This pretty much solves the problem of too many bots, but only in a way that works with Cloudflare and does not help the rest of the web. They don't mention any possibility of specifying a different platform to route payments through for instance.
Cloudflare published details of the prototype implementation, so there's no reason if it takes off then other CDNs and hosts can't implement the same 402 protocol.
There's literally nothing Cloudflare-specific about this.
Another interesting protocol that supports LoRa is Reticulum, which uses an announce based system for bandwidth efficiency instead of Meshtastic's flood based routing.
Executing JavaScript on random pages seems like quite a bad idea, spammers could potentially include links to JavaScript which does resource intensive things, like that small and sketchy trend of including Bitcoin miners in websites.
Tencent is not a game publisher, while it does have a games division which publishes video games, that is one thing it does, not all of them.
Tencent is a Chinese multinational company that is the largest video games vendor and is also among the largest social media, venture capital, and investment corporations.
It also owns the Chinese social media app WeChat.
I'm pretty sure the article is more recent than that... After some searching I found the Conversation's RSS feed for technology[1] which says it was 2025 after searching the page for "internet" and looking through the results
<id>tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/45404</id>
<published>2025-01-08T16:44:10Z</published>
<updated>2025-01-08T16:44:10Z</updated>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://theconversation.com/how-britain-got-its-first-internet-connection-by-the-late-pioneer-who-created-the-first-password-on-the-internet-45404"/>
<title>How Britain got its first internet connection – by the late pioneer who created the first password on the internet</title>
The preface says it was originally written "a few years before [the author] died", but never published (until now - having been (re)edited), so the (2018) makes sense.
In my opinion, it's one of the worst (non canon now) Star Trek shows but it does get marginally better if you can struggle through the first season or two.
I would not recommend it unless you have nothing else to watch
I dropped it about half-way through season 2. Even if you pretend it's not Star Trek and treat it as a stand-alone show, it's terrible. The characters are not likeable and there is no depth to the story. It seems like they just stuck together some bells and whistles to impress the modern crowd and called it a day.
Some of them, others not so much. In the original series there was an episode on computerized warfare and efficiency (Season 1 Episode 23 A Taste of Armageddon). In the later series "The Next Generation" there was an episode on AI and rights (Season 2 Episode 9 The Measure of a Man).
Both still get cited in actual work, probably because it's easier to direct someone to watch a reasonably short and entertaining TV episode than some 300 page book on the subject.
The Measure of a Man is one of those episodes that drives me nuts. I re watched that season recently. The debate about artificial life is an important one but the framing is terrible: Data already being so far beyond the argument. Sure, someone might want to dismantle him but the idea that a court case would need to weigh it up for more than 30 seconds is preposterous. And the idea of the bridge crew accepting that Data would be dismantled if the court case succeeds rather than starting with the position of "if you go near our friend we'll shoot you with guns" to make it clear it would be a pr disaster for the federation.
2009 reboot movie was an obvious turning point, seemed like it was being used as an audition for Star Wars.
IIRC there were behind the scenes politics involved due to who owned the rights, like they were able to use the names and setting but it had to be "thematically" different to not infringe on previous series, which were owned by a different company.
