Hmm. This comment and the reply got me thinking... I wonder how many people are erroneously being blocked by CF at any one moment?
It sadly seems impossible to eliminate all the maliciousness without also impacting legitimate users, but it's obviously a low enough number that the various little uproars never really gain momentum.
But thinking about how technical users severely impacted by the situation gives me an idea: a Chrome/FF extension could trivially the various CF block/captcha page HTML, and fire off a ping to a server somewhere with some statistics about ISP, (very) coarse location (eg, capital city resolution), time of day, optionally the website in question... hmm, and maybe the server could have an account/distinction system, so it could let users who cannot access XYZ website they don't want to disclose, how many other users in their area are also unable to access the site...
Hmm. Thinking this through was useful. There are a lot of tricky privacy balances this would need to upset in order to be most practical. And then on top of that the malicious users would probably figure out a way to ruin such a service :/
Wait. Maybe use an invite system with a user tree?
(NB: A small footnote that I usually do not /dev/keyboard this badly; I certainly _was_ tired this morning. "Affected by the situation might react"; "could trivially parse"; "disclose, know how many".
It sadly seems impossible to eliminate all the maliciousness without also impacting legitimate users, but it's obviously a low enough number that the various little uproars never really gain momentum.
But thinking about how technical users severely impacted by the situation gives me an idea: a Chrome/FF extension could trivially the various CF block/captcha page HTML, and fire off a ping to a server somewhere with some statistics about ISP, (very) coarse location (eg, capital city resolution), time of day, optionally the website in question... hmm, and maybe the server could have an account/distinction system, so it could let users who cannot access XYZ website they don't want to disclose, how many other users in their area are also unable to access the site...
Hmm. Thinking this through was useful. There are a lot of tricky privacy balances this would need to upset in order to be most practical. And then on top of that the malicious users would probably figure out a way to ruin such a service :/
Wait. Maybe use an invite system with a user tree?
</thinking_out_loud>