I don't really understand why there is resistance to in-browser Anubis-style gating using crypto mining for public sites like this.
You mine crypto and my free service remains cost-neutral. Yes, that transfers some of the cost to you, but it is marginal.
You want to bang on my servers with the fury of a thousand madmen, then I'll scale up the servers and you can pay the marginal cost of your access.
Or micropayments, of course, but hard to get normal users to sign up for micropayments. Micropayments could of course be the way to bypass the crypto mining gate.
>I don't really understand why there is resistance to in-browser Anubis-style gating using crypto mining for public sites like this.
But in the case of anubis it's not even used for crypto. It's just wasted.
>You mine crypto and my free service remains cost-neutral. Yes, that transfers some of the cost to you, but it is marginal.
No, the problem is time wasted. I don't care about the electricity cost. Spending 10s to solve a challenge on a 5W SoC translates to 0.0005 cents (yes, cents, not dollars). Meanwhile if I click on a link and it doesn't load in 5s, I'm seriously questioning the value of your blog or whatever, and will probably just close the tab.
Instead of punishing a criminal, you make everybody pay.
This is not only unfair to legitimate users having to pay.
It also needs to explain what actually happens when the Ddos succeeds (I know, you are talking about scrapers, but what’s the difference really?). Does that mean that the attacker just gets to shrug it off.
Don’t take my statements as facts, I just want to outline a few reason I could come up with that show a purely technical solution might not be enough.
Akin to “just use Cloudflare, it’s free”.
Yes it works but why conceding defeat and say “oh from now on you depend on a business to publish a server”?
I don’t like people being burnt at stakes and what I see when I google “residential proxy” does not feel like we cannot identify. More like we are not even trying.
I mean, if residential proxies are tools used to DDOS websites, why is Google advertising them? And if you have Google ads for them, can we really say “ah, if we only knew who these guys are?”.
Governments, when faced with shortfalls in the government pension, will absolutely nationalize your 401k or IRA.
YOU, while attempting to responsibly take care of yourself, will absolutely be a piggybank to be raided. This has happened in numerous countries.
You wouldn't want to be selfish, would you? Sure, you forgo the midlife crisis sports car in favor of the Toyota Corolla you've been driving for years, but that's just tough. Shoulda lived for the now.
It doesn’t even have to be raiding of accounts. They can modify rules of RMD to drive tax revenue or even entirely change the rules of 401k withdrawals such that if your balance is over a certain amount you pay an extra tax.
I don’t think it’s far fetched that 401ks of a certain value start to experience penalties to make up shortfalls. After all, the whole reason they would need to do this is because they failed on the promise of social security. Why not fail on the promise of the 401k?
1. It upsets the most influential voting demographics. I struggle to find any national policy implemented in the last few decades that has truly disrupted the kind of upper middle class voter that has a lot of money in a 401k.
2. If you tax 401ks higher than long term capital gains tax then higher earners just won’t use 401ks/IRAs.
3. 401ks and IRAs are completely detached from the way social security is funded so they aren’t even really the most logical place you would go to fund social security. E.g., why not just raise the social security payroll tax?
5. It’s less logical to do this than to remove the social security tax cap.
> I struggle to find any national policy implemented in the last few decades that has truly disrupted the kind of upper middle class voter that has a lot of money in a 401k.
Capping SALT deductions was a big one. For upper middle class folks in HCOL cities this is tens of thousands of dollars of additional taxes being paid.
> If you tax 401ks higher than long term capital gains tax then higher earners just won’t use 401ks/IRAs.
How does that help those who funded a 401k/IRA during their working career? Sure, new earners won't use them but that doesn't help you very much if you're retired. I also don't think it would be more than long term capital gains, it would first start as a very small "reasonable" tax on the top "rich folks" accounts and slide upwards from there like nearly all taxes do.
Totally agree on points 3 and 5, but I absolutely expect my tax advantaged retirement accounts to become less advantaged than they are today by the time I'm drawing on them. You have to collect revenue from where the money is, and with all the talk about "wealth taxes" I predict will eventually hit 401k/IRA accounts as well. I bet it will be politically very popular to add a 5% tax on withdrawals from "millionaire" retirement accounts. Most folks have very little concern over the upper middle classes $3m brokerage account being taxed regardless of account type.
Yeah, the SALT cap is probably the most prominent example. Perhaps even the only example.
Maybe this idea is too much of a stretch, but something to point out with the SALT cap change is that it’s arguably a partisan tax shift for middle class people who live in blue states with higher property values. The tax cut and jobs act was partisan legislation passed by one party with no support across the aisle.
Upper middle class people in red states with less valuable property still experienced an overall tax cut with the same law. I think this legislation was written with the intention of shifting the tax burden from the right to the left, and to make blue states look less attractive.
I’ve conversely seen tax advantaged accounts become more tax advantaged over time. For example, 529 accounts have gained more spend flexibility and the ability to transfer funds to beneficiary Roth IRAs. Dependent care FSA recently had a very significant contribution cap increase.
Still, I don’t disagree with the idea that we should expect our tax-advantaged accounts to eventually be less tax-advantaged, although I think it would be less abrasive for that to be accomplished by slowing down contribution limit increases compared to inflation, or by modifying the underlying tax brackets themselves.
I think we're still in the right ballpark bit we're headed for the exits.
.1 lb sugar is 1.6 oz (net), and we'll need to wrap it in paper. I estimate about .5 of an ounce? So we're spending approximately 10% of the weight in packaging. Our nominal 33000 pounds of sugar just got 10% heavier.
At least we haven't resorted to those little sugar packets, which would be colossally worse!
I think it's more a reference to Spectre and Meltdown and Rowhammer and a bazillion other hold-my-beer attacks that have never, ever been used in the wild but that everyone pays the price for by having their CPUs slowed down by the countermeasures. Applying Unicorn Repellant is fine when there's no cost, but it definitely has a cost in these cases.
The same way I'm fairly sure that no-one's ever been attacked by a unicorn. There could be lots of unreported attacks, but I'm pretty sure there aren't any actual ones.
What we do have is millions of actual, real-world attacks (see any security body's top-ten list) that we aren't mitigating because we're too busy focusing on silly attacks that no-one ever uses.
right, it buys Costco people. my local Haggens is a veritable paradise by comparison to the overcrowded warehouse that's too far away and closes too early to shop at after work. don't get me started on Fred Meyer clientele
You mine crypto and my free service remains cost-neutral. Yes, that transfers some of the cost to you, but it is marginal.
You want to bang on my servers with the fury of a thousand madmen, then I'll scale up the servers and you can pay the marginal cost of your access.
Or micropayments, of course, but hard to get normal users to sign up for micropayments. Micropayments could of course be the way to bypass the crypto mining gate.