  >  I really don't see why Safari on a modern iPhone should be so slow at this

me neither, but I don't think it changes the argument. There's always going to be someone on a low-end device. Your adversaries already have superhuman coding ability and infinite patience. Why would you expect the long-term advantage to be with the defenders?

▲ paytonjjones 4 hours ago | parent [-]

In this case, because there's a vastly more efficient economic path for the adversaries (cloning).

They're not trying to engage in an arms race, they're trying to channel a racing river into its natural course.

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pbronez 4 hours ago | parent [-]

It’s more economical at a compute level, but not at the developer level. The moment you start customizing your crawler to use protocol X for site Y your scale story collapses.

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paytonjjones 3 hours ago | parent [-]

It's a good point, but in practice it depends on how easy those customizations are to implement / maintain, and how much money and effort you save. At some point the compute cost can disrupt even the nicest scale story.

I think the path forward is that websites offer one path for humans, and another for scrapers. But the huge catch is the path for scrapers must be _genuinely_ and _reliably_ the more economical and scalable path (either through something like PoW arms races, or through fear of litigation). Otherwise they will continue to ignore instructions and intrude on the human path.

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inigyou 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Why aren't we litigating against scrapers, anyway? DDoS is a felony.

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ekidd 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Largely because they're residential botnets in places like Brazil (a real example from one of my sites that was crawled to near-destruction). Someone could probably do something about this, but it's out of reach for individual site owners.

	▲	inigyou 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		If you block Brazil, they'll find an alternative, maybe then you can sue them.