eli5 : Why do websites need to verify if you are a bot?
In: Technology
Every time you visit a webpage, a server has to spend a small amount of computing resources sending the page back to you. That’s cool; most websites will rarely have too many visitors at once, and those that do will have the server capacity for it.
But now imagine you run a website and someone had a grudge against you. By using an automated piece of software (that’s what we mean by a bot here, not a literal robot), they could request so many web pages from your server that those small amounts of resources add up and it’s using so many resources to respond to those requests that when someone legitimately wants to view the page, the server doesn’t have the available resources to show it to them. This is called a *denial of service* (DoS) attack.
In reality, this generally happens with many computers, often infected with malware to make them all send requests to this server, in which case it is called a *distributed* DoS attack, or DDoS.
So human verification is a way to prevent that happening.
Of course, some sites have additional reasons to not want bots, such as social networks, where bots could be used to manipulate the numbers of likes etc.
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