It's a rather brilliant idea really, but when you consider the environmental implications of forcing web requests to ensure proof of work to function, this effectively burns a more coal for every site that implements it.
this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2025
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Giant middle finger from me -- and probably everyone else who uses NoScript -- for trying to enshittify what's left of the good parts of the web.
Seriously, FUCK THAT.
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It is not great on many levels.
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It only runs against the Firefox user agent. This is not great as the user agent can easy be changed. It may work now but tomorrow that could all change.
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It doesn't measure load so even if your website has only a few people accessing it they will stick have to do the proof of work.
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The POW algorithm is not well designed and requires a lot of compute on the server which means that it could be used as a denial of service attack vector. It also uses sha256 which isn't optimized for a proof of work type calculation and can be brute forced pretty easily with hardware.
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I don't really care for the animé cat girl thing. This is more of a personal thing but I don't think it is appropriate.
In summary the Tor implementation is a lot better. I would love to see someone port it to the clearnet. I think this project was created by someone lacking experience which I find a bit concerning.
…you do realize that brute forcing it is the work you use to prove yourself, right? That’s the whole point of PoW
True, I should of phrased that better.
The issue is that sha256 is fairly easy to do at scale. Modern high performance hardware is well optimized for it so you could still perform attack with a bunch of GPUs. AI scrapers tend to have a lot of those.
I look forward to TOR's PoW coming out for FOSS WAFs
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This is icky to me. Cool idea, but this is weird.
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