Ask HN: Captcha Alternatives?
51 by ev1 | 42 comments on Hacker News. TLDR: I help with a gaming community-related site that is being targetted by a script kiddie, they are registering hundreds of thousands of accounts on our forums to 'protest' a cheating (aimbot) ban. They then post large ASCII art spam, giant shock images (the first one started after we blocked new accounts from posting [img]), the usual. Currently we use a simple question/answer addon at registration time - it works against all untargeted bots and is just a little "what is 4 plus six" or "what is the abbreviation for this website" type of question. It's worked fine for years and we don't really get general untargeted spam. I am somewhat ethically disinclined to use reCAPTCHA, and there are some older members that can't reasonably solve hcaptcha easily. Same for using heavy fingerprinting or other privacy invading methods. It's also donation-run, so enterprise services that would block something like this (such as Distil) are both out of budget and out of ethics. Is there a way I can possibly solve this? Negotiation is not really an option on the table, the last time one of the other volunteers responded at all we got a ~150Gbps volumetric attack. I've tried some basic things, like requiring cookie and JS support via middleware; they moved from a Java HTTP-library script to some kind of Selenium equivalent afterward. They also use a massive amount of proxies, largely compromised machines being sold for abuse.
Tell HN: Check medium's localstorage if you use adblock
28 by ev1 | 2 comments on Hacker News. If you have uBlock or similar, it appears medium logs all analytics pings into HTML5 LocalStorage and will keep retrying to send them (and apparently periodically change domains and subdomains to try and send them). I had tens of thousands of entries in localStorage, wasting quite a bit of space, all of them at least 400-600 characters or more. Each time I scrolled it'd add a few dozen more in, to the point where devtools was freezing. Ridiculous. Example: https://ift.tt/2QAyqu0
Luxury home contracts hit record quarter for Toll Brothers
The company's net signed contract homes surged 26% to 2,833 units compared to 2,241 units the previous year while contract value rose 18% to $2.21 billion compared to $1.87 billion.
Salesforce lifts full-year revenue outlook as customers work online
Business-software provider Salesforce.com Inc. posted record quarterly sales and raised its full-year guidance, showcasing the sustained appetite for cloud-computing services during the coronavirus pandemic.
Brouillette calls California's renewable energy push 'case study in how not to approach our electricity grid'
California's emphasis on renewable energy is “a case study in how not to approach our electricity grid and how not to approach the energy needs of this country,” Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette told Fox Business Network's “Varney & Co.” on Tuesday.
Texas A&M professor hid ties to China from NASA, DOJ alleges in criminal complaint
A NASA researcher employed by Texas A&M University was taken into custody Sunday and charged with conspiracy, making false statements and wire fraud related to his ties with Chinese organizations.