers who make the internet worse.