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A comment on Proof-of-work to protect lore.kernel.org and git.kernel.org against AI crawlers. Parent comment

Re:Proof-of-work to protect lore.kernel.org and git.kernel.o... by mschuster91 on Wednesday April 02, 2025 @06:47PM (#43562645)
The problem is, it kills anonymity - it allows at the very least the government to tie each web page visit, each resource load, back to a real person.

And no, "anonymous mixer" services don't work either. They're yet another layer of useless profiteering middlemen, which the web already has more than enough of.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Proof-of-work to protect lore.kernel.org and git.kernel.o... by pitaj on Wednesday April 02, 2025 @06:49PM (#43562676)
What about Monero/XMR? Isn't is fully anonymous by design?
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Proof-of-work to protect lore.kernel.org and git.kernel.o... by mschuster91 on Wednesday April 02, 2025 @07:06PM (#43562823)
TOR used to make the same claims, turned out the NSA actually can to a degree correlate traffic given that they have their eyes literally everywhere on the planet.

I wouldn't trust anything to be safe from the dragnet surveillance apparatus of FVEY.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Proof-of-work to protect lore.kernel.org and git.kernel.o... by pitaj on Wednesday April 02, 2025 @09:59PM (#43563888)
That seems to be a much weaker claim than "allows at the very least the government to tie each web page visit, each resource load, back to a real person"
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Proof-of-work to protect lore.kernel.org and git.kernel.o... by mschuster91 on Thursday April 03, 2025 @08:57AM (#43568942)
That was related to payment via Monero/XMR/...

The problem is, if you want some "proof of money"/"proof of stake", site operators set that up on their own which is a ton of work and people will not want to set up payments for their favourite porn site AND the government can trace back people from payments to site visits, or site operators contract a major vendor (similar to Stripe, Paypal, ...) who handles it and can then trivially be subpoena-ed for records.

[ Parent | on HN ]