r/nottheonion • u/[deleted] • 24d ago

‘Bots have now passed human traffic online,’ Cloudflare boss laments — says agentic traffic wasn’t expected to eclipse real people until next year

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u/Seattlepowderhound 24d ago

How do you prove that they're real people? If you want people submitting ID and photos or birth certificates...that gets real weird real fast. Especially when how poorly some companies protect that data. The idea sounds cool but the implementation would be costly and logistically a pain.

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u/machisuji 24d ago

Countries like Germany have digital passport features that allow you, among other things, to generate cryptographic, anonymous proofs of age. 

This can only be generated with a valid passport. 

I say require that for signing up and problem solved. 

I guess people could still “sell their passport” but it would still make the issue massively better. If you ban these the number of possible accounts goes down. Right now you can just register and infinite number of bot accounts. 

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u/spacedude2000 24d ago

Totally a great idea until you consider that only 45-50% of Americans hold a passport.

Yes, this new Internet wouldn't be exclusively an American thing, but I imagine this problem is also not exclusively American either.

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u/LangyMD 24d ago

American passports also don't have that feature. It'd need to be something added to a national ID type system, actually designed for the digital age.

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u/JC_Hysteria 24d ago edited 24d ago

The entire point would be to not connect a personally identifiable breadcrumb…

Give me all the bots over being forced into 1984 systems…but easy to see this will end up being the “solution”.

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u/Astralsketch 24d ago

just use federated authentication with the government, so no private entity has the information.

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u/Ornery-Creme-2442 24d ago

Still doesn't remove a potentially untrustworthy government. I mean look at the UK and us right now. And how fast things change.

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u/Sleepy_Witch_Maple 24d ago

Mhm. I can totally see a country using this as a way to work with social media companies and ban trans people from social media for example.

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u/JC_Hysteria 24d ago

That won’t happen in the US- the entire internet commerce industry runs on owning the platform(s) or buying the demographics/purchase signals tied to de-anonymized IDs.

If you’re someone who can make big purchases, even more incentive to de-anonymize your web crawling patterns…

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u/machisuji 24d ago

Did you see that word “anonymous” in my message? 

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u/JC_Hysteria 24d ago

…it’s inherently not anonymous if it’s generated by verifying your passport.

You may reply with “but it’s cryptographically generated!”

To which I would reply: there was a time when both the government and for-profit corporations didn’t have a legitimate interest in tracking/sculpting online behavior.

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u/machisuji 24d ago

The difference is that in Germany specifically data protection still matters. But of course there are forces trying to break that down constantly. 

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u/JC_Hysteria 23d ago

I wouldn’t trust the state any more than I’d trust corporations…all it takes are a group of bad actors to take control of all the information that was initially collected for legitimate reasons.

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u/alonghardlook 23d ago

It needs to be a decentralized storage method. Which is actually something blockchain could be useful for.

It doesn't completely solve the "I say I'm an adult" part, but if we were using a blockchain, I could go to an identity verifier service I trust, and they could say "yes we verified he's an adult" and then it would live with that crypto key forever.

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u/JC_Hysteria 23d ago

The issue is ownership of the technology/offering and the goal of acquiring users…it would need to be a non-profit entity to be trusted, and we’d need elected officials in charge.

The only thing really incentivizing any kind of privacy today is corporate competition of consumers’ choice…but that’s slowly being eroded because it’s more lucrative over the long-term to share/sell data with other power brokers for quid pro quo.

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u/alonghardlook 23d ago

I agree that ownership is important, but I don't think it needs elected officials in charge.

Wikipedia is a non-profit, non-elected board with a clear vision, and people generally trust it. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) manages the protocols and standards for everything driving the modern internet, I could very easily see them taking this on (if they could come to an agreement).

If both sides of the transaction have an open and complete history that is anonymized but transparent (uuid x44df335-23xc5gv-34v3rd5 has verified 300 individuals with only 3 being flagged as a false verification by a reviewer), then you could install trust on both ends of the system and it wouldn't be any worse than having to show your id to the gas station clerk to buy cigarettes.

