Current Events > Cloudflare Has a New Plan To Fight Bots -- and Climate Change

(+) Yeah! (+)

Its new bot fight mode, which Cloudflare today enabled as a free opt-in feature for all accounts, will detect and serve bots with deliberately computationally intensive challenges. As the bot tries to crunch the impossible puzzle effectively a small bit of code only visible to the bot the bots server will max out its processing power, churning up cloud resources and driving up costs for the bot operator.

While the company says its efforts will dissuade bot activities in the long run, it recognizes its efforts in the short term will result in cloud servers working overtime, thus consuming more electricity and requiring more cooling all of which contribute to greater energy consumption.

By making bots do extra work we may be increasing carbon emissions from the [processor] usage and decided to offset through tree planting which will have a long-term effect, said Graham-Cumming. In the long term our goal is simple: ending malicious bots as a viable practice.

Each tree planted can absorb about a years worth of dual-core computing power. But given trees need time to grow, Cloudflare said its donations will result in the planting of 25 trees for each frustrated bot the company encounters and shuts down.

Source:
https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/23/cloudflare-bot-fight-mode-climate-change/

Do you think this will be an effective change? I think they should have just made it opt-out instead of opt-in if they were serious about combating malicious bots. Kinda nice to see though.
---

What the fuck I was supposed to vote yes
---

"This would be great in every single way, but can't cuz climate change" - one reason why we are literally years behind where we should be

I was gonna say the tree planting thing is just PR, but I think a lot of them are captive to it at this point where it looks like what they used to do before sending the fleet out in the ancient world: offer up the doves, go looking for omens, that sort of thing.

Stick with the solid progress in technology and not the imaginary stuff.
---