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From: Richmond <dnomhcir@gmx.com>
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: Re: [LINK] Google begins requiring JavaScript for Google Search
Date: Mon, 27 Jan 2025 20:56:15 +0000
Organization: Frantic
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Sylvia Else <sylvia@email.invalid> writes:

> On 24-Jan-25 3:33 am, Ivan Shmakov wrote:
>>>>>>> On 2025-01-21, Computer Nerd Kev wrote:
>>>>>>> Salvador Mirzo <smirzo@example.com> wrote:
>>>>>>> Sylvia Else <sylvia@email.invalid> writes:
>>   >>> How is this going to '"better protect" Google Search against
>>   >>> malicious activity, such as bots and spam'?
>>   >> I believe the idea is that if the robot doesn't speak
>> Javascript,
>>   >> it's an easy denial by the web server.  And making bots speak
>>   >> Javascript is one step up.  And with Javascript they can likely
>>   >> monitor things like mouse movement to detect whether the user
>>   >> is a human or a robot.
>>   > Which of course is one of Google's main businesses, with their
>>   > Captchas that don't always need to show a puzzle in order to
>>   > validate users as humans.  So if anyone _thinks_ they can achieve
>>   > that, you'd expect it to be Google.
>> 	And they don't even need it to be perfect: a robot that
>> 	implements the relevant browser APIs, while possible, /will/
>> 	be costlier to run and maintain, thus reducing the profits of
>> 	the robot operators, in turn disincentivizing them.
>> 	Even if that doesn't solve the problem altogether, it will
>> 	still likely result in less load for their servers.
>> 	Not that it invalidates any other reasons they might want to
>> 	require Javascript / APIs regardless, mind you.
>
> A bot only needs to be able to send the correct data to the
> server. how difficult that is obviously depends on the details of the
> Javascript's interactions with the server, but frequent interactions
> themselves create a higher server load.
>
> One example would be the mouse-movement based human detection. If the
> script just sends a yes/no message to the server, then the bot doesn't
> need to try to emulate a human at all.
>
> Sylvia.

That's useful. I set my Seamonkey user agent string to a Lynx user agent
string and now google search works without javascript.