Sure its certainly a front we can do better on. I don't think Kasada is a product that's appropriate at this time. Ignoring the ideological aspect of it being non-free software, there's a lot of easy things we could and should try first.
However, I'd caution against viewing this as purely a technical problem. Wikimedia is not like other websites - we have allowable bots. For many commercial websites, the only good bot is a dead bot. Wikimedia has many good bots. On enwiki usually they have to be approved, I don't think that's true on all wikis. We also consider it perfectly ok to do limited testing of bots before it is approved. We also encourage the creation of alternative "clients", which from a server perspective looks like a bot. Unlike other websites where anything non-human is evil, here we need to ensure our blocking corresponds to social norms of the community. This may sound not that hard, but I think it complicates botblocking more than is obvious at first glance. Second, this sort of thing is something that tends to far through the cracks at WMF. AFAIK the last time there was a team responsible for admin tools & anti-abuse was 2013 ( https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Admin_tools_development). I believe (correct me if I'm wrong) that anti-harrasment team is all about human harassment and not anti-abuse in this sense. Security is adjacent to this problem, but traditionally has not considered this problem in scope. Even core tools like checkuser have been largely ignored by the foundation for many many years. I guess this is a long winded way of saying - I think there should be a team responsible for this sort of stuff at WMF, but there isn't one. I think there's a lot of rather easy things we can try (Off the top of my head: Better captchas. More adaptive rate limits that adjust based on how evilish you look, etc), but they definitely require close involvement with the community to ensure that we do the actual right thing. -- Brian (p.s. Consider this a volunteer hat email) On Sun, Feb 10, 2019 at 6:06 AM Pine W <wiki.p...@gmail.com> wrote: > To clarify the types of unwelcome bots that we have, here are the ones that > I think are most common: > > 1) Spambots > > 2) Vandalbots > > 3) Unauthorized bots which may be intended to act in good faith but which > may cause problems that could probably have been identified during standard > testing in Wikimedia communities which have a relatively well developed bot > approval process. (See > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bots/Requests_for_approval.) > > Maybe unwelcome bots are not a priority for WMF at the moment, in which > case I could add this subject into a backlog. I am sorry if I sound grumpy > at WMF regarding this subject; this is a problem but I know that there are > millions of problems and I don't expect a different project to be dropped > in order to address this one. > > While it is a rough analogy, I think that this movie clip helps to > illustrate a problem of bad bots. Although the clip is amusing, I am not > amused by unwelcome bots causing problems on ENWP or anywhere else in the > Wikiverse. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lokKpSrNqDA > > Thanks, > > Pine > ( https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine ) > > > > On Sat, Feb 9, 2019, 1:40 PM Pine W <wiki.p...@gmail.com wrote: > > > OK. Yesterday I was looking with a few other ENWP people at what I think > > was a series of edits by either a vandal bot or an inadequately designed > > and unapproved good faith bot. I read that it made approximately 500 > edits > > before someone who knew enough about ENWP saw what was happening and did > > something about it. I don't know how many problematic bots we have, in > > addition to vandal bots, but I am confident that they drain a nontrivial > > amount of time from stewards, admins, and patrollers. > > > > I don't know how much of a priority WMF places on detecting and stopping > > unwelcome bots, but I think that the question of how to decrease the > > numbers and effectiveness of unwelcome bots would be a good topic for WMF > > to research. > > > > Pine > > ( https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine ) > > > > > > On Sat, Feb 9, 2019 at 9:24 PM Gergo Tisza <gti...@wikimedia.org> wrote: > > > >> On Fri, Feb 8, 2019 at 6:20 PM Pine W <wiki.p...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> > >> > I don't know how practical it would be to implement an approach like > >> this > >> > in the Wikiverse, and whether licensing proprietary technology would > be > >> > required. > >> > > >> > >> They are talking about Polyform [1], a reverse proxy that filters > traffic > >> with a combination of browser fingerprinting, behavior analysis and > proof > >> of work. > >> Proof of work is not really useful unless you have huge levels of bot > >> traffic from a single bot operator (also it means locking out users with > >> no > >> Javascript); browser and behavior analysis very likely cannot be > >> outsourced > >> to a third party for privacy reasons. Maybe we could do it ourselves > >> (although it would still bring up interesting questions privacy-wise) > but > >> it would be a huge undertaking. > >> > >> > >> [1] https://www.kasada.io/product/ > >> _______________________________________________ > >> Wikitech-l mailing list > >> Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org > >> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l > >> > > > _______________________________________________ > Wikitech-l mailing list > Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
