I'm a bot
It started with my heavy reliance on qutebrowser (previously Vieb, but it had issues.) I love the keybindings and the browser is generally quick. Other browsers have add-ons for better key bindings, but they're messy. I occasionally run into messages from certain search engines or cloudflare protections that want to make sure I'm not a bot. I started hitting issues where YouTube wanted me to log in (to what account? I don't have one, couldn't create one without a cell phone.) More recently my wireguard VPN experiments have been causing issues, too.
When using qutebrowser and hitting pages that claim to be checking to see if I'm a bot, they generally leave me stranded. Instead of offering any sort of recourse, they tell me they're running a script to make sure I'm not a bot and that I'll be redirected shortly. About 1% of the time, I'm redirected to the article or page I was trying to view. The rest of the time I end up closing the window and doing something else because I've failed the check.
I've also been playing with wireguard and I've had to restrict the VPN to only being the route for other systems I have on the VPN because the IP block was also getting me in trouble with sites that are aggressively filtering out AI bots and scrapers.
I'm not complaining. I think these places are free to do whatever they choose with connections to their resources. I hope they're effectively reducing costs with these countermeasures, but I don't really know. And they serve as a good reminder that I'm probably spending too much time on the internet.
All of this also leaves me wondering, if I were a bot, would I know? My assumption is that these pages and tests are all failing, but maybe they're working as intended.
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