• I am denied read-only access to some websites because I use a VPN. This makes no sense at all, but it happens anyway.
  • I am not allowed to register in some forums because I use a VPN. Because everyone knows that anyone who uses a VPN is a serious criminal. There is no other option.
  • I am subsequently banned from forums because the moderators realise that my IP address is not unique because I use a VPN. My posts don’t matter at all, IP addresses obviously unambiguously identify every person on this planet.
  • I’m supposed to confirm that I’m not a robot because I use a VPN. The fact that the company asking for these confirmations (usually Google) is itself sending robots marauding through the internet doesn’t matter, because Google is Google and I’m just a bloke with a VPN.

Guys, a VPN is self-defence. A website banning VPNs is like a brothel banning condoms. I mean, of course the house rules apply, but I’d like to see a bit more judgement. What’s happening right now is ridiculous and hardly does justice to the security aspect of these “tests”. If you find yourself as a contributor to this list, I urge you to stop. I am not a bad guy. All I do is use a VPN.

Thank you.

  • @damnthefilibuster
    10•10 months ago

    Nope. It gets difficult every single day. Used to be easy - just check the user agent string. Real users will have a long one that talks about what browser they’re using. Bots won’t have it or will have one that mentions the underlying scraping library they’re using.

    But then bot makers wizened up. Now they just copy the latest browser agent string.

    Used to be that you could use mouse cursor movement to create heat maps and figure out if it’s a real user. Then some smart Alec went and created a basic script to copy his cursor movement and broke that.

    Oh, and then someone created a machine learning model to learn that behavior too and broke that even more.