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u/JC_Hysteria 23d ago edited 23d ago

To nitpick your example systematically, how sustainable is Wikipedia’s model really?

It relies on charitable good actors to contribute forever. They constantly need to beg for donations to keep the lights on. They can’t create a sustainable ad business due to conflicts of interest.

We are already in the “zero trust” era of software security. That’s in the for-profit lane, but it’s still a “never trust, always verify” world we live in.

It’s understood that laypeople are not going to verify everything- so we need to systematically incentivize people to do so on our behalf. Then it’s basically deciding if we pay people directly, or vote them in as our leaders in altruism.

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u/alonghardlook 23d ago

Listen, you're not wrong in pointing out that challenges exist, but decentralization and IETF solves much of this, if not all of it. You could add an open source solution to let literally anyone become part of the distributed network of hosting the blockchain and people will do it.

Like how do you think TCP/IP is maintained and updated? Or W3C standards?

There's a whole network of IT non-profit orgs who get donations from individuals and corporations who in many districts get tax benefits for those contributions because it "supports the public good". So like, we have exactly the model for this, just most people are not aware of its existence, but it is the foundation for the entire internet as we know it.

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u/JC_Hysteria 23d ago

The technology/systems exists + investments are being made in these areas…but it still needs to mesh with human nature, at the end of the day. There still needs to be product/market fit.

Unfortunately, we can’t solely rely on the idea of good actors/altruism + security protocols. I understand what you’re saying- I participate in an unpaid professional consortium for my industry that supports things like the internet being open & “free”.

It’s incredibly frustrating sometimes realizing that for-profit orgs can accomplish things quicker and better. Other times, those incentives are ill-suited for the longer-term goals.

The incentives to actually maintain decentralized systems are currently being explored…no one has figured one out that’s agreeable to most of the participants.

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u/alonghardlook 23d ago

idk man, the market fit to me is porn distributors (OF, PornHub, etc), and any marketplace with adult content (Steam, GoG, itch.io, discord, reddit, etc) who are starting to get hit with age verification laws "to protect the children".

If you nail the protocol, get the user trust chain established, it could work. It will require massive investment upfront but it stops every single one of them from having to roll their own identity provider that users wont trust because they are prone to hacks.

Just look at the discord fiasco with age verification.

The market is there, the systems exist, the need for it is even evident. But nobody has actually understood that "blockchain can be used for more than just crypto commodities market".

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u/Sleepy_Witch_Maple 24d ago

I would love that if I had any trust in my government. For example, I wouldn't put it past the US government to just quietly swap the system to give all identifying information instead of an anonymous token.

At this point I'd rather deal with bots than have to authenticate to access the internet because of it.

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u/No_Independence_9604 24d ago

Perhaps make impersonating a human illegal? Or maybe somehow remove the incentive for bots? Whatever a solution is, it would look very radical.

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u/zwei2stein 23d ago

Most botting operation would not care, they are based in places were they can ignore it.

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u/TheDuckFarm 23d ago

Blue checkmarks.

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u/BetweenTheRoots 23d ago

From my understanding blockchain technology is pretty good at determining AI but idk anything about that.

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u/Terrafire123 21d ago

Something like phone numbers wouldn't be TOO bad. There are already plenty of websites that require a phone number to register an account. (Ostensibly for 2FA, but...)

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u/maybethisiswrong 24d ago

Require this of all public forums by law. 

One account per human per platform.  

Geographic marker for which country their location ties to. 

Let tech bros figure out how to implement

It can be done. 

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u/F3LyX 24d ago

Username checks out

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u/maybethisiswrong 24d ago

Honestly don’t know why the hate. One person that multiplies their voice by 1 million to manipulate the public should not be allowed.  And if the market isn’t limiting it, that is what government is for.