Cleaning up bad bots
Great! Let&#x27;s add it to the list of obstacles to accessing content for us savages in small, poor, out-of-sight-out-of-mind countries:<p>- Harrassment with an extra verification step every <i>god damn</i> time you log in into a website you&#x27;ve been a paying customer at for years because some rando risk model thinks you&#x27;re a bad guy<p>- Harrassment by reCAPTCHA to respond to US-centric image challenges when it decides it&#x27;s up for some sadistic fun (Mark all images with a store front or street light? Sure, let me just Google how they are &quot;supposed&quot; to look, because I sure as hell ain&#x27;t seeing any I&#x27;m familiar with here.)<p>- Blanket IP range bans which serve you a default 503 error page and call it a day, with ripple effects throghout tons of unrelated websites. I always know when my ISP&#x27;s IP range is added to some new blacklist.<p>- Harrassment by Cloudflare &quot;verifying my browser&quot;, presumably burning my CPU cycles so they can be sure that my browser, which has been hitting their IP ranges for years with not as much as a cookie wipe, has not suddenly turned into a bot<p>- &quot;Your name is invalid&quot;: no, your regex is<p>- &quot;Our fetishism for credit prevents us from accepting your debit card payment unless you submit a scan of your passport signed in blood&quot;<p>- (NEW) CloudFlare&#x27;s anti-bot measures which will surely not misfire because no one thought to test their shiny new model on the traffic patterns of some culture with &lt; 50 million Internet users<p>Apologize for the off-topic rant, but you wouldn&#x27;t believe how using the Internet for basic things has gotten difficult in the past few years over here (and from what I hear, in many other &quot;forgotten&quot; geographies). No one cares. Long live colonialism